This book is different than the other Pirate books we’ve been reading but yet more intriguing for students because it is more of a fairytale type of book. When I started reading the book I didn’t know what to expect but the further I got into it the more I enjoyed it. I can see students loving this book because of the great details in it. While students read this they can visually place themselves in the book. Growing up I would love to read books that I could visualize in my head. Sometimes students find themselves bored with books which don’t have pictures in it but, when they read a book with such great descriptions who needs the pictures. I also see the character sketches being a great motivation and benefit for reading. It can motivate students to read to find further information in the text they have read about the character. Not only are they reading about the character but then they are describing the character in their words from their reading. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.
I found this article to be interesting and resourceful. While growing up I learned to speak English and Spanish simultaneously. The majority of the time in my household my family and I would use Spanish as our primary language. However, while at school I would speak mostly English. To my recollection I do not remember being taught strategies such as Morphology. I do recall making comparisons of English words to Spanish words and noticing there were many similarities among words. This article helps make a great point of this and I think it would work excellent with ESL students especially with the beginning English speakers. I think students are most likely trying to make these connections and relate the new information to something they know on their own anyway. Making these connections and relating words can in fact help to remember the language much better. There are several Spanish words that are spelled very similar to English words and mean the same. There is a relationship between comprehension and vocabulary and if students know and understand the vocabulary they will be able to comprehend their readings at a higher level. Vocabulary is very important and should be enforced throughout every grade level not only k-2. When students are at an understanding level of the vocabulary word, they then can begin decoding words and this becomes easier for them with the more practice and making the relationships among words.
Making a list of these even if you don’t know Spanish could be beneficial to use with your ESL students. These students are the ones that struggle the most in school because when they go home and they don’t have sufficient help from their parents. It may even be that their parents speak very little English or not at all. The only exposure these children receive could be in the classroom. I agree with the article when they said this strategy could be confusing for students who don’t speak Spanish therefore there is no need to emphasize this strategy with them. On the other hand, many schools are implementing learning different languages at a young age and making the same connections from English to Spanish could be helpful for Spanish teachers. I think Morphology can be a useful strategy to implement in the elementary classroom and students could help close the achievement gap. Using strategies such as these can help students achieve grade level expectations.
This article is useful in helping to integrate Social Studies while addressing reading levels. Social Studies can be overlooked and avoided due to testing in the schools. I think implementing leveled readers can increase reading abilities while teaching more of the curriculum. I had a lot of fun in Elementary school with social studies, but testing did not have the emphasis it does today which makes some teachers reluctant to teach it. Integrating subjects is a main goal to teaching so the students can have the advantage of receiving knowledge of every subject. Assigning different books to students that are at their appropriate levels is beneficial to modifying lessons and integrating subjects. Using various testing instruments such as the WRI is a very useful tool for teachers. These tools can help guide teachers to place students in ability groups and help while determining which leveled book is most appropriate for each child. The testing instruments can help cater to each child’s need and drive instruction.
I enjoyed writing the Ipoem and could see the students loving this kind of poetry. I think this poem is a great way to introduce certain poetry with the examples it provides and all students have to do is fill in their thoughts. I also think that this type of poem can be an icebreaker to students who find it difficult in constructing their poems. However, I believe that Ipoems is beneficial for in-class writing assignment at the beginning of the term when students are just getting acquainted with each other. It is very important for the teacher to introduce the Ipoem to the class by demonstrating an Ipoem before having the students do their own. The class can participate in this that way they gather the experience in what the poem is and how to construct it as well.
Our study of the effects of shared reading in a classroom has helped me to see the important role it can have on student learning. I thought about how important it is for students to comprehend the text they are reading or that’s being read to them. I enjoyed reading this article because it helped me have a more in depth knowledge and understanding of the structure of shared reading. It was very interesting reading the different opinions and strategies that teachers have implemented with shared reading. While doing the Not-So-Jolly Roger activities I noticed that within each website there was similar information about Blackbeard but yet some that varied as well. Some websites were more in depth and others were more focused and straight to the point. This is a great example to implement and model for students to demonstrate the importance of having more than one resource while researching information. It also works to show how you can find more information within each resource. While doing this and students find words they don’t understand having the word parts structure is a great strategy. I remember when I was in elementary school I would remember words by certain parts of it like the article used “carnivore” carne is mean in Spanish. I would do this and remember a lot of words that would help me throughout school. Making these real life connections helped enable me to retain information. I enjoyed doing the activities and reading the article it definitely helped show me the importance of implementing shared reading to improve student skills.
