Formative design

Dr. Dennis visited our class and talked to us about formative design. I like the focus on valuing practitioner knowledge. The pragmatic epistemology also appeals to me.

Formative design differs from action research in its focus on utilizing and developing theory. Differs from experimental and quasi-experimental in that you can modify what you are doing based on what you see happening. It's not quite the same as Mixed Methods.

Part of pragmatism says that even conflicting ideas can be informative. How do conflicting theories come together to inform classroom practice? Praxis is an important concept in formative design.

This approach emphasizes close alignment between theory, research, and (classroom) practice, and it's iterative.

Your approach should be skepticism, not romanticism or advocacy. Your goal isn't to prove your theory is right. You have to balance your beliefs with what is actually working in the classroom.

This is a methodology in its infancy, so researchers working in this area must be explicit in all stages of the research.

Timeline for Formative Experiments

Phase 1: Preliminary phase - recruit schools and teachers, meet with stakeholders, discuss goals, obligations, responsibilities; negotiate plans.

Phase 2: Gather demographic data. Use "ethnographic" methods to create a thick description of the classroom, school, and community.

Phase 3: Gathering baseline data. Establish where participants are in relation to the pedagogical goal prior to implementing an intervention.

Phase 4: Implement the intervention; gather data.

Phase 5: Post assessment to provide comparison to baseline.

Phase 6: Consolidate findings and write it up.

For information on formative design and related issues, see:

Bauman, J., Ware, D., & Edwards, E. (2007). "Bumping into spicy, tasty words that catch your tongue": A formative experiment on vocabulary instruction. The Reading Teacher, 61(2), 108-122.

Johnson, R. B., & Onwuegbazie, A. J. (2004). Mixed methods research: A research paradigm whose time has come. Educational Researcher, 33(7), 14-26.

Reinking, D., & Bradley, B. A. (2008). Formative and design experiments: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College Press.

Reinking, D., & Watkins, J. (2000). A formative experiment investigating the use of multimedia book reviews to increase elementary students' independent reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 35(3), 384-419.

Ivey, G., & Broaddus, K. (2007). A formative experiment investigating literacy engagement among adolescent Latina/o students just beginning to read, write, and speak English. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(4), 512-545.

Dennis, D. (n.d.) Co-constructing the implementation of multi-level texts in middle school science classrooms. Unpublished proposal for research.

Notes from A's Class

Review from last week
Comprehension - making connections to schema
Stumbling blocks
Strategies to improve comprehension
Last week, played a game to show how questioning relates to thinking, and how to teach
questioning
Start with out of context actitivity to teach self-questioning (e.g. 20 questions); go to reading acitivity to teach questioning (e.g. Stump the Teacher); go to activities where they are reading and thinking of questions at the same time.

Questioning minds don't get bored. Questioning is thinking, is making connections.

For younger kids, 20 questions about pictures instead of reading passages.

Game: Guess who? A series of pictures of people with descriptions. Ask yes or no questions, put down each picture that doesn't match.

If you are doing a lesson and it's too difficult, you have to know how to go down a few levels, then work back up when they are comfortable.

Major topic: Visual imagery
What? Being able to create pictures in your mind.

Making connections in the brain: neurons sprout dendrites; dendrites don't touch each other. The gap is called a synapse. That gap is bridged by chemicals, neurotransmitters (e.g. adrenaline). There are positive ones and negative ones. The negative ones make you feel anxious, scared, etc.

Story of struggling reader who came for tutoring... said one day "I love you"; "you don't love me, you don't know me; you love the way you feel when i'm around you." A few months later, reading problems fixed, still coming because of good feeling. Asked "can you show me how to do what you did with me? I've got friends who are about to make bad choices and I want to help them.

Visual imagery - picture worth 1000 words. Helps students make solid connections.

Example, picture map of United States. Candidate got on the plane in Miami, FL. went to ..., etc. etc. listed off all of the places. Because you made a mental picture, you could remember all of those places.
Remember example of what I'm wearing. Once your mind starts working, it keeps working.

