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Craft Lessons pgs. 105-138

The closing pages of this book cover many questions and answers about the writing lessons.  I personally found these questions and answers to be very helpful.  This section gives suggestions on how to implement the mini lessons into your existing curriculum.  The closing pages also give a very useful list of childrens literature with which to aid in your writing lessons.  This book has given me a wealth of ideas and guidance. 

Craft Lessons Teaching Writing

Pages 14-43 delt specifically with writing in Kindergarten through 2nd grades.  The writing is presented to the students through mini-lessons the help the child to develope good reading and writing practices early on.  The lessons are laid out with the materials, and resource items that would be needed.  There are even sections on how to teach these lessons. The book states that students should be able to retell stories that they have written, and should use picture books to enhance their setting and character in each story.  Pesonally, teaching writing is an area that I feel that I can improve on as an educator and find the information in this book to be very useful. 

 

 

Craft Lessons: Teaching Writing K-8 pgs. 1-13

The book Craft Lessons begins by touching on the 3 steps to writing.  They are conceive, craft, correct.  The author talks about shortening the writing so that more attention can be focused on the writing itself.  It is important for writers, especially early writers to spend plenty of time practicing writing while receiving direction and guidance from their teachers.  I know in my own experience dealing with children with learning disabilities, writing often suffers due to deficits in the area of reading.  Their is a natural progression to a childs developement.  First they learn to read and then writing begins to develope. 

Teaching Student Centered Mathematics Grades K-3

Chapter 9 deals with early fraction concepts.  Fractions present a considerable challenge for elementary and even middle school students.  This chapter explores a complete conceptual development for beginning at grade 1 or 2, with most of the concepts for 3rd grade.  These concepts range from the understanding of the fractional part of the whole, models for fractions, fraction symbols, fraction number sense, and equivalent-fraction concepts. 

Chapter 10 begins to touch on algebraic reasoning.  Today we hear and read about algebraic reasoning and thinking.  This includes students uses algebra patterns, representations, and functions.  These concepts should begin in Kindergarten and continue through the years.  This chapter focuses on the content of algebra: pattern and regularity, representation and symbolism, and relationships and functions.

Chapter 11 talks about helping children use data.  Data in the form of graphs is important in the way we receive information in everyday life.  Students must begin be grasping how information is categorized and presented in several graphical forms.  The focus of our teaching should be for our students to be able to use information from graphs to answer questions. 

Chapter 12 deals with early experiences and with probability concepts.  Simply telling children how probability works is completely useless.  Instruction at this level should confront students with the outcomes of simple games and experiments with discussion of the reasons for these outcomes. 

 

 

 

Teaching Student Centered Mathematics K-3

Chapter 5 dealt with base-ten concepts and place value.  A students concept of place value developes over the K-6 span, grades K-3 being the most important years in this time.  In years K and 1 they count and recognize patterns to 100.  They also begin to place items in groups of ten as a unit.  Second graders begin to connect these patterns to our base ten number system, and third graders carry this over to 3 and 4 digits.  Children also start working to put numbers together and take them apart in many different ways to solve different types of addition and subtraction problems.  Children should be allowed to use their experiences with computation to grow understanding of place value as well as firm up computation.  These concepts should be taught together not separately. 

Chapter 6 touches on strategies for whole- number computation.  One way of working a math problem should not be the goal for mastery of computational skills.  Mastery of computational skills is very important, however growth of many skills that will serve in the real world should be the goal. 

Chapter 7 geometric concepts and thinking is the focus here.  Not all people think about geometric ideas in the same manner.  It is beneficial to think of objectives in terms of two separate but related terms:  spatial reasoning, or spatial sense.  Spatial sense is an idea or intuition about shapes and their relationships.  Spatial reasoning deals with the way children think and reason about a shape in space.  This chapter talks about how to teach children in both areas at all different levels. 

Chapter 8 discusses measurement.  Before anything is measured meaningfully, it is important to understand the attribute to be measured.  Children must tie measurement and estimation to a personal understanding with the unit being used to measure. 

 

 

Teaching Student Centered Mathematics Grades Chapters 1-4

Chapter 1 can be summerized by a single statement.  Students can develop understanding of math and math concepts themselves.  This, inturn, developes confidence by being engaged in doing the mathematics.  Teaching math effectively is to meet them on their level so new ideas are created so that students can make connections in mathematics.  This combines an understanding of how children learn, learning through problem solving, and assessing through daily basis. 

