15 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2016
    1. Third graders should begin to use the structure of words (common roots, prefixes, and suffixes) and context clues to determine the meaning of unknown words.

      Would this also be when they learn dictionary skills? I feel like that is something that is not being taught or used as widely in schools any more, but is a good resource for students to understand and know how to use

    2. Third grade students learn to write in cursive.

      Is this still accurate? I learned to write in cursive when i was in 3rd grade, but I think that now it has moved more towards keyboarding and computer knowledge

    3. Building automatic word recognition, spelling skills, and reading fluency

      lots of repetition with sight words and common words in reading and spelling throughout the day helps this processing

    4. Be sure to check out student work samples like those supplied by the Board of Education. It’s vitally important to gauge your expectations in terms of concrete examples. You will be better equipped to plan lessons, set the tone in the classroom, and teach toward big goals. I have found that my class will only perform as well as I expect it to. My first year, I had little idea what Kindergartners should know, and was happy to see any progress. The second year, I expected a little bit more – and my kids’ performance reflected that. Now, my children are reading on a first grade level in January.

      I really like the suggestion of looking at student work from other students who are in the same district to know where more seasoned teachers have set their expectations for students so that the students strive to achieve higher goals & not just stopping where the standard is set

    5. Having the big picture is hugely important because the student's reading does not stop when the grade level ends, it continues on and to know what the students will be learning more forward gives the teacher the ability to probe new skills with them towards their next goals and prime the children for later grades

  2. Jan 2016
    1. We have to isolate and teach concepts that we may not remember learning ourselves, such as: reading from left to right, using context clues to learn new vocabulary, or writing a topic sentence.

      Exactly what I was saying earlier about not remembering learning about how to properly open a book or put a book away on a shelf

    2. Writing Workshops (described in chapter seven) are, for example, a staple of the elementary classroom.

      I don't remember this from when I was in elementary school but loved all of the options for the students in the classrooms I observed in during their writing workshop time

    3. Finally, research has shown that students benefit tremendously from explicit instruction in reading comprehension strategies (such as predicting, making connections, and asking questions).

      I think that concept imagery should also be explicitly taught in schools as it would help those students who have a hard time making predictions or answering questions that require higher order thinking skills and make their responses to these that much stronger.

    4. earn strategies for independently conquering new vocabulary, including the use of context clues, word analysis, dictionaries, and other people.

      Can a student gain clues from the context if they do not have skills to develop concept imagery for the context? I feel like the students who have a hard time developing those movies in their minds when reading would have a harder time picking up new vocabulary on their own.

    5. Research has shown that students who can read with accuracy and fluency are better able to comprehend the material because they are spending the majority of their time thinking about the text and not deciphering the words.

      Makes a lot of sense! If a student is putting all of their effort into decoding each word, they are not going to be able to see the big picture of the whole sentence.

    6. The content of word analysis lessons varies significantly between grade levels. First grade students will learn compounds, simple contractions, and some word endings. Second grade students will expand on these skills and learn some simple prefixes and suffixes as well. Our second graders will learn syllable types in their phonics lessons and can combine the use of syllable types and word analysis to decode longer words. Third graders will learn to use meaningful word parts not only for the purpose of decoding, but increasingly, to learn word meanings. Fourth and fifth graders will use Greek and Latin roots to decode words and learn their meanings. Though

      Question answered! I like how they really show the flow of the order and rough timing of when students are learning letter combos, phonics, and different parts of muti-syllable words.

    7. n first grade, instruction typically begins with two or three weeks reviewing the alphabet letters and the simplest sound-symbol correspondences. As the year continues, students learn the remainder of the sounds and the different letters that represent them.

      I see that in a couple sentences we read about students learning multi-syllable decoding, and here we are reading about when they learn sound/symbol associations, I'm interested in when along this way they learn common, or "unfair" letter combinations (i.e. ou, ow, au, aw)

    8. Typically, Kindergarteners learn the alphabet letters and shapes (both capital and lowercase) in their alphabet order. Then, they learn the sounds of the alphabet letters, beginning with those that will give them the earliest access to print and are more easily pronounced.

      Why do we teach children the letter names and how to write them before they are taught the letter sound? It seems to me that all three could be taught at once, although I could see that being an overwhelming amount of information for a student. I also wondered reading this why students learn letter names and shapes in alphabetical order while when they are taught letter sounds, they are taught in order of frequency

    9. Book and Print Awareness through constant, explicit modeling. When they hold up a Big Book that the class is reading, they “think aloud” about how to hold the book, where to start reading, and in what direction. While a teacher is writing the morning news on the board for his first graders, he might ask the students, “Should I start at the top of the board or the bottom?”

      Never thought about how I had learned how to do all of these things or how I would teach those steps of learning to read to a student

    10. I've never thought of fluency as occurring in line with comprehension so much as just from repetition of decoding and increase of sight words in a student's vocabulary - but, especially when looking at the phrasing of one's reading it makes sense that fluency and comprehension are connected, if a student does not understand what is going on in the story it makes it difficult to be able to predict how the phrasing should sound