Second reason for using visual imagery with kids, it gives you pleasure. Avid readers, raise your hands. I don't expect many. Okay, when you read a book, and then a movie comes out, which do you like better? The book, of course. You are making pictures in your mind.

Third reason for using visual imagery, it will improve comprehension.

Visual imagery is very powerful.

So, how do we teach it?

First floor, out of the context of reading.
Example: Everybody, picture an elephant. With your arm show me what the elephant's trunk is doing. Arms down. Put the elephant in an environment. Now picture elephant raising his front right foot. Now give it polka dots. Raise your hand if you changed your elephant's color when you gave it polka dots. What color was your elephant? Put your elephant in clothes. What clothes is your elephant wearing? Make your elephant stand on its head.
Go back to a kitchen that is somewhere in your past. Go to your seat at the kitchen table. Think about the smells, sights. All of your senses can be activated.
In your mind, picture a 3 x 3 grid. Number each of the spaces, 1 through 9. Start in the upper right hand corner. Move down 2, left 1, up 2, left 1, down 1. What number are you on? Some of you are there on the third floor and had no problem doing that. To scaffold, give them the grid on a piece of paper and a red disk to cover. Next, take away the number, or take away the marker. Then let a kid call the directions. Use number cards to do a comprehension check with the kids of the whole class.

Story about little Jerome, who said his TV set wasn't working. When it "warmed up", he was happy.

Second floor, you read and have them make the pictures. Read passage from "Sarah Plain and Tall". Could also have them buddy read, where one reads, one visualizes, then switch off. Also, read a picture book, but don't show pictures. They visualize, then show them the pictures to compare. Also, read them a picture book and give them a wide angle lens. Ask them what's happening to the right and left of the picture you can see. Picture your favorite car. You're in it. Now you're going through a drive through. Where are you? What are you wearing?

Some people say that they can't tell a joke. As your comprehension gets better, you'll get better at telling jokes.
First floor activity: tell a joke, and have your students try to tell the joke back. By the third floor, try three jokes.
Inquest dramatization - I'm going to read first two pages of a chapter book, these two are going to act it out for you. Freeze them and ask questions. Read beginning of The Great Gilly Hopkins. 1) dramatization, 2) stop periodically to ask audience to ask questions.

Teach the students to make the pictures in their minds. As they move into 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, there won't be pictures for them.

BREAK

I'm going to read a passage. As I read, I want you to go outside of this classroom and make a connection. When you do, raise your hand. I'll ask you to share your connections. Record in Inspiration.

Guided Reading, demonstration.
First floor. Warm up by listing six things to pick up from the grocery store. Who can list them backwards? Second floor. Read passage to them. Challenge them to remember everything. (Passage about caterpillars and moths.) Third floor, they read and remember everything.
Steps: 1) Challenge to remember, 2) Read to them, 3) record what they remember, 4) read again and make additions and corrections, 5) short term memory test, bar graph in reading journal. 6) Week or two later, long term memory quiz. 7) Graph in reading journal. Goal: by the end of the month, how many of you can get your LTM scores the same as your STM scores? That makes the kids responsible for their own learning. Guided reading procedure is very powerful.
Remembering 12 items and saying them backwards is a subtest of intelligence tests. Could you do that? Yes.
We study Alzheimer's here at USF. My friend is in one of the classes and they do a lot of these same activities to do with young children to get them to think. We pay a lot of attention to keeping people from losing their minds, but we don't pay enough attention in schools to making sure kids develop their minds to begin with. We test them so that we can say 'you're smart', 'you're not', but we don't pay enough attention to helping them develop their minds and become smart.

Chunking. Social security numbers, phone numbers with area codes. Cleaning garage: big job, break into chunks. When something isn't manageable, you break it into chunks. Break text passage into chunks. Use procedures on each chunk, like guided reading or visualization. Mnemonic devices.

Readers Theater
Story grammar
Once the students understand the framework, your mind wants to fill the framework.

Notes from A's Class

Vocabulary
Who is putting new words in their heads by 3rd grade?
Make a concerted effort to continue putting new words in their heads. If not, by third of fourth grade, they may look like they have a word recognition problem when really they have a vocabulary problem. A student reading comes to the word "proficient" for the first time. If that word is not already in their head, they won't be able to read it. If they have heard it used before and know what it means, they will be able to figure it out from context.