Chapter 2 deals with developing early number concepts and number sense.  Numbers are complex concept for childern to grasp.  A firm grasp of numbers and concepts covers many ideas and skills.  Children come to school with many concepts and ideas about numbers.  These ideas should be built on as children work to develope new ideas.  Developing these concepts takes time and experience and grows the further concepts to come in later school years. 

Chapter 3 discusses children connecting different meanings, interpretations, and relationships to the four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division so students can use these operations in real-world settings.  Operation sense is the focus of this chapter and how to develope this concept.  This is a firm grasp of the operations and the meanings they take on real life.

Chapter 4 touches on basic facts in addition (subtraction) and multiplication (division).  These are problems where both addends and both factors are less than 10.  Mastering a basic fact means that a child can give a response to a problem in about three seconds without resorting to counting or other less efficient means of calculation.  Children, all children, can develop these tools to help them master these basic facts.

 

 

 

Revisiting the Reading Workshop

 

Chapter 7:  Independent Reading, Confering, Responding, and Sharing

 

Our children need to practice everything that they have been taught.  Time to read is the best and only way to accomplish this.  Not only should they read, they should have discussions about what they have read.  In the reading workshops, the students, often gather together and have conversations about the books they are reading.  Not only is this time important to the students, it is also very beneficial to you as an educator.  It is time for you to talk to the children and discuss with them one on one about their reading.  It is opportunity for you to assess their reading needs.  Students can also respond in writing and share their experiences in reading.

 

Chapter 8:  Effective Assessment in the Reading Workshop

 

Assessment takes place while children are in the act of real reading.  An educator must use his or her eyes and ears at all times to gather information for assessment.  In many different situations, we should pick up on things like comprehension, engagement, level of accuracy, fluency, and a childs motivation.  A childs responses in a journal can give an idea of that students thinking processes and how well they can come up with responses.  These assessments should take place on a daily basis to examine and evaluate each students progress.  From these assessments a teacher can make decisions about instruction for a particular child.  Next step?  Start the whole thing over again.

Revisiting the Reading Workshop Chapters 4-6

Chapter 4 deals with how to phase in the reading workshops beginning in the month of September, and even goes into detailed schedules for different grade levels.  These schedules show what your reading workshop should look like at a particular point in the first month of school and how much time should be alotted for the activities.  This chapter also touches on twenty days of mini lessons and how those lessons should be structured.                                

Chapter 5 discusses mini lessons on reading strategies and skills.  Reading strategies ans skill instruction is very important in the lives of young readers.  This chapter gives a mini lesson outline for teachers to follow.  Eight reading strategy lesson plans were given these included:  looking ahead, fix-up strategies, making connections, questioning, visualizing, making inferences, making it your own, and looking back.  There were also examples of each of these given in the chapter.  Topics fro mini lessons were discussed to show the skills that a good reader should automatically use as they read.

Chapter 6 continued to deal with mini lessons but delt more with the elements of the literature and techniques that authors use to craft his or her work.  Topics for mini lessons on literary elements ( plot, characters, setting, and theme) were given for teachers to use in targeting elements for instruction in good literature.  Example mini lessons to isolate separate elements and identify them were given in the chapter.  Literary techniques are important in that they help students to recognize how authors create text, structure the story, and use words to create sensory images.   

 

Revisiting the Reading Workshop Chapters 1-3

I'm reading Revisiting the Reading Workshop, by Barbara Orehovec and Marybeth Alley.   The first chapter of this book really made a strong argument for reading workshops and how benefical they are for young readers.  It focused on the elements of the workshops and what each element should accomplish.  This chapter also compaired traditional practices for teaching reading and the reading workshop approach.  This was a eye opener for me as I thought back on my own experiences as a young reader.  Reading was a task and not something you did for enjoyment when I was taught in elementary school.  I personally can see the advantages to using the workshop approach.  

Chapter two touched on the ins-and-outs of organization of the reading workshop.  It discussed knowing your reasons and priorities for using a reading workshop.  It also went into detail about what a reading workshop classroom should look like and how it should operate. 

Chapter three began to deal with actually getting ready to implement the reading workshop and its structure.  It touched on planning things from mini-lessons to your expectations of what will happen in your reading workshops.