Book Review: The Daily 5 - 18 views
This book is a wonderful! The students become very independent and teachers are able to work with guided reading groups or individual conferences. It amazing what students can be trained to do with...
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Book Review: "The Teaching For Understanding Guide - 5 views
I don't think I've seen this book before. It sounds intriguing. I'll have to check it out.
Journal #1 Studying the "Reading Transition" from High School to College: What Are Our ... - 6 views
A thorough analysis of a fascinating article! I think when the authors were referring to "minutiae of students' rituals" it was more to help the reader understand the students wrote in their readin...
Book Review: Derrick Jensen's walking on Water - 1 views
I choose Derrick Jensen's book Walking on Water to review, mainly because he offers specific details on how to reform education, but focuses on students' attitudes on writing and reading. Jensen te...
Journal #2: Contexts for Engagement and Motivation in Reading - 1 views
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Brett Hewitt on 06 Feb 12The article I read for this journal focused on the differences between readers who are engaged and those who aren't. An engaged reader is a student who wants to read both to gain knowledge and for their own enjoyment. Sometimes it seems as you talk to students that there aren't that many of these. As you could probably assume, students who are engaged in reading are more likely to be successful readers. The reason that I chose this article was first because it was directly applicable to our class. Another was that I would like to be able to get more students to become engaged readers. If it is possible to get some students to want to read on their own it would be a great accomplishment. I think very often students don't like to read because they aren't interested in the readings they are assigned. If, as a teacher, you are able to find subject matter that can interest students they would be much more likely to be engaged readers. The research in this article found some interesting information. One interesting bit was that students' motivation to read decreased as they aged. This seems to make a lot of sense to me. For one thing I believe that very often the reading that students are assigned is very, for a lack of a better word, boring. It could be a good thing to try to provide students with a greater variety of books that may be able to evoke more motivation to read. Another part of this article spoke to the idea that relating the information in readings to real life experiences. This seems to me to be one of the most important things a teacher can do. If teachers are able to relate the information in the readings to real world experiences the students are more likely to grasp the information. Simply having the students read a text and then not providing any real-world context doesn't accomplish a whole lot. For me, the information that has stuck with me the longest is that which was related directly to stories that the instructor told
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Linda Clinton on 12 Feb 12Engagement and motivation are huge topics in education right now. Small things we can do to tap into students' interests can provide links to help students make connections between school content and their worlds.
Journal #2 Words Made Flesh: Fusing Imagery and Language in a Polymorphic Literacy - 5 views
Another fascinating article. I appreciate how you share your thinking about your own literacy experiences, and what you hope to bring to students.
Book Review: Change is Gonna Come, Transforming Literacy Education for African American... - 10 views
This sounds like an interesting read. I have a couple of journal articles you might like. I have always been interested in this subject, because part of my own journey toward literacy has been ba...
Book Review - Amazon.com: The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets to Turning On the Tune... - 7 views
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http://www.amazon.com/Motivation-Breakthrough-Secrets-Turning-Tuned-Out/dp/0743289617/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1328620537&sr=1-2-catcorr The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets to Turning On the Tuned-Out Child, author Richard Lavoie, is a well written resource guide for teachers who wish to figure out how to motivate their students. Parents can learn from the guide as well, but the author primarily addresses educators who seek to improve relations with their students and figure out how to help them work to potential. Richard Lavoie is a consultant and a lecturer with over thirty years of experience as a teacher and an administrator at special education facilities. He explores strategies and techniques that are proven to inspire children to learn. He outlines strategies that will be most effective in igniting the interest and eagerness of kids, especially given their different needs. He outlines several different ways that children are motivated to do their best work. He teaches of the six Ps to motivate children. Some seek praise; others seek prizes, power, projects, or prestige. Some are people-oriented and are motivated when they work with people. Six different chapters address the various motivating factors and how they can be identified and used in the classroom. Personal accounts from Lavoie's years as a teacher allow us to see how he has put his lessons into practice. I appreciate the way that Lavoie challenges teachers to find out what motivates their students, even those students with special needs or who are classified as difficult. He encourages parents and teachers to work together to spark any child to reach his/her full potential. He covers learned hel
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Wendy, it looks like maybe your review got cut off. You can add to it by adding an additional comment.
