Teaching Portfolio
Literacy
This quarter, we worked on reading and understanding fiction texts. Students learned about connecting to and understanding characters through their dialogue, actions, and traits. We analyzed texts for sensory language, plot sequence, and theme. Students applied their learning to plan, draft, and edit creative writing projects.
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Read Alouds
The first part of our Language Arts block is used for our class read aloud. Read alouds offer students the opportunity to come together and spend time in our virtual classroom. After morning meeting is over, we pick up the pace and move as quickly as we can, without pushing our students too hard. Our class read aloud, however, slows us down, relaxes us, and reminds our students of what it feels like to spend time in a classroom together.
In addition to bringing our students closer together, I use read alouds to preview information such as themes, text structures, grammar, and dialogue. Furthermore, I use it to model effective reading and expose students to texts they may not yet be able to decode for themselves. This also improves vocabulary acquisition, especially for ELLs.
Set the Scene
READING AND WRITING ACTIVITY
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In this recording, a student reads her work out loud as part of the editing and revising stage of the writing process. Not only does this activity allow students to practice reading with prosody, it helps them recognize the revisions that need to be made. More specifically, this exercise guides students’ attention to parts of their writing they need to focus on clarifying for the reader. By periodically reading her writing out loud, this student independently identified parts of her story that needed to be revised. In turn, this instilled a sense of pride and control over her work, further encouraging this student to take ownership of her learning.
Oftentimes, students have an idea of what and how they want to communicate to the reader, however, they struggle to make the actionable changes that would bring their vision of their writing to life. This skill develops over time and with practice, but I believe that having children read their writing out loud, is a particularly helpful exercise which clearly reveals mistakes that need to be corrected.
In being attentive and intentionally providing an array of strategies to my students, I feel that my students see me as a source of support in the classroom. This inspires a willingness to take risks academically and emotionally as students push themselves to learn, share ideas, and participate in class activities.
Reading Partners
With a transition to distance learning, my mentor teacher and I were faced with a set of new and unique challenges. Perhaps one of the most crucial learning tools that was lost was daily peer to peer interactions. being removed from daily classroom activities, such as reading groups, pair share, and turn and talk activities, our students became isolated learners. In this setting, I initially found that it was especially tricky to consistently keep our students engaged. As my mentor teacher and I strived to create lively, engaging, and productive online lessons, we were challenged with effectively commanding our students’ attention and anchoring learning to their lives in meaningful ways.Â
With this in mind, I designed a lesson which utilized breakout rooms and facilitated peer to peer interactions as students read passages and discussed character traits. In this video, I am working with a student who needed a partner. Â
This lesson is a good example of maximizing student interest and engagement using effective instructional learning formats. By communicating clear learning objectives and providing a variety of interesting and interactive materials, I was able to present a focused, well planned lesson which captured students’ attention and promoted inquiry. I was able to encourage participation by asking questions that invited my partner to express his thoughts and explain his thinking using specific evidence from the text to support his answers. This lesson encouraged cooperation and provided our students with the opportunity to collaborate.
Our students read at a variety of different levels, therefore, students were matched using the paired reading strategy. This research based strategy supports peer-assisted learning and cooperation through reading, listening, and responding to other readers. In order to enhance literacy skills and improve student fluency, more emerging readers were paired with higher level readers. Specifically, lower-level readers benefit from this strategy by listening to the higher-level reader. I learned how to examine my students’ reading levels and implement this strategy to best support and accommodate my students’ needs. I look forward to using paired reading in the future as it allows the teacher to observe readers in the classroom and also work with those who may need more assistance.