Learning Showcase!

This semester I have had the awesome opportunity of working one-on-one with a third grade student for my teaching class.  My student and I have met twice each week to work on his reading and writing skills in the context of learning about the deep sea.

Today and last Thursday we had our Learning Showcase, where all the third graders were able to display what they have learned with their mentors this semester!  A lot of other students designed and created posters, games, SmartBoard games, and sorting activities.  My student compiled all his work from the semester into a portfolio that he explained to his classmates during the showcase.  Here is some of his work:

Making Predictions
I compiled a list of deep sea creatures from the National Geographic website.  Then my student had to pick a creature, look at the name of the creature and the picture of the creature and predict why he thought that creature was named what it was named.

New vocabulary words!

Interacting with the Text
My student and I made a graphic organizer to display all the ways we could think of to interact with the text while reading.  Then we read A Director's Deep Dive, by Kelli Plasket of TIME for Kids.
While reading, the student was to underline anything in the text that reminded him of the graphic organizer.  He recorded this in his Interacting with the Text worksheet and made connections.

Summarizing
We also used A Director's Deep Dive to practice writing good summaries!  The goal was to read each paragraph and write a 1- or 2-sentence summary for that paragraph and then we would combine all the summaries at the end to create one big summary of the article.  We only got through two paragraphs but the student loved going back to check his work and proofread!

 We also used books and other resources to create our own book of deep sea creatures.  I created this page template which we each filled out.  My student and I would each separately choose a creature to research in one of the resources available.  We wrote the name of the creature at the top and the reference at the bottom.  Then we read the information from the text and listed 3-4 interesting facts about the creature.  Finally, we traded papers and "graded" each other's work based on grammar, spelling, punctuation, using our own words, and writing complete sentences that showed the most important facts from the text.  By the second day of doing this, we were able to write full paragraph summaries instead of just bullet points!

 Context Chart
The activities and lessons I did with my student this semester were guided by Improving Reading, by Jerry Johns and Susan Lenski.

This Context Chart is adapted from page 375 of their book and it was a great way to record my student's new vocabulary words.

 Vocabulary
This was a cloze vocabulary exercise where I photocopied a chapter in a book about megamouth sharks and whited out every 5th-7th word.  Then the student read the text aloud and filled in what he thought the blank word was.  He did great on this exercise!  Even though he got less than half of the words exactly correct, he was able to fill in words that made sense with the context and meaning!

So this semester we worked on literacy strategies like making predictions, interacting with the text, using a dictionary, and summarizing.

The teaching experiences I have had in this class have been wonderful opportunities for me to grow both as a teacher and as a learner; I am so grateful these opportunities have been available to me.  I learned a great deal about working one-on-one with a student and trying to meet his needs.  While all this was happening, I still had certain requirements I needed to meet, certain guidelines for teaching, in order to pass the class.  I feel that this part was the most genuine aspect of the experience because it reflected the reality of having to teach to meet many students’ needs while also meeting certain standards and other requirements in order to maintain a job as a teacher.

The most effective instructional strategy I learned was simply being excited about the lesson.  At first, the class was overwhelming because I was entirely unsure of what my role was and what my duties were.  I am afraid this may have come off in my tutoring sessions.  Yet soon I became more confident in what was expected of me.  Following this, I became more confident in my own instruction.  I knew that even if I was unable to address the course requirements, I was spending valuable teaching time with my student and that was the most important thing.  From here, I was able to develop more meaningful activities that responded to my student’s greatest needs, I was able to participate in the activities with him, and I was finally able to be genuinely excited about our lessons.  I could tell that my enthusiasm thus led to my student’s success in several academic areas.  I was able to show him that looking up words in dictionaries, discovering new information, and creating a book to track our knowledge is so exciting, and he responded positively to this.

In the future, I would like to improve my instruction by incorporating more modeling into my lessons.  I am currently working to improve my understanding of when is an appropriate time to model and when it is more beneficial to let students figure things out on their own.  I also plan to improve my instruction by setting clearer goals for my student and myself.  I would like to encourage my student to set clearer goals for himself.  I am becoming more and more goal-oriented myself, and it has proven to be successful for me.  I believe that having my student set a personal literacy goal is very meaningful because they are allowing themselves to achieve on a level that is not determined by someone else.  Furthermore, I look forward to improving my instruction in the future by studying other teachers and learning from their successes.  I plan to watch videos online of successful literacy instruction and read books (such as The Book Whisperer, by Donalyn Miller, which I loved) that can inspire me to try new instructional strategies.