What: learning the meaning of new words
Why important: Comprehending text; communicating; building self-esteem.
How: be a model (push their vocabulary in spoken comments, comments on papers. To be an effective teacher, you have to make them want to learn. Don't you think if you put new vocabulary into your praise, don't you think they'll want to know what the word means?); continue reading to the students; teach with the why in mind. Teach them morphemes; teach a few a week and their vocabularies will grow exponentially; antebellum and beligerent. Start with words they don't know. Not only does it exponentially increase their vocabulary, it allows them to figure out words they don't know. Spectacles, inspect, spectator. Teach them etymology; history or story of words; how you were named; If your mind doesn't wonder, it will wander. Teach them word play. Word searches are the lowest form of this. Crossword puzzle incorporates semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonic clues.

Notes from A's Class

Midterm framework

12 Identification

• Example - Consonant digraphs - two letters, one sound
• sh, ch
  

3-4 Discussion questions (Major topics so far)
Format - What, Why, and How

• Inter-relatedness of the Language Arts
• Reading Process - CLR
• Emergent Readers
• Word Recognition
• Fluency
• Vocabulary
  

Multiple choice
New material
Magnifying glasses - word detectives - theme
Kids physically manipulating paper letters
Oral cloze
Kids were having fun

With a worksheet, the goal is just to get it done. The kids aren't having fun. Attitude is a choice. What you choose to do will affect their attitudes. If you don't make learning fun, you won't enjoy teaching.

Read-Write-Think lesson on learning sight words. Semantic clues first, then graphophonic clues, picture of a watermelon. Review entire lesson.

Word recognition - Runny Babbit example
Use with 3rd or 4th grade.
Word recognition skills are learned, shifting to comprehension.

Fluency is the bridge between word recognition and comprehension. To get from word recognition to comprehension, you need to become fluent.

First part is reading with flow - correct pitch, juncture, and intonation.
Why important? I pause when I teach. I'm trying to get knowledge from my head to your head. It's more likely to get there if I speak with pitch, juncture, and intonation. Why important? It causes the words on the page to come alive in the reader's head. The opposite of fluency is word-by-word reading. When a child reads like that, the words are not going to his head. If the words don't come alive, there's no comprehension, no mental stimulation, no enjoyment. If you hate reading, your thoughts go to, 'how many pages do i have left?' We have to create this fluency bridge by grade 2, definitely grade 3.

To make sure kids do well on FCAT, schools work on comprehension. They should be checking fluency. Without fluency, you're checking on the other side of the bridge, they aren't there yet.

How do you make certain that the kids are fluent?


Echo reading (works on pitch, juncture, and intonation)
Very easy to see which aren't fluent. One thing to do is echo reading. One problem is word-by-word readers are grouped together, so all their models are non-fluent, and they weren't read to as kids. You become a good role model reader for them. May need to start by teaching them what an echo is.

5 Chinese Brothers, example of Echo reading. Kids enjoy imitating intonation, even accent, etc.

Model examples - mannequin, model home, HGTV

Start off with phrases. When they have the book in front of them, use entire sentences. Don't let memory become a part of it; make sure they have the text.

Speeches - from a teleprompter. That's reading. They have a speech coach. Gestures.

Buddy Reading -

• with friend
• self-select book
• self-select location
• make sure they aren't 2 non-fluent readers

Stop and Go Reading (working on juncture)
modeling stop and go reading
When you get to any type of punctuation, the next person starts reading. Kids have to focus and pay attention throughout.

With Round Robin reading, kids figure out which paragraph is theirs, then tune out. This is not a good strategy. You need to be a thinker. If it's a bad strategy, stop it. Don't use it.
Oral cloze
Let a student read and leave one word out, let the other students fill in the missing word.
When a reader begins to make more use of syntactic and semantic clues, they become more fluent.

Theme for each month
Logo contest. Logo goes on a bookmark. On the bookmark, put information for parents on how to build fluency, these methods.