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This sounds like an interesting book, and strategies for inspiring students to learn is always a good thing. I would like to add this book to my professional library. Even though I will not be a special education teacher per se, I have special education students in my classroom. Anything that I can do to help them will be valuable.
Journal Article #2 Information I shared with my principal while student teaching - 5 views
I Entered the Citation above of the book I mentioned in my last post.
Journal #2 - Comprehension through Rereading - 1 views
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Hedin, L.R. & Conderman, G. (2010). Teaching students to comprehend informational text through rereading. The Reading Teacher, 63(7), 556-565. Doi: 10.1598/RT.63.7.3 "Striving readers may view the purpose of reading as decoding an assigned section rather than building knowledge." When I read this quote, I knew that this article would be of interest to me. As my building continues to examine the ramifications of the Common Core, informational text is something of concern. Should other content teachers be required to teach reading strategies using informational text? (Here, I am hoping, my readers reply with a resounding "YES!") This article gives specific strategies to use with students, with a focus on encouraging rereading. Below is an email that was sent to my colleagues: Subject: The Secret to Informational Text Perhaps my subject line was a bit misleading... Attached may not be "The Secret" to our informational text woes, but the article details strategies we can use in our classrooms now that will help our students with comprehension. After reviewing our NWEA scores, we have all seen the difficulties our students have with informational text and comprehension. The Common Core has a significant focus on informational reading and writing. In order to prepare for this shift in instruction and curriculum, I have found this very useful article. "Teaching Students to Comprehend Informational Text Through Rereading," details key ideas like helping our striving readers set the purpose for reading, identify text features, and strategies we can use in our daily instruction to strengthen their comprehension of texts. It questions whether our students are simply great "decoders" (they can read the words because they understand sound/letter relationships) or are they truly constructing meaning. The role content teachers play in the development of successful readers is HUGE! Many of these strategies seem basic, but because of that, they will be simple t
Book Review: 7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read and Get It - 5 views
I haven't seen too many books that are equally useful for teachers and parents. I'll have to take a look at this book. Might be something to pick up for door prizes for our parent involvement activ...
Journal #1:Giants Steps with Nonfiction Writing - 1 views
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This article gives excellent advise on how to step-by-step teach non-fiction writing to ELLs. It gives tips on do's and don't's and reasons why things work and don't work when teaching students new to the country that are especially helpful for grades 3 and up. I believe strongly that reading and writing need to be linked to have meaning for students. As we teach reading in our content areas, we also need to teach writing skills to go with those reading skills.
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The article says that most ELL students who had schooling in their former country will try to write in their own language and then translate into English and this becomes problematic, because the formats of sentence structure do not match in most languages. I don't really have this problem, but understand how this could become a problem. I do have the problem of sentence structure with the way my students speak, therefore when they write, the sentence structure is not proper. The article gives a step-by-step guide starting with organizers to teach non-fiction writing. I really liked the fact that it said to use sentences in the organizers. I have been using organizers with my class and trying to teach them to write fragments and then write the sentences later and found that problematic. I thought that I was trying to teach them to get their ideas on paper quicker, but after reading the article believe that it would be easier to teach them to write the proper sentence in the organizer and then transfer it to paper.
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I do love it when I find something that contradicts what I've previously done or known. Gives me pause to think. It will be interesting to see if this change in your thinking produces results in your students' writing. Keep us posted!
Journal 2: 10 Strategies to Enhance Students' memory - 5 views
Nice job picking out the highlights of--what was the article about again-- lol Seriously, some great points that apply to more than just reading.
Book Review: Clock Watchers: Six Steps to Motivating and Engaging Disengaged Students ... - 8 views
Great question I didn't address in the review. All the examples used are middle to high school oriented and seem to require a level of maturity that elementary students would not possess. I think...
Journal # 1 - Literacy Strategies for Improving Mathematics Instruction - 2 views
Diana Metsisto, 2005, http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/105137/chapters/Reading-in-the-Mathematics-Classroom.aspx As a math teacher, I wanted to find some information on reading in my content...