While reading the Pirate Unit study I thought how fun it would be to be the student in that class doing this unit. I think it would be sometimes hard to introduce certain things to students especially something that has so much background to it like Pirates. There is so much to learn about Pirates and understand them as well. However, using all the tools in the lesson and engaging students with their own “Pirate Notebook” I feel that they not only would love this but learn a lot from it. I hope to engage my students with every book we read and activity and also that they gain a lot of knowledge from it. I have realized throughout time that the more interesting something is the more students are going to stay motivated for a longer period of time. It would be great for the students to walk into the classroom and not be able to wait for their next activity.
While reading Swashbuckling Adventures on the High Seas I liked the idea of the Double-Entry Diaries. I feel like students can benefit a lot from this especially having the teacher model it at first. Some quotes or even definitions are hard to make sense of and by doing this students can find ways to relate to it and make a definition which they understand. I think that this is a great tool for studying so students are studying information that they understand and not just reading something they don’t understand. Sharing this information with other students in the class is also so beneficial because they can learn it better. When I was in elementary school I sometimes learned more by writing my information down and sharing it with others as oppose to reading it straight from a book. I also think that the Data Retrieval Chart is another tool that is engaging for students to use while researching. When I would hear the word research in elementary school I would automatically assume copying information down from the encyclopedia to summarize and it wasn’t fun. However, having students use fun tools is a great start. The Double Entry Diary is another great tool to use for vocabulary and studying as well. I feel that students will be very engaged in the lesson while using these tools.Swa
It was interesting to read and compare the similarities and differences found in each poetry book. I liked how they all contained examples of various types of poetry. I enjoyed seeing how “Jack” in Love that Dog grew as a writer from the beginning of his poetry until the end. I hope to ensure that my future students gain knowledge of strategies to comprehend and enjoy poetry. There are various ways to make writing and reading poetry interesting and engaging for students to learn. I believe the poetry writing should be intriguing and stimulating for students as opposed to how I learned poems with memorizing and other tiresome methods. Poetry became stressful and frustrating for me to read or compose. I don’t recall having the opportunity to read engaging poetry books such as these books. They were entertaining and children can relate to them. I truly believe that reading poetry to children daily would be a great enforcement for students to realize what poetry is and how they can begin to write and comprehend it. Seeing how “Jack” loved the poem “Love that Boy” because he could relate to it was a great way to show students that poetry can be something they can connect with. I have enjoyed reading these books and plan to implement them in my future classroom.
My laptop is meaningful to me because when I went to look for one to purchase my grandma decided she wanted to buy it for me. My grandparents live in Miami, Florida and I don’t get to see them as often as I would like to. I miss them deeply and it means a lot to me that she bought me the lap top I use daily. Without my laptop I wouldn’t know how to live my everyday life.
Every since I was born my parents gave me a little pillow to sleep with. As I grew older I continued to sleep with my pillow and it naturally became a favorite item in my life. When we would go on vacation it would always be the first thing I would pack and when I would spend the night at my grandparent’s house they had one there for me. Till this day I sleep with a little pillow and can’t sleep comfortably without it.
I learned various strategies for teaching writing while reading the rest of this chapter. I plan to implement the methods to ensure my future students have different strategies to construct their own independent writing. I learned it isn’t an easy task to brainstorm and write without a given topic. I now understand the difficulty some students may have while the task is easy for others. Considering that I am planning to implement writing notebooks in my future classroom, it is beneficial to know how to launch the journal. I realize that easy strategies would be to help students construct list about what they like, dislike, 10 favorite things that has happened to them and 10 bad things as well. This helps guide students in creating their own list and help start struggling students. I feel students will have difficulties finding a topic at some point especially when they are to write every day. Insuring students this notebook can be scribbled on and not to erase anything on it is very important so that students loose the fear of being wrong. This can take some time especially if you have perfectionist in the class. I believe modeling that you do is a good example. I think for students who absolutely don’t have anything to write about it would be a good idea if they draw something they like and then briefly describe what they drew. This can eventually lead to writing for students. I love the idea of the students keeping a writers notebook because they not only get to express their feelings, but they can look back and reread the notebook and see their progress throughout the school year which is always a great thing to see.