NIM - neurological impress method Sit close behind, read aloud together, a little bit faster. Read into their right ear, theoretically impressing the left side of their brain.

Riddles and Jokes Telling a joke requires good delivery, good pitch, juncture, intonation. Have a theme

Vocabulary
Beethoven Lives Upstairs by Barbara Nichol
I told you never to try to teach them words that weren't already in their heads. So you need to put more words in their heads, so that you can teach them those words.
Period book. Timelines. Clothes they wore, vintage pictures. Writing with a feather.
This book is written in the form of letters from Christoph to his uncle, and responses. You could be teaching letter writing. Use compare/contrast on words that are not sight words. Most are. Once they get to the end of the letter, they want to hear the response.
As you go up in age, the words don't get that much more difficult. If they have the strategies, they can read these words.
Vocabulary - Learning the meaning of new words
Humerus - funny bone - acted out, made it come to life
Teaching and learning should make sense. If you can't comprehend,

In life, a good vocabulary helps you to accurately communicate with people. The best single indicator of someone's intelligence is their vocabulary. V. is important to being able to express yourself. Works in receptive and expressive. Works as a ceiling in many occupations. Can't get higher because they like the skills to communicate.

How do you teach vocabulary?
What doesn't work - get a list of words on Monday, look up the definition, write it in a sentence, test on Friday. If you had twenty words a week and did it for ten years, maybe you get 6000 words? You learned 20,000 words by a much better method and you probably don't remember learning them. By the time you were five, you learned those words by your parents talking to you. The best way to make sure that your students have healthy, robust, rich vocabularies? By purposely infusing these words into your speech with children. (Esoteric information is that which is known by only a few.) If you teach 3rd grade, go look at books written for 4th and 5th and 6th grade. Start using those words in your speech.

Enthusiastic Model

Teach morphemic analysis - get a list of Latin and Greek roots. Teach in the context of a word that they already know. When you're riding a bike, you put your feet on the PEDals. PED = feet. PEDestrian. BiPED is an animal that walks on 2 legs. If you want your camera to stay steady, use a triPOD. Cap on your head, CAPtion is the heading of a picture, CAPtain is the head of the team.

Wordplay - let them play with words. What do these words have in common? star, evil, peek, pals, now. Can you find any other words that can be read backwards?
palindromes - racecar
acronyms
Know what they are, give examples.
Wordplay makes them feel smart. They want to share and learn more.





The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists by Edward Fry
I did not say you stole my red bandana.

Recommended Book

Dr. S recommended this book for all qual researchers:

Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods By Michael Quinn Patton

Notes from A's Class

structural analysis

• syllabication
• prefixes and suffixes
• compound words
• contractions

compare/contrast
re|cent
cor|ner
mo|ment

word recognition

• sight
• phonics
• structural analysis
• context clues

Ex. Teaching prefix sub
Start by brainstorming words that begin with sub

game with compound words
act out each part of the word
1 finger for first part
2 fingers for second part
sidewalk, runway

Teaching contractions
You are teaching them the role that the apostrophe plays in a word.
(Get the words out of the kids)
Do you have a million dollars?
I do not.
Oh, you speak so well. [Write it down.] You said 'do not'. Some of us are lazier than that. We say... [class answers 'don't']
Look at these two words.
How many letters are in the first word? How many are in the second? Which letter is missing? That's right, so that's where you put the apostrophe.

Practice getting words out of your friends' heads so that you can do it in front of kids.

Figure out what matters; the rest does not make a difference.

Reading levels

• independent level - easy reading; reader knows the words
  
• instructional level - 95/100 or 95% words read correctly
  
• frustration level - more than 5 words wrong out of 100; less than 70% on comprehension questions

If a kid is always taught at their frustration level, they aren't getting any better. A 1st grade kid taught at 1st grade level, when that's his frustration level, isn't going to progress.
All of the reading you do for pleasure is at your independent level. That's the biggest problem in reading in schools today; not necessarily the method. All kids should be taught at their instructional level.

Sharing pattern books.

Keep the kids engaged and you won't have behavior problems.
When you are planning lessons, keep the kids in mind. What are the kids doing at each part? What are they thinking?

Study now for the midterm.
Lesson plan due next week.

Class notes- book talk

Class notes on book talk:

Language and Control in Children's Literature by Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer

Examines how adults teach culture to children through children's literature

Identifies the mechanisms of control, such as dissimulation, euphemism, unification, fragmentation, reification, 

"Suspension of dissent", analogous to suspension of disbelief

Leech and Short, 1981

I wonder about the theoretical framework of this book.

-critical linguistics

Does it take a position on the use of language in children's books to spread culture?

In discussion, Dr. L recommends Shirley Brice Heath's Ways With Words (originally 1983).

Notes on A's class

Umbrella example - difference between looking and focusing

Balancing umbrella

Using die mind reading trick

I'm showing you that it's all about focus.

You've got to get the students impressed with their mental capabilities. Dots are called pips.

Make a configuration of four pips. Now put a fifth pip. Raise your hand if put that fifth dot somewhere other than the middle.

quincunx

spell it for them

How many letters?

How many syllables?

Magic fingers, spell it in the air.

If you have three babies, you have _

If you have four babies, you have _

If you have five babies, you have _

quin - means five.

What letter does it start with ?

WHat's next?

How can you make a u into an n?

How many n's were in it? How many u's are in it?

What letters dropped out?

Make students pay attention to the distinctive features of a word.

I'm forcing you to pay attention; i'm not telling you. Tellers belong in banks. You are a teacher. You are activating their minds. Making them do things with it in their heads.

To teach a word by sight, the cardinal principle is this:

Never teach a child to read a word that is not already in the child's head.

What's teh first thing I did with quincunx? I made sure that you knew what it was. Next, I forced you to pay attention to its distinctive features. Use as many of the modalities as possible. Then there needs to be reinforcement.

Can you think of 3 or 4 or 5 things that I did to do that? Write them down.

What letter am I covering up?

What else? I could cut the letters up. Ask repeating letters.

Can you use design on your paper to make an x by connecting dots? And that's the last letter in the word.

The eyes looking is not mental. You need their minds engaged.

Reinforcement can be Word Wall, Puzzle, games (remember games you played as a child - go fish, etc.).

Word recognition

There is no one way. We're all different.

Sight words - What and why -  Fry, Dolch, high-frequency word list. These 300 words make up 65 - 66% of the words you will ever need to read. First 100 words, 1st grade. 2nd hundred, 2nd grade. 3rd hundred, 3rd grade. These basic sight words should be mastered by third grade. No reason for every third grader not to know these words. A word a day is not difficult. But, if you don't have any type of plan, it won't get accomplished. Kids will get out of third grade not knowing these words. Make a plan. Get with the other teachers. Make sure that first grade teachers make sure all kids know these 100 words. 

Can you see all the names on a spreadsheet? Can you see all the words listed off? Can you see making small groups for activity so that you can check off on that spreadsheet?

Put the words on cards. Shuffle the cards. Make it a game. Flip a card. If you know the word, you get the card. If not, it's mine. What's the score? It's simple. It's a game. And when I'm done, I have all of the cards I know I need to work on.

Think about schools. It's reading time, take out your books. And they do lessons, and they're nice lessons, but at the end of the day, are you absolutely sure that your kids have learned?

Make sure that you teach them:

• They are common. (highlighter, newspaper activity)
  
• Many of them are phonetically irregular. (home, raid - rules of phonics. o in come, a in said - phonetically irregular). How many of you have a friend named Jennifer? Do you ever call her Jen? How about Elizabeth? Liz? A long vowel is long because it takes longer to say an a than it takes to say a short vowel. That's why we call them long vowels. Now... we are basically lazy. Over the years we have taken words that have long vowels and we have shortened them. We are lazy. The most frequently used words tend to be irregular because we have shortened them. Write the word TOME. It's a big book. How often do you use the word TOME. Infrequent, so it kept the long sound. How about SOME? We use that all the time, so it's shortened vowel sound.
• Allows them to make use of context clues.

Can you teach any word by sight? Yes. I taught you.

What? Why? How? Study by that.

Phonics

What is it? phoneme-grapheme correspondence

Phoneme - smallest unit of sound

Grapheme - smallest unit of written text

You are putting a sound to a letter.

Here's the problem: How many letters do we have? 26. It would be easy if we had one to one, but in English, we have 44 sounds. That's why English is hard to learn. 

Kids - learning ABCs. You know the word alphabet. Have you made the connection that the word alphabet is from the Greek letters for a and b.

Why do we teach phonics? 

1. Our language is phonetic. Some aren't.
   
2. It's an independent means for students to learn words.
   

We have 26 letters, divided into vowels and consonants. What is a vowel? Has to do with the way we make the sound. 

a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y, w

Open your mouth. Let's do long a to short a, all the way down to u.

Now let's do it with consonants. Starting with B. Let's go. Did you keep your mouth open? You were supposed to keep it open.

A vowel is a sound produced by an unobstructed flow of air. 

What is a consonant?

Now I want you to write down what a consonant is. You're smart now.

Now what is it?

A consonant is a sound produced by an obstructed flow of air.

What are these obstructions? l sound, tongue and roof of mouth, th = tongue and teeth

Season after Fall = winter. Mouth is closed, w is a consonant.

White stuff that falls during winter up north = snow; mouth is open, it's a vowel.

Yellow, y is a consonant.

By, y is a vowel.

Every syllable must have a vowel sound. Otherwise, nothing would come out of your mouth. The vowels allow the sound to come out.

Spelling test: who can spell rhythm. There are two syllables, two vowel sounds, even though only one vowel.

Remember when you learned how to tell when to add s and when to add es to make something plural.

tax

Plural is taxes, two syllables.

key

Plural is keys, one syllable, no e

Build grapheme tree

Show them GHOTI

Between the lions

Phonogram 

What? a unit of sound made up of an onset and a rime. Also called word families.

Why?

1. When you learn one, you learn many
   
2. It circumvents the need to teach the vowel rules.
   
3. It's fun. They are rhymes. The brain is wired to enjoy rhymes.
   

Game - word family, win - lose - or draw

dice, mice, slice, rice

Yall are much happier now than when we were talking about digraphs and diphthongs. Diphthongs don't do it for you. You like phonograms.

There are rules of phonics but we don't use them. Why do we insist that kids learn them?

ab is a phonogram. If I have ab, I can have slab, stab, blab, grab, tab, nab, crab, dab... when you learn one word, you learn 10-15 other words.

ack gives us back, flack, track, stack, sack, tack... it takes us pretty far, so teach it.

five - hive, live, dive, thrive, strive, arrive, jive

bed - fed, Ted, red, shred, shed, bled, not dead or tread (Don't confuse them by using words that aren't in the word family)

Two weeks from today, word recognition lesson due. Easiest thing: a phonic element. Mini-lesson, small group. You could do the BL blend. You could do a phonogram, like a ake word family. 

First, select the element you are going to teach.

Second, come up with words that contain that element.

Third, from those words, choose one as a theme word. (For instance, you are teaching TR blends, may choose the word TRAIN. That gives you a theme. Can't you see a train going in a tunnel? It makes your lesson more interesting - spices it up.

Fourth, get the words that I want to teach from the students heads. (Remember, never teach them a word they don't already have in their heads.)

Fifth, get the students to determine what they have in common.

Sixth, bring in other BL words. Let them see that they all sound the same.

Seventh, a game or activity to reinforce it. 

Example, big blazer velcro words to it. Or blue blanket, they reach under and feel things under it, maybe a block. Think about universals to get their attention. 

Next week, structural analysis, context clues, get you ready for lesson due in 2 weeks.

Structural analysis

Context clues - look at all the words around it, figuring out what the unknown word is.

A's Class, after the break

Notes from A's class

Pattern Book Lesson

* First, describe who you are teaching.

(Highlight ESOL adaptations. Pattern book lessons by nature are good for ESOL students.)

Title of the book

Describe the environment. (Env. is important. Most of you can remember where you were when you were read to.

Using Rosie's Walk. Hook them, start engaging them. (Maybe where overalls.)

That book is one sentence. What's the pattern? (across yard, around haystack, under beehives) What's the theme? being on a farm.

Have a theme; brings life to your party. Have nice extra touches. When you have a theme, you think of these extra things. Without the theme, you don't.

Back to Rosie's walk. Maybe a matching activity post-reading, to match those nouns with the prepositions. They may not know what a mill is. So maybe bring in a bag of flour, build that schema. Rosie also goes under the beehives. Bring in honey, show them the process on the computer.

When I see flour and honey, I think of cooking. Maybe the cooking is in the post-reading section. Let's get some math in there. Make biscuits, cut them in halves, cut them in fourths. In the end, in the celebration, we're going to have biscuits and honey. They're going to know where everything came from. Get them thinking about where the things that they eat come from. That gets them to be thinkers. That's not on the Sunshine State Standards, but it's what's important.

Rosie the hen is a female animal. I might have a bulletin board of female animals. Female deer is a doe. Female horse is a mare. I'm increasing their schema. Not for this book, but in general.

Reading

We'll have about 4 readings. With each reading, add a layer, and a modalities.

First reading, working on conventions of print, moving my finger from left to right.

Second reading, I want to get the words into the kids' head. (One way is rhythm. Book lends itself to what to do  in each reading. Could be getting kids to fill the picture word.)

Third reading, get the kinesthetic in, and some repetition. Make each of the preposition into a hand motion. Let the kids decide the movement for each one.

Reading four, they are reading it using the labels and acting it out in class.

Sequence

Day 1: Pre-reading and first reading (maybe 20 min)

Day 2: Review pre-reading, add something new (maybe teach them the word oblivious). Reading 2.

Day 3: Reading 3, reading 4. Maybe bring in blue celophane and make a pond. Bring in stuff each day to make something else. Print the words on the floor. Soon you'll have them acting out the book. 

Day 4: Post

Day 5: Post

Story about teacher with neighbor kid:

"We've been working at it for a long time." To be successful with kids, it needs to feel like fun, not work.

Post-reading

Next week

Second thing: make use of the arts. 

Third thing: food.

Integrate curriculum.

Let's say you do the apple tasting. Tie in math, in the shapes you cut or the fractions. Tie in science - taste buds, etc., social studies, etc.

If it has a seed in it, it's a fruit.

I want them to learn Mozart. Don't limit them based on when you learned something. When you feel you are losing them, say this, "I'm going to tell you something that you're not supposed to learn until fourth grade. Don't tell anybody that I'm teaching you this in first grade." They will want to share that with others, their parents.

PRODUCT

find letters that make

PROUD

You want them to have pride in what you've taught them.

Enrich your lessons.

Why shouldn't all children have an enriched curriculum? Don't make it just the basics for them.

A's Class

Notes from A's class:

Began by reading from fun facts cards. Reminds me of a segment from a talk show. This occurred while people were arriving.

Sets goal for today: review, get you ready for Pattern Book lesson, due in 2 weeks.

Review of C-L-R. Model is drawing of head with C & L in it and a children's book sitting on top of it. Refer to new document on Bb that reviews cuing systems for each area. Good readers rely on syntactic and semantic, not graphophonic. Proved that by "Oxford study" text on screen and by exercise with "Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King gave his famous I have a dream speech..."

To make you use semantic and syntactic, take away graphophonic. That's teaching. Teaching is not telling. If you want to be a teller, go work at a bank.

Teaching is changing behavior.

Help kids read with expression by demonstrating it. You can't just tell, you must teach. Those of you who've been around kids and pools, how well does it work to just tell them to slow down and not run. That doesn't work. Many of you have had too many teachers who are tellers, so you think that's what teaching is.

The other thing from last week was the relationship between the language arts. Last week, I drew the diagram. This week, I'm just saying the words and motioning. I'm transferring it to your brain. (Review, what's the relationship b/t listening and speaking? etc.) 

Want kids to be able to express themselves. Teaching is changing.

We also talked about modalities. Wrote on back, forced her to use tactile and kinesthetic, could not use auditory, visual, etc.