Book Review: "The Way They Learn: How to discover and teach to your child's strengths... - 2 views
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I really enjoyed this book, and it gave me great insights into how students are wired. How do they take in information and how do students use that information. There are four styles of students. The book goes into different ways of working with students and talks about how students concentrate, remember, and understand information. I liked the book because it provided useful information and tips on how to interact with students. I realize that learning styles have gotten a bad rap by some educators. Now having said that learning styles do present an interesting piece of the puzzle to how students learn. It is important to note that a learning style is a preference rather than an ability to learn. Individuals have a tendency to like information or processing to be done a certain way because there is a familiarity and comfort level. The awareness of a learning style can assist educators in setting students up for success by phrasing information in certain ways or pointing out that this information may be more uncomfortable for individuals to learn because of the way it is presented. The book is organized by learning style category and then by subject areas like concentration, understanding and remembering. The first six chapters focus on learning styles, and the remaining six chapters delve into specific topic areas as each relates to learning styles. The main topics of the book are learning styles, and three central topic areas related to learning. The topic areas are concentration, remembering, and understanding. The overall message of the book is that every person may have a dominant learning style, however each person has a certain amount of each learning styles' characteristics. Moreover as students, parents, and teachers become aware of their learning style it is meant to help them achieve and adapt to others who are not wired that way, not to be used as an excuse for poor performance or I can not do something.
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You raise some important points, LeAnn. I think also it is important to help students (and ourselves?) learn to tap into other styles to further develop them.
Journal #3 - High School Literacy - Voices from the Field - 1 views
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Christine Cziko, a former high school English teacher, writes about a year-long undertaking that she was a part of that sought to transform students into capable readers. Her desire to do something about the lack of reading ability that her students exhibited came out of her concern about her students' apparent inability to read independently or to understand what they read. I was greatly impacted by this whole idea. I would LOVE to do something like this at my school. I have taught high school English at a private school where many common issues don't exist and I still had students not doing the reading or not understanding what they read. However, once we read CS Lewis' The Great Divorce (which is written at a very high level) they were engaged and devoured the difficult text. We would then come together and ask questions, discuss, and analyze the text. I didn't have to beg my students to read it, they WANTED to. One of the big differences was that I talked it up and let them know that it was going to be very difficult but that people would be impressed to know that they had read it in high school. They were so proud to have read, analyzed, and understood this difficult text.
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This year my students read "The Westing Game" by Ellen Raskin. They absolutely loved the book and I had to beg them not to go ahead because doing so would spoil the ending. Teaching reading (or any subject matter) is so much more fun when the students are engaged. I wish we had these same experiences in everything we taught!
Book Review: The Way They Learn: How to discover and teach to your child's strengths - 4 views
It's so interesting to me how some people don't buy into the "different learning styles" theory. I really want to check out this book now! I like how it seems to incorporate the idea that, yes, eve...
Journal 1 Building World Knowledge: Motivating Children to Read and Enjoy Informational... - 4 views
You keyed in on some very important points. Informational texts requires a somewhat different approach from narrative text, and we do have to help students learn strategies to be successful in meet...
Text Book Reveiw: 7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read It and Get It! - 5 views
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Zimmerman, S., & Hutchins, C. (2003). 7 keys to comprehension: How to help your kids read it and get it. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. 7 Keys to Comprehension is a powerful read that I would recommend for both teachers and parents that want to encourage reading for enjoyment and understanding. This book is simply written and well organized making it an easy read for teachers and parents. The book outlines the 7 key strategies that good readers use in order to create meaning. What I really like about this book is that each chapter is designated to one of the key strategies, making it easy to look up and refer back to. Inside each chapter the authors discuss each strategy and why it is important to reading success. The authors also provide examples of how to help children at varying levels (preschool, emerging, and advanced) with each strategy. As a teacher, one of my favorite things about each individual chapter is that a list of picture books and more advance books is given to use when working on the specific strategy. I also like that at the end of each chapter tips are provided to highlight the main idea of the chapter and simple ideas to implement the strategy. When I was teaching first and second grade, this book was always on my bookshelf because it was so easy to pick up and refer back to when I had students that were struggling. This was also a book that I had shared with my coworkers and parents because the strategies are used in every grade on some level and are not geared specifically for classroom use, but also for parents to use at home while reading with their children. Many times parents would ask me how they could help their child with reading and I would often lend them this book or give them strategies from this book to use at home. In lower elementary so much time is spent on decoding skills and learning to read the words, but a huge part of reading is comprehension and although stude