TEMS520

How often do students look up to celebrities, right?  I thought this list was so cool.  If anything hopefully it gets one student interested in a book because their favorite star is too! I feel so special - Tyra, Halle and I have a special bond!  Our favorite teenage book is Are You There God?  It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume!!!!!!! p.s. I think Hillary Clinton wussed out.  NO recommendation for teen/adults and Goodnight Moon for your fav childrens book? c'mon Hillary!?! p.p.s.(or is it p.s.s.?) With a soft heart I noticed that Whitney Houston's fav childhood book was the bible. RIP Whitney...

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This article caught my attention because it was focused on something we just discussed last night: teaching to standardized tests. I like this schools way of thinking: they do not obsess about teaching to the test, but rather look at it as one section to teach for the whole year, like a poetry unit. Teachers cannot be ruled by standardized tests, but must take it into consideration when they are teaching students.

Teaching prohibition & organized crime with The Great Gatsby and the attached resources is a BREEZE! (:

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This packet contains colorful posters to teach 14 non-fiction text features! -guide words -title page -table of contents -index -glossary -heading -keywords -illustrations & photographs -captions -diagrams -labels -text box -maps -charts

Free downloadable posters to teach text features!

Found this website during our TEMS314 class. It is a great site that students can use to help them create persuasive websites. They log in using a specific teacher code, and their work is saved on the site, allowing the teacher to check it as the students work. It seems pretty neat, and I'd love to try it someday in my own classroom.

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Excellent list of professional reference and resources on teaching reading. Thoughtful reviews written on each.

This article gives several ideas of activities that can be used to help increase reading comprehension with special education students, but they are designed for different learning styles and, I think, would work well with all students! The article is structured as a simple number for each activity so it's very easy to follow. Ideas suggested here fall into the Bloom's Taxonomy of questions and can be used with picture books, short stories, novels or individualized reading for students of all ages. Many ideas do not involve written answers which work best with students with learning difficulties. The activities listed promote comprehension.

The ideas about engagement and motivation and their place in encouraging at-risk students to read was incredibly interesting to me.  I wonder in which district in Michigan the study was done.

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This is actually 2 articles from American Educator Spring 2011 -Putting Students on the Path to Learning: The Case for Fully Guided Instruction -Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know The first article asserts that "teachers are more effective when they provide explicit guidance accompanied by practice, not when they require students to discover many aspects of what they must learn." The second article presents 10 research-based principles of instruction, along with suggestions for classroom practice.

This is an activity to help with writing skills for middle schoolers. It's a great way to have fun while learning. It can be used in the classroom or at home.

Ediger, M. (2000). Teaching Reading In The Social Studies [Abstract]. College Student Journal. Retrieved January 29, 2012, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_1_34/ai_62839401/?tag=content;col1 For my first journal article I choose an article that covers teaching in reading in social studies. The article discusses how teachers should use methods of guiding students to comprehension and understanding of ideas in print. Students need word recognition skills which can lead to meaningful learning. This is crucial for students to develop necessary skills to achieve a higher understanding in this subject area. To do this teaching reading across the subject will benefit as students learn the important facts, concepts, and ideas the curriculum. As a social studies teacher, you need to be active in students reading by helping with comprehension which can lead to a better understanding of the material. The article offers several methods on how to do this. These include adding new words found in readings as vocabulary, reading orally in small groups, using a student aid to read orally, using tape recordings of the section, individual readings, and using journals during readings. Overall I thought this article was great because while it provided you many ideas and practices that you could actually use in your classroom. In the end, having actual methods to use first hand will benefit us as teachers the most. It will just be up to use to master using them in the classroom.

The 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

Engagement 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.

I know that this isn't *exactly* about reading and learning.  However, this article was so revealing of our culture and mindsets.  I read it with a reading comprehension group I lead at school.  Basically, we (society) spend almost all of our time consuming and, consequently, judging information from all sorts of electronic screens.  We create very little and are so afraid that what we are capable of creating will be judged as "not good enough" because of our judgments of the creations of others.  So, it encourages the reader to go out and create something - write, draw, dance, and learn what makes him or her tick. 

Actually, I think this article has a lot to do with reading and learning. Based on what you read, what would you apply in your teaching practice? (And what did your comprehension group have to say?)

We make a LOT of things in my Spanish classes. Creativity is stretched and encouraged. As far as my comprehension group, they all said, "this is boring... Is it almost over...??" except for one student who loved it and said, "So, we just need to do things that make us happy! It doesn't matter what other people think!" So, I am not sure how much they got out of it...

"APA (American Psychological Association) is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences. This resource, revised according to the 6th edition, second printing of the APA manual, offers examples for the general format of APA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the reference page. For more information, please consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition, second printing."

APA 6th edition is the required style for your research papers. This page lists the most common formatting guides.

This is the website I used for my Journal #2 material. The strategies outlined in my journal are under the Reading Fluency title.

While the "How not to..." side is humorous, the "How to..." side is good advice!

Slideshare by Emily Kissner gives good explanations of various text structures, and why they are important to teach to students. Also included are examples of books which can be used to teach the structure.

Thank you for sharing this! I often struggle with explaining these concepts to my team's content teachers. Perhaps this would help me to outline the text structures they most frequently provide to students and how best to teach them.

"WritingFix is a teacher resource website that contains lessons and ideas for any educator to freely use in their K-12 classrooms....The site is sponsored by the Northern Nevada Writing Project, a not-for-profit professional development organization that is located on the University of Nevada-Reno Campus." An absolutely amazing goldmine collection of writing ideas: mentor texts, 6 traits, revision, genres, and MORE!

I realize the focus of our class is reading. This resource is too good not to bring to your attention.

Though it does not focus on reading, I have found that WritingFix absolutely saved me in my first year teaching ELA. Even if it is simply "saved for later" this is something all teachers should review.