Literacy Journal - Assessment

I think that in literacy, assessment depends obviously on the grade level your assessing.  I believe firmly that grammatical correctness should never stand in the way of the creative process of getting things down on paper.  I know I struggle until all of a sudden I get a spurt of creativeness,  and totally forget about the mechanical elements in favor of getting something down.  The other stuff being addressed sometime later.  I know its important for readability, and certainly a lot easier to teach than creativity.  Here you need to look at the student, and where they are at in their writing maturity.  Knowing where in the developmental level they are can direct you to what you should be assessing.  The goal, like a just right book, is to push the bar a little higher, and thus encourage the student to strive higher.  I think back to my first days in a kindergarten class with a room full of very early writers, and how the teacher would beam with encouragement to just get letters on a piece of paper. Even funnier was the students helping her spell out on the active-board exactly what they dictated, and again beam with accolades of encouragement.  That is the joy of writing,  and often times we get hung up on the technical parts of it.  Myself being a prime example, and ever reluctant to proof my work.  But I am getting better.

In working one on one in my placement with students that need extra help its important to always complement the sometimes, small strides they make in both reading and writing. I always on the evaluation sheet include more positive than negative observations which is how it should be I believe.  I have learned to choose my words carefully to encourage.  I like how Routman cautions against students work being “rubricized.”   

Write, write, write

Literacy Journal - Writing a Present

As I finished Bird by Bird, I was reminded of writing for people we love, and writing about people before they are no longer with us. I am sadly reminded of the missed opportunities I had to record my father, and mother’s life experiences. The details of my fathers survival at Pearl Harbor. How anxious my mother was, pregnant and in San Francisco, waiting two weeks to learn of his fate. I am reminded how as a youngster, half listening to my grandmother speak of a relative that fought during the civil war, and made his way west after to seek their fortune. How another was connected to the U.S.S. Maine that was sunk in Havana Harbor, and that gave cause for the Spanish-American War.

While these opportunities were missed by me, I was determined to leave some record of those I loved and that had important stories to share. It was too that end that I undertook the capturing of the oral history of a man I have known all my life as a second father to me. He was a veteran of not only World War II, but of Korea, and Vietnam. He rose to the rank of Command Sergeant Major of the Army, and his story was a fascinating one that kept me riveted for hours. From a young man who needed his parents permission to enter the Army because of his age, to the invasion of Europe on D-Day, and jumping as a paratrooper into France, through the Battle of the Bulge. It was important for me to capture his stories. Stories of a modest, and unassuming man, that did heroic things, through the decades. These stories that his children, and grandchildren can know, and their grandchildren can pass on.

My point is how important it is to do these things before the stories are lost. At the site of the World Trade Center, right at the point where now the subway passengers exit the station, there is a recording booth, dutiful manned to record the stories of the survivors, and anyone that had a story to tell of that fateful day. We have this semester learned about photo stories, which is another excellent method to record and publish for those we love, the stories of our lives, which ordinary or not, are important. With our often hectic lives we find it hard to make the time to do so, but yet they need to be done. I am reminded of how in the absence of a written language the Native American’s passed on their stories, and the importance of heritage, and who we are, and were.

Find your voice so we can hear the voice that is our heritage.

Diary of a Catholic School Boy

Audubon Teaching Journal

Kids entered the room at start of day very chattery and our MT immediately called them to the carpet, literally, and in no uncertain term showed her displeasure in them.

I like the shared reading we do quite often when there is a literacy exercise and the MT starts sentences and the students in unison finish them as they look at text on the active board.

Today was apple crisp day, with Leia reading the story about making pie, and me indicating on the document reader and a world globe where the ingredients come from.  You definitely need help in the classroom to pull this off with the kids measuring, mixing ingredients, and following the apple crisp recipe.  We baked them off in the cafeteria, and the kids feasted before going home with recipe in hand.

Audubon Teaching Journal

• Reading Workshop
• Scratch Art today using a turkey as the subject
• Letter “Q”, “q” Note: Lots of kids still make “g” instead of “q”
• Student desk groups called “learning center”
• Continuation of measurement unit with baby steps now being used to measure.  MT did an exercise using a story to contrast the baby steps of one student may not be the same as another student with obviously larger feet.  This was acted out by two students, one being the king, and the other the royal carpenter who builds a horse stall to the number his steps, when he should have used the kings steps, and the result was a stall too small for the horse.

Literacy Journal - Writers Block

Writers Block

Anne Lamott says on page 176 of Bird by Bird “ There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer’s block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling your talent run down your leg and into your socks.”

Well, as I speak I am experiencing a block.  I usually don’t have a problem writing about something.  Mind you, it may not be good writing, but it’s writing never the less.  This week it has not been so easy as I skimmed back over chapter 4 and 5 of Fox, and Lamott.  Nothing struck me as something I could write a great deal about.  I even looked back over last weeks dyad literary experiences and there was nothing there that I thought would be interesting or that I had not talked about already.  I think writing is very much like a roller coaster where you get these incredible spurts of energy, and you write, write, write.  Then you get these periods where you have to write something, but you just can’t conjure up something.  I am not sure if its block, or if I am being a bit of a perfectionist, and need to get just the right subject, but here I sit.  Lamott suggests that your not really stuck, but perhaps empty.  I am empty of thought right now after a tough week of procrastination, deadlines, and finally a flurry of writing activity.  This was unfortunately the last thing on my plate for the week, and I pushed it off.  Lamott says just write something.  What does that mean?  Just put random, in coherent thoughts on paper.  Does this snap you out of it?  The rest of the chapter did not provide any other clues to jump start yourself, so with that, I will hope for better things next week.

Audubon Teaching Journal

We had yesterday off for Veterans Day, and just could not bring myself around to write anything.  I did read for classes, but that was it.

Today we make snowmen from clay.  This was a ceramic exercise which should prove to be very neat with lasting mementos that will forever sit on a winter days shelf by prideful moms, and dads.  Our MT taught the lesson to all three 3rd grade classes, and than off they went to create their snowmen.  We were blessed with having four moms in the class to help as our students dutifully followed the steps to make their masterpieces.  Even Leia and myself got to make them.  After Thanksgiving we will glaze and fire them.  
I was very proud of Leia in that she actually picked up a crayfish without getting pinched so that we could clean tanks today.  We both did some binding,  and set up folders of the kids work for the upcoming parent teacher conferences.

The day ended with the introduction of a new unit on measuring.  Kids learned to measure distances today by taking giant steps, and recording the number of giant steps from the classroom front door to the back door.  The class then discusses the reasons why there were differences, and what accounted for them in this exercise.

Literacy Journal - Expectations

One thing I have noticed in both my placements is the emphasis on reading and writing.  Perhaps emphasis is too light a word as each of my master teachers includes reading and writing each and everyday.  Both employ the writing workshop theme.  Both are sticklers for quality, and especially for work that is published or that goes home, which is nearly everything they do.  Routman speaks to this in chapter four.  No one in either class gets a free ride with sloppy or incomplete work.  Even those that struggle, or you might think we have low expectations for must produce a quