Kristin Tonkovich Reflection - 4th Grade - Summarizing

Teaching this two-week unit in Language Arts was an extremely valuable experience for me as I learn about myself as an educator. As I reflect on my teaching, I feel that from this unit alone I learned a lot about teaching strategies, curriculum planning, and the best practices to aide in student learning. There were many challenges throughout the unit, but overall, I am satisfied with the way I carried the unit out the three plans I turned in, and with the students’ learning. I chose to reflect on the unit as a whole, as well as the three lessons that I turned in. Those three lessons included a review of the five strategies taught for summary writing and independent practice with the strategies while reading, collaborating as a whole class to write a summary, and more practice writing a summary in a small group.

The unit I taught to my 4^th grade class was titled “Writing in Response to Reading: Summaries”, which was taught during the Reader’s Workshop period. Students learned a great deal from this unit, as is evident from the improvement seen from their pre-assessment surveys compared to their summative assessment written summaries. The goals of this unit were for students to learn about various strategies that can be used to write summaries of fiction texts, understand the story elements that must be present in an effective summary, and for the students to be able to write their own, complete summary at the end of the unit. I feel that all students learned about the story elements that are important to a summary such as characters, setting, problem and solution, and main events. Students also learned how to use several summary writing strategies, and were able to select a strategy that they felt most comfortable with in order to write a summary independently.

The aspect of summary writing that I saw the most improvement on across the board was the ability to select only the important, or main, events of a text to include in the summary. I observed that with each day’s activity, students were including less and less detail in their summaries, and were able to leave out irrelevant information to create a more effective summary. Students also improved on writing the summary in their own words, rather than giving a word-for-word retell of the events. On the pre-assessment surveys and in the early summary writing activities, I noticed that students would write the summary exactly as it was written in the text, use dialogue for characters, and the summary would be written like narrative, rather than a factual account of the events. However, there was significant improvement in this area with the students’ final summaries. Only one student did a word-for-word retell that as written like a narrative, and none of the students used character dialogue. Finally, I was pleased to see that students mastered a few smaller skills that helped make their summaries be more sophisticated. They included some important information about characters when introducing them in the summary, rather than only listing the main characters’ names. A majority of them were able to write in chronological order in every summary, and they included the problems and solutions every time.

While most students’ summary writing improved, I noticed that some students still struggled to master the objectives of my lessons. The two ESL students were asked to complete varied assignments and were assessed differently. However, I feel that one of my weaknesses of this unit was catering to the needs of these students. I spoke with them each day to assess their understanding and give further explanations and guidance in a one-on-one setting, instead of solely relying on them to ask questions or reading their written work, but I wasn’t able to spend as much time as I would have liked with them. From my conversations with them, and the guided writing I completed with them, I am confident that they gained some knowledge of what a summary is, but they still struggled to verbally summarize texts using each of the elements highlighted in the lessons.

Aside from analyzing students’ work in terms of meeting the objectives I outlined, I was also able to learn about my students’ literacy practices through the conferences, and small group conversations that I had with the students while they worked. It was evident that the most difficult part of writing summaries for the students in my class was selecting appropriate information to include in the summary, specifically choosing the main events without discussion details. While this information informed my instruction for summary writing, it also gave me some insight into the students’ comprehension abilities. I began to understand what students focus on while reading, and types of information they believe to be most important in a text. I found that students weren’t using the reading strategy of noting important parts. Rather, when they retell information from a text, they were focusing on the small details to show they remember several different, albeit less significant, parts of the text. I addressed this concern, and the connection of summary writing with comprehension strategies in several mini-lessons throughout the unit.

The students also demonstrated a strong metacognitive awareness as they were able to choose strategies and summary writing styles that worked best for them. I was impressed with their motivation and the quality of work that was done when the students were given the opportunity to choose their own approach to completing the assignment in week two. It was evident that students really were choosing the summary strategy that made the most sense to them, or one that really helped them do their best work, because I saw students, even those that struggled on previous days, turning in work that was well-thought out and well written. Giving the students choice proved to be beneficial for the students, as they got more practice with a strategy that they liked. Students were even able to talk about why they chose a specific strategy, and why it helped them write a good summary, giving me evidence that they were becoming metacognitively aware of their thinking while writing summaries.

If I were to teach this same unit again, I would do a number of things differently. I would most likely spread this unit out over a longer period of time, and I will definitely be returning to summary writing and the skills we worked on throughout the rest of the year. I would also not plan to cover summary writing of both fiction and non-fiction texts in the same unit, which I actually changed from my original unit plan. Since these two types of summary writing are so different and require different strategies and skills, it made more sense to split up those lessons. I will be teaching non-fiction summary writing later on this year. Another thing that I did change from my original unit plan was assessing the student’s summary writing by giving them an unfamiliar text on the day of the final evaluation. However, I realized as I was teaching the unit that that was an unfair challenge. In my objectives I wanted students to use planning and strategies to formulate a well-written strategy, but in the final assessment I wouldn’t be providing them with enough time to plan and use those strategies if I gave them a text they hadn’t seen before. I decided to give them a text a few days prior to the final assessment, and asked them to read it, take notes, and think about the story elements they would include in a summary of that text. I feel that this is a more accurate assessment of all of the objectives, and is a more realistic task for the application of summary writing as it is used in the real world.

I would explicitly teach talk with the students and teach them about why you write a summary, and why summarizing is an important comprehension skill that will be used for the rest of their lives. This would, hopefully, make the tasks in this unit more meaningful for the students. Finally, one last thing I would change if I were to teach this lesson again would be to teach this unit as a both a reading and a writing unit, so that the students do not confuse their assignments in the Writer’s Workshop with the skills used in summary writing and vice-versa. This was an issue for me because the students were working on narrative writing in Writer’s Workshop, and I saw some confusion and mixing of those two very different skills in the students’ writing.

Jennifer Farrell - Reflection - Text to Self Connections 1st grade

Jennifer Farrell

Unit Reflection

· What did students learn and which students struggled with the lesson?

From the lesson I think most of my students really learned how to relate to a text personally (text to self). Making connections is something that we have been working on with many books throughout the year and I can see that they are understanding how to do this. Most are listening well and are able to answer questions about the text also (comprehension). The students who struggled with this lesson are the ones who are not paying attention and off track. When they are off track that is when I get students raising their hands to say something like “Steven has a rubber band in his hand” when I asked how they think the character is feeling. What I see happening for some students like this is they are having a hard time finding the balance between “turning and talking” to their partners and coming back to share and have the group discussion part. Bu tI would say the majority are understanding how to have a conversation with their partner and then use what they are talking about to have a class discussion.

· What are alternate reads (interpretations) of your students’ performance or products?

I’m noticing that there seem to be some who are very interested and like hearing and talking about the stories and others who really like to use the time to talk about other possibly more fun (to them) topics. A way that I have since been trying to monitor this problem is to move around the classroom to listen in on conversations and ask as well, trying to make sure they are on the right track.

· What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?

My students always amaze me with how much they can do. They have so many ways to connect to the story, beyond just comparing to a situation that is basically the same. Feeling worried before coming to school, worried about a friend who lives in China now, etc. not just being worried about going to a friends sleep over (directly tied to the book). I think the fact that we are tying the story to their feeling and their experiences is what makes it work for them, but I am truly impressed by my students often.

· When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?

We have continued to make text to self connections every week whether it is during making meaning or shared reading. The expectations of being a good listener (and what the looks like) and having their attention on the task at hand is also always expected and practiced. With the making meaning they add on more and more group discussion type objectives as well such as speaking with an appropriate level voice for talking to you r partner and talking to the class, how do you ask someone politely to speak up or repeat what they said, etc.

· If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

If I were to do this again I would be sure to ask more “thick questions.” I got a lot of great answers but I could have helped them to really think about how they came up with the answer they did how it relates to the characters feelings or the situation in the book so that they think about their thinking and the rest of the class can try to understand their thinking as well. Asking these types of questions is something that I am really working on now to make our discussions even deeper and make my students become even better thinkers.

Liz Adams- 5th Grade Writing Unit

During my literacy unit, I began our unit on persuasive writing. This is about a month long unit, so I was only able to do about half of the unit during those two weeks. During those two weeks, we went over a lot of the writing process and how to begin to think about persuading and convincing. After teaching the unit, I realize that this is one of the most important parts of the entire unit. We began our unit by defining a few things, such as “persuade” and “thesis statement”. This was important so that we could use those terms during the unit as we constructed our essays. Next, we talked about things we have persuaded people to do. The class did a couple of quick writes and also brainstorming sessions to think about those ideas. The one thing that many students had trouble with is the idea of a thesis statement. We went over this several times in class, but I think they were confusing their statement to grab their reader at the beginning of their essay, with their actual thesis statement. We had to spend an extra day discussing this.

In thinking about the students having difficulty with the thesis statements and such, I would probably need to be even more explicit with my instruction. I have realized that you must give every detail, or there will be a ton of questions. Even when I think I have given too much detail, I still have questions. Another thing I would need to focus on are transitions. I think we needed to spend even more time on small details of the essay, such as this. Many of the students were able to develop their ideas well within a paragraph, but had a lot of trouble with how to start those paragraphs and how to end them.

During the unit, I used a couple student examples to help guide the students. We went through the examples and picked them apart. We talked about where their thesis statements were, how many opinions did they use versus how many facts, and whether or not they were able to persuade us through their use of those opinions and facts. If I needed to help certain students, I would probably use other student examples with those students individually. From our discussions, I could tell that the students were finding the examples useful and were taking a lot of notes along with me. I also have extra writing organizers I can use with a student who needs that extra assistance. This just allows them to think about how they need to lay out their ideas before creating any kind of rough draft. I noticed that this gave the students much more confidence while starting their rough drafts. They went into it knowing where ideas would go, and how they might develop those ideas.

Kindergarten Comprehension

        My unit was built on comprehension for a kindergarten classroom.  At the beginning of each language arts time I would show the children a book and we would first discuss concepts of print.  Through assessments it was found many children in my classroom had very little understanding in this area.  We would discuss the definition of author, illustrator, title, cover, spine, back of the book and text.  I found that this often led into my discussion of comprehension by starting with the cover.  We would focus on what was shown on the cover, what we thought the illustrator was trying to tell the reader.  By stating what they saw this then led into whether or not they thought this story was going to be make-believe or real.

       Without even planning on going so in depth on illustrations it quickly became one of the main focuses of my unit.  I found that children would ask me questions about the illustrations wondering why the book was the way it was.  For example, the story, Animal Mother's, has an illustration of a mother fox and baby on the cover, yet in the story it never mentions the fox.  When I concluded the story multiple children immediately asked where the fox was or began telling me that I skipped the page about the fox.  I was caught off guard and wondered if I did miss this page...so we did a picture walk through of the story leading to the answer that their was no fox in the story, but we could draw a conclusion of the fox mother based on the illustration.  We knew from our picture walk that the illustrations in the story showed how mother animals cared for their babies.  At this time I was excited to see that the children were really engaged in the details of the illustration to draw meaning from the text.  It also helped me to understand that informal assessment really does work when listening to conversations during pair-share as well as by making sure there is time for children to answer and ask questions.

       During my unit I also focused on beginning letter sounds to make sure children are continually learning their phonemic sounds.  On these days we would do a worksheet that had different pictures on it and would look for words that began with a specific letter.  I found that stating the letter and letter sound aloud then stating what the picture was worked, but it was helpful to also state the letter sound again after the picture.  For example, m, /m/, cat, /m/.  For the first worksheet I was having children state yes or no aloud, but then found not everyone was participating because the more advanced children were completing the worksheet instead.  Therefore I found that by having the children place their hands on their head if it was the right letter or hands on their table if it was incorrect.  I found that this was also a great informal assessment.

        Throughout my unit I found different ways to do informal assessments throughout the day.  I learned that since we complete all of our task together over the elmo and then students complete it, it wasn't really assessing their skills.  It was assess if they could copy work basically.  I did however notice that children who were given the work to take home because of absences filled out worksheets very clear (help at home) or majority did not turn them in at all.  I have since been having absent children do their work during center time or other opportunities throughout the day since it was not being turned in when sent home.

Sarah Rybicki Visualization Unit

My unit was built around my students using visualization as a reading strategy to better comprehend the text at hand. Overall, I absolutely loved my unit and so did my students from what I could tell. We all really love making meaning, and that’s what my first extended lesson touched on. We looked at paperboy and pictured a little boys paperboy route. We learned how to start to listen to the authors word choice and text, and took those words to help us create these mental images. Some of my students, drew pictures of what they visualized that were pretty similar to what the illustrator drew them as. They drew their favorite part and took great pride in their artwork and their thinking. However the kids who struggled to come up with a drawing, were my students who had a hard time picking out a word that helped them visualize what was occurring in the text. I have each students write down words that helped them visualize the text the second time I read it to them, and some kids had a hard time coming up specific words or phrases. Furthermore, they had a hard time explain what they were picturing. I adjusted my teaching for them and started to explain and model my own thinking regarding what I visualized, based off of my background knowledge, and the images the author’s text created. This definitely seemed to help, even my students who displayed all clues of comprehension. It really highlighted how I look my past experiences AND the text to help me, which seemed to help everyone with visualizing while examining the word choice used.

A couple of lessons later, I began my “Voices in the Park” lessons I formulated. We looked at the text (I typed up each voice for every student to have their own copy), uncovering a voice a day at a time. The students were under the impression that they were helping me figure out what the pictures once displayed, since my little sister cut out all of them! My favorite book was ruined and I wanted them to use their handy dandy skill, visualization, to help me repair the damage. I explained that there are four voices in the book, and I want them to look at, listen, and examine the text, to try to discover what the character looks like and how each character relates to each other. After every voice we filled out a chart and we drew how we pictured this character.

At first, I was extremely worried. The students weren’t responded to my preplanned questions and they couldn’t explain what they pictured, they probably didn’t even know what to picture at first. However, once I modeled what the words caused me to think, and what they text reminded me of from my prior knowledge, they caught on. They learned how to take a phrase like “I was planning what we were going to have for dinner that night”, and think, “this must be an adult, and it might even be a mother, because I know my parents provide dinner for me.” By the fourth voice, my students really got the hang of this strategy. The connections my students made by just listening to the text, and the pictured they produced after our classroom discussions and investigations, were astounding. We all were so excited, and so proud of each other. We had so much fun. These pictures were a fantastic way of assessing their progress with this strategy, and we learned that not only can we all create mental images to help us understand text, we can talk about these pictures, we can write about these mental images, and we all have unique ways of seeing things, because we have all experienced completely different lives!

The students who struggled were my students at really low reading levels, so I pulled them up to sit with me as I helped them with their highlighting, filling out their chart and really guided them through the whole project by explaining how I thought.

An alternate reason for my students performance could be that they have always been able to easily visualize. It comes easier to some, especially more than others, and we had focused on visualizing for two weeks. Furthermore, they could have already read the books before, which I know was the case for the paperboy. For voices in the park, my lower students could have been too dependant on my thinking and my stronger students thinking.

I learned that my students, LOVE being detectives. Exploration was huge with them, once they made connections, especially without my assistance, they were smiling form ear to ear because they were so proud. I also learned that having them sit at their seats was also beneficial. My “Voices” lesson, helped me realize this, and I plan to make my lessons with a variety of different spot to listen and perform the task at hand. Normally we also go to the back rug for literacy and always to writing and drawing at our desks. But when I allowed my students to write at the rug with clipboards, I allowed them to listen to read alouds at their desks, and I allowed them to follow along as I provided individual copies for each student to follow along. I notice this variety ultimately resulted in better behavior and an over all improvement in everyone’s participation. This makes sense because as a learner, I also like variety, as my attention span also struggles with repetition.

I plan to integrate visualization with our next unit, making inferences, with my students who need additional support. I also plan to have these students draw pictures of what they read frequently, which will be easy for me to do because this concept is always presented in their monthly book logs. I also plan to consistently model the way I visualize, and why certain words make me think and picture certain things.

If I were to teach these lessons again, I would definitely not consistently do the same thing for each voice. Even though my students were able to perform our task at hand without my guidance the entire time, I could tell we were less enthusiastic by the last day. I could do this by choosing different approaches to examining the text. Instead of always making it a whole class experience, I would implement book club methods, or even have them investigate the last voice on their own and then come back as a whole group. I would definitely not have my students who struggled with these lessons do this, but my higher students could work independently while we had a group meeting on the rug with my other students. I would also have higher students work with lower students, and have more preplanned partner shares. I normally let my students pick their own partners, but I think preplanned partners would benefit my students, as I know now who works best with who, behavior wise and performance wise.

5th Grade (Hayley Johnson)

The three lessons that I turned in were based on three different days from a genre unit. This genre unit revolved around the book Guests by Michael Dorris, and covered a variety of different topics including; genres, reading strategies, vocabulary, retelling, etc. The three days that I chose to turn in mainly focused on similes/metaphors, personification, and comparing character traits. I think that overall my students were able to recognize and produce their own similes and metaphors, but some simply failed to follow the directions to the postcard that they had to create that included sim/met. Where some of my students did struggle a bit more, was recognizing and pulling out personification from the text that they were reading. Many of them were pulling out metaphors and similes rather than personification, even though we clarified the difference before sending them off to complete the activity. This is not the first time that they have been introduced to personification, but I think that since the two lessons were taught side by side, it may have made things more difficult to separate the differences. Overall though, there weren’t any students who got all of their examples wrong, therefore I feel that they are at least beginning to grasp the concept. The assignment also called for them to create two examples of personification on their own, and some students struggled with this as well. Since I feel as though many of the students are just falling short of complete understanding, I plan to just keep bringing it up throughout other lessons and have students recognize what a particular piece of text is a simile, metaphor, or personification, and then have them tell me how they know this; along with this require the use of these in various writing pieces.

If I were to teach the simile and metaphor lesson again, I would have actual postcards that I have received in order to show them the structure of how a postcard is put together, along with some of the types of things that are said in a postcard. I would also have created a postcard based on their requirements as an example of what is expected, in order for them to have yet another visual. Something that I would have changed in the personification lesson would have been more of an emphasis on the differences between that and similes/metaphors. I think that I might have created a checklist of questions to ask themselves before writing down what they thought was an example of personification.

The third lesson was less related to the previous two, and asked students to pay attention to the differences between the two main characters in the story. Before we read the chapter from the text for that day, I had prompted students to start listening for the traits each character had, and the differences/similarities between them. Students used a Venn Diagram to organize what they were able to come up with, and were assigned one of the three sections to focus on; we came together at the end to fill in the rest of it as a class. Many of the things that the students came up with were very “shallow”; for example clothes, boy/girl, different tribes etc. Though some of these were relevant, many of them struggled to give me what was different about these traits and why they were important. I had to do a lot of probing and questioning to get some of the answers that I was expecting from them, and yet still some of them had a difficult time pulling this information from the text. This is something that they struggle with as a class overall. They are able to pull the surface details to support their ideas, but really have a hard time delving deeper into the text to find the real meaning/idea/reason.

I think that next time I might have them complete as much of the entire Venn Diagram rather than separating it by groups to focus on one area. Some of them neglected to think whether or not the traits that they were listed applied to only that character or both. As far as addressing the fact that they weren’t able to dig deeper into the text, I think that this is something that needs to be addressed

Nonfiction Venn Diagram Reflection

For my unit plan I planned and taught the end lessons for a visualization unit and then began the non-fiction unit. As I am still teaching my Non-fiction unit I will reflect on it so that I can now make any changes I feel are necessary.

The lesson I am going to focus on for this review will be my nonfiction third day lesson using Venn diagrams to explore similarities and differences between fiction and nonfiction. Upon looking at students work from that day all my students who were in the class for the lesson could identify their non-fiction book and their fiction book and fill in at least one similarity and one difference for each genre. The majority of my students identified at least five or more similarities and or differences. Therefore the objective of the day was met considering my students hard work on the Venn diagrams.

However, as always, lessons can be improved and upon reflecting on this lesson I built on this lesson the next day. I found that students identified important text features of non-fiction books, which they included in their Venn diagrams but that some students thought that all nonfiction books had certain text features such as photography. To address this my following lesson included adding sometimes to my example Venn diagram during my mini lesson. Further I showed some nonfiction books without photography to help students visualize what I was talking about.

Further, I am now realizing I am not hanging some of my anchor charts up after working on them with students. Therefore I will make sure to hang these up to help students remember what we have learned about.

Only a few students struggled during this lesson but the main reason for this is that they were pulled out during my lesson for a variety of reasons. When these students came back they had missed the mini lesson and as a result struggled. I did briefly describe what we were doing when they came back, but I could not explain the whole lesson as I had to conference with students.

When conferencing with students I was amazed at the progress they have made. Many of my students came in below grade level for reading. Although many are still not at grade level they are capable of reading books I thought would be too hard for them. I had gone to the library to find enough nonfiction books at my students independent reading level for my class. When at the library I was unsure if I would have enough books for my students who struggle with reading. I found that I had underestimated my students. To address this I have returned many of my books to the library and now have a new bunch of books at higher levels.

Lastly I have found that including two questions at the bottom of my students writing paper drastically increases their work effort. In a lesson I taught after this at the bottom of their papers I wrote two questions. One question was, did you work hard on this and the other was did you challenge yourself? Students then had to place a check mark in a yes or no slot. It was interesting when observing my students work on this writing. Many students got to the bottom of the paper, where they had to check off those two answers based on their own thinking and looked directly at me smiled and went back to their work and added more. After adding some additional information they checked off yes for both questions and brought their paper over to me saying, “Ms. Flanagan look at what I wrote, can I read it to you? I worked really hard on it, I challenged myself!” It is amazing how much of a difference those two questions made, and it is apparent in their writing for that particular day. Therefore, after seeing the impact these questions had I would have included them on the Venn diagram writing for my lesson.