Week 4 - Reading Lesson & Final Reflection!

We did it! It's the final week of Summer Learning Place! We have successfully completed four weeks of learning - both on the students' part and the teachers'! I know I've learned so, so much as we made our way through this program. I knew that this would be an incredibly powerful experience, but didn't realize just how much of an impact it would make on me! That first week, I was so nervous about the program as well as the new role I am stepping into this coming year. I now feel more prepared and well on my way to becoming an effective special education resource teacher

In the beginning of the program, I set some goals for myself. One goal I had for myself was to refine my skills of flexibility and adaptability. This is such a crucial part of the teaching process and I sometimes struggle to find the balance between being ultra-organized and over-planned vs. flexible and adaptable. I challenged myself these past few weeks to find that balance and to strive to be more adaptable. I believe I accomplished this goal. Our kids constantly threw things our way that forced us to think on our feet. Whether we were dealing with mental roadblocks or behavioral difficulties, we had to constantly adapt to our the needs of our students and get creative in our solutions.

A second goal of mine was to try to reach every student, both personally and academically. I wanted to build meaningful relationships with every student in our classroom so that SLP was a safe and fun learning environment. Morning meeting was a great way to build relationships with students and between students. Unstructured social time during the morning before school and during our break were also great opportunities to build personal connections. Academically, I focused heavily on differentiated learning, ensuring that all learning styles were reached and that students were able to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways. I feel that I was able to accomplish this goal effectively.

My third goal was to work on my data collection. Although I did make a concerted effort to jot down notes whenever possible and to monitor progress in a very concrete way, this goal is definitely something that I need to continue working on. Going into this school year, this will be a professional goal of mine and I hope to attend professional development workshops to assist me in achieving this goal.

Coming into these four weeks, Miss Gilbert and I had little idea of what we would be teaching, who we would be teaching, or how we would be teaching. This was a major concern of mine going into the program, but it forced me out of my comfort zone and I learned a whole lot. Our four weeks looked something like this:

Week 1:

• Procedures and behavioral expectations established
• Social opportunities and community building activities fostered
• Pre-assessment data gathered and analyzed

Week 2:

• Community building, procedures, behavioral expectations continued
• Narrative writing (heart maps, paragraph structure, writing process)
• Addition fluency practice and strategy building (single-digit, multi-digit, regrouping, number line)
• Reading connections (text-to-text, self, world, etc.)
• Word work with student-choice boards

Week 3:

• Community building, procedures, behavioral expectations continued
• Opinion writing (OREO strategy, paragraph structure, writing process)
• Subtraction strategy building and word problem strategy building (CUBES, number line, standard algorithm, etc.)
• Reader's theater and preparing for performance
• Word work with student-choice boards

Week 4:

• Community building, procedures, behavioral expectations continued
• Post-assessment data gathered and analyzed
• Math word problem strategy building
• Reading comprehension strategy building (thick vs. thin questions, sketch-to-stretch)
• Reader's theater and preparing for performance
• Word work with student-choice boards

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Reading Lesson 7/30/2019

Brigid Duffy

Reading Comprehension - Sketch to Stretch

My third and final observation lesson was a lesson regarding the "sketch to stretch" reading comprehension strategy. In this lesson, we explored the concept of visualization to help us stretch our comprehension of the text at hand. We did this through discussing each of the five senses, coming up with concrete examples of each, and making connections between the senses we feel in real life and the sensory details that authors provide us with. Our class used the mindfulness technique of palming and closing our eyes, then used our imaginations to watch "brain tv" as I read a very descriptive book out loud. I did not show any pictures and the students all kept their eyes closed during reading.

After a few pages, we would stop and discuss what we were seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, etc. on our "brain tv's." About halfway through the book, we stopped and completed the anchor chart graphic organizer (seen below) to sketch and stretch our understanding of the text. During our discussion, we made sure to dive deep into what the text was telling us. This served as the teacher modeling portion of the lesson. 

At the end of the read aloud, I asked students to flip to the blank side of their graphic organizer and focus on sketching their favorite part of the book (different than what we completed together). After a few minutes, students shared their drawing with a partner and discussed what they decided to include and why. Students were very eager to share this! 

Finally, students completed the graphic organizer on their own. This time, instead of using our read aloud, students used their lines from the reader's theater that we have been working on. This reader's theater will be our final presentation and we have been working on getting the students to really think about what they are saying while they are performing, rather than just saying the words. 

What went well:

I think that students liked how different their read-aloud experience was today. Normally, read-alouds follow the same structure: the teacher reads, the teacher shows the pictures, the teacher stops and asks a question, the teacher continues reading, etc. This time around, the students were given a very specific job to do. It was on them to create the images in their minds and truly dive into the words that the author is telling us. They were very engaged during this portion of the lesson and enjoyed sharing their "brain tv" experiences. 

I also liked the mindfulness activity that we did to prepare our minds and bodies for our visualization strategy. It's called palming and I learned about it at a recent professional development. If you would like to see a demonstration and get further explanation, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRKpNaVaP84 

What didn't go as planned:

I think I was trying to fit in too many components into one lesson. I liked that we were able to get some additional reader's theater practice in and that students were able to think more deeply about their lines. However, some lines from the reader's theater don't provide as much sensory detail as our read aloud had. This made it slightly more difficult for students to fill in the sentence stems on the "stretch" part of the page. Also, switching from our read aloud to our reader's theater texts was difficult for some students to do. They were wanting to sketch more about Puddles rather than I Like Myself.

How to change for subsequent lessons:

In future lessons, I would simplify things for myself and just center the lesson around the read aloud, rather than on working with multiple texts.

Today's graphic organizer:

Today's read aloud:

Our reader's theater book: