Letter+of+Self+Reflection

Dear Dr. McKool, When I began this class I was both excited and scared. Scared because teaching children to read sounded like such an overwhelming task and I was unsure that I would be able to do it, but excited to find ways to make it not seem so overwhelming and impossible. Thankfully, since the class began I have become less scared and more excited. I am very excited to use what I have learned about teaching literacy in practice. As I reflect upon this past semester and the time I have spent both in your classroom and my classroom at Wicoff I can see just how much I have learned and grown in such a short period of time. So far for me the idea that sticks out the most in my mind is kid watching. The idea that we are, at all times, watching and informally assessing children seemed very daunting to me. When I first heard this idea I thought there could be no way to watch every child at all times, especially with the amount of children in a class today. This changed when we began in the field. I realized that although you cannot watch all children at all times, but when you do have the opportunity to watch children you can learn a lot. When we observe children we need to make sure we are really listening to things such as the reading strategies they are using and the kind of books they are choosing to read and even things such as are they holding the book correctly if they cannot yet read. As teachers we take anecdotal records of what children do throughout the day. Owocki and Goodman say that the key to these records is focusing on things that will help you to inform instruction (pg8). When we do this we are able to pinpoint student’s strengths and weaknesses and teach to these children accordingly. In my classroom at Wicoff my teacher is constantly watching the children and assessing what they know and she uses this knowledge to form her instruction. When she notices a few students are having trouble with one particular thing she will make sure she takes the time to do a minilesson in it. One example that I can think of is she noticed that when students were writing how to book more than half had spelled “first” wrong so she stopped the class and had them look up front while she wrote it for them and placed it in the pocket chart. She also makes sure that if she sees a student struggling with something she will note and when she is coffering she takes notes also. When I have my own classroom I plan to keep a clipboard with an index card for each student so that I can be constantly taking notes of my observations throughout the day. At the beginning of this semester my management skills were almost nonexistent. I have since learned a few strategies that seem to be working for me. The first is positive reinforcement. This has worked well for me thorough the many read-alouds I have done. By saying “I am calling on Jane because she is raising her hand” I am able to set a standard for behavior that the children can easily follow. Another strategy I have found that has been working for me is making sure to set explicit expectations for the children’s behavior before the lesson even begins. This ensures that there is no ambiguity in what they are expected to be doing. Management is crucial when you are doing writing workshop or reading workshop or any other literacy activity because in the primary grades every minute of reading and writing is precious. You do not want this precious time to have a lot of interruption because of misbehaving students. Another thing worth mentioning is how hard is it to use management in a classroom that is not your own. I believe this is because you are unable to have any say over the overall management and what works for the classroom teacher might not work for you. Guided reading is something that I do not remember doing in school but it is something that has become essential in all primary grade classrooms. Guided reading gives you a perfect opportunity to watch children read appropriate level books and see their reading strategies. We are able to watch any miscues that they make and hear the way the student works out the word while we are conferencing with the students. This can be so valuable, especially because you do not have time to do running records on each child each day. Guided reading allows the child to have a positive reading experience and allows us to do some informal assessment. When I taught a guided reading lesson it was amazing to me how much I could learn about a student’s reading just by listening to them read aloud, although I think it is important to note that the lesson I taught did not seem like guided reading to me after we did the role-playing in class. My teacher at Wicoff has the students read aloud to her during guided reading instead of conferencing with students while they all read silently. I do not believe that this is a good strategy because not all students read everything. In my own classroom I will make sure that guided reading is done in a better, more appropriate way. This would be done by first making sure to go through the book to pick out words that may be tricky and then asking the children to read silently. While the children are reading silently I would go to each child and have them read me a page and I would take notes on my clipboard about the things I noticed about their reading. Another idea that had never thought about is the interactive read aloud. I never realized how many different things you could teach from children's picture books. The only thing that I can ever remember my teachers doing with books when I was in school was reading them to us as a reward for having gotten all our work done. I believe that by teaching through picture books, children are more interested in the material. Having done the annotated bibliography I feel much more prepared to teach children in a fun and exciting way. The first time I did one of these read alouds in my classroom I was very nervous about whether I would ask the right questions or stumble over the book. When it came time to do it I found out my weakness was not in questioning or reading the book fluently, but in keeping control of the classroom when questions are asked. It is important to note also that when introducing a new book you should just read the book first before teaching from it. This reading allows the students to see a model of fluent reading and this is important for children. Going along with the read aloud another thing that I think is important is shared reading. When we find a book that has a repeated sentence or is a very easy pattern to remember we can have children read chorally and that will get students who may not read much at all yet to read along with the class. The student will feel no pressure because they will be easily able to remember the pattern and if they make a mistake the classroom will be so loud that no one will notice. I really like the idea of shared reading and although I have not seen much of it in my field experience I will use it in my own classroom. Word walls can also be a great classroom tool. Not only can they help students to spell, but they are a great management tool because students will not be constantly asking you how to spell something if there are many high frequency words placed on the word wall. Word wall can also contain sight words that you have taught and expect children to be able to recognize. When they come to a word they cannot pronounce they should look to the word wall for the word and even though they may not recognize it in the context of the book they will recognize it on the word wall. One thing I would have never thought of that Rutzel and Cooter suggest is that the words on the word wall be easily moveable so that the order of the words can be changed intermittently. The point of the word wall is not to have the students know the word because of where it is on the wall, but because they know it by sight. Moving them around helps the words to become more recognizable in other places (pg86). My cooperating teacher is not very good at keeping up with her word wall. She has very few words on it and I know that there are more words the students know. In my own classroom I will make sure that I keep up with the word wall because I believe it can be a very useful and important tool. This semester I have also learned that I need to ask better, more in-depth questions. To do this I should begin referring to the QAR model presented by Rutzel and Cooter on page 179. Many of the questions I find myself asking are right there questions. These are questions that students can answer based on the material right in front of them and usually you can point right to the answer in the text. Some other kinds of questions I should try using are think and search, on my own, and author and me. These questions will cause students to have to search harder and think beyond the text to find the answer. These higher level questions will elicit a deeper and higher level of thinking which will increase comprehension. Overall this semester I feel like I have learned a lot but I also know there is a lot more to learn. Throughout my time in your classroom and my time in my classroom at Wicoff I feel like I have had very meaningful experiences and I hope that next semester will be the same way. I am very thankful for having you and my cooperating teacher this semester to guide me through the very beginning of what I hope will be a very long and successful career of teaching children. Sincerely, Kelly Nolan