Helen Keller had many teachers (let's not call them teachers, because her behavior didn't change). Along came Annie Sullivan, her teacher was Grace Fernauld. Together they came up with the VAKT method - visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile.  That famous scene, using all of the pathways, breakthrough. Once you open up one of those pathways, the others will open up. Clogged drain analogy.

Modalities are very important when you are teaching. Use all of them, as much as you can.

New topic of the day: Emergent literacy

We're going to start with young children, and I'll teach you how to teach them, then we'll move all the way up to 6th grade. Structure of course.

Emerge = morpheme

Two plots of land, growing flowers. One gets fertilizer, testing, planning, pull weeds. Both get sun and water. 

Ask about process of making literacy notebook. Ask about stories that they got from parents. Favorite book that you liked to read every day - your emergent stage.

If you don't remember learning to read, it's because it just happened naturally. How many of you were read to as a child?

Call out stories from crowd. How do I remember your stories? What does mem mean?

Reading highway analogy.

What is your schema?

Highway 4310, which way does it go? East-west, because it ends in an even number.  Odd numbered highways run north-south. When should kids learn that? Teach them this when they learn even and odd numbers. It's simple to learn. It makes you start thinking. You are trying to create learners and thinkers. You'll see a highway and think about which direction it runs.

Places cars on reading highway. We don't want the kids who are just learning to drive, on the reading highway. They are on the on-ramp. When you are going onto the highway, you have to merge. e-merge-nt. We want to help them get ready to merge. If they go in too soon, what will happen? They'll crash. Then they'll need a tow truck. It's not right to be a failure at 5 years old. When you fail, you feel like a failure. The moment they are not sure and you feel like they are not getting it, back off. Make sure they are ready to succeed. How do we make sure they are ready? C & L. Talk to them about lots and lots of things. Read to them on a regular basis. Teach them the letters of the alphabet, and sounds with letters. 

Google "phonemic awareness".

I'm thinking of a word that rhymes with small. It begins with a b, my word is...

I'm thinking of a word that rhymes with cat. It begins with a b, my word is...

That makes you feel successful.

Should be natural to learn at the emergent stage. Letters on refridgerator. Playing rhyming games.

Story about student program at church; emergent literacy. Bradley, student in LA, poor child from cotton fields. Teacher said Bradley would disrupt the whole program. I know that students who will try to disrupt the whole program because he's frustrated. You're asking him to drive on the highway, and he's just on the on-ramp. Don't judge them, don't label them, meet them where they are.

On the emergent ramp, I want them to have a store of about 50 words that they can read. Helpful to know initial sounds. (Put ball and boy together. Put together things that begin with a T). Conventions (or concepts) of print.

You'll meet some kids that are on this ramp that should not be taught to read yet because they don't have all of this stuff. That's where your pattern book lesson comes in.

Bring in pattern book next week so that I can make sure you have a book that will work. 

Repetitive syntax

Consistent theme

May have rhyming pattern

Look for a book that the kids will have memorized after 3 or 4 times

Teaching concepts of print (left to right, top to bottom)

How to do this:

Come up with a catchy syntactic phrase

Get a theme

Add a rhyming word

Suggest not Dr. Suess

Wonderful to read to children

Not wonderful to teach them to read

- Long (64 pages)

- Words spread all over and around page

- Made up words

Brown Bear, Very Hungry Caterpillar

Could be colors, days of the week, opposites, etc.

You could make your own book. 

Lesson format: Pre-reading, reading, post-reading.

No objectives, because I know what the objectives are.

Pre-reading: Activate schemata. (May need to develop schemata). Create interest.

Check to make sure that they have the necessary schema. Focus on cognitive and linguistic. (If they don't, you are setting them up for failure. It should be a slam dunk for the kid, if you are doing your job right.) 

T-ball analogy. We know that kids at that age aren't equipped to hit the ball. So we...

Tricycle analogy. We know they can't balance a bicycle, so we set them up for success by having three wheels. Move to bicycle with training wheels.

For a pattern book lesson, the training wheels are the repetitive patterns. They will feel like they are reading - we know they are not. But they feel like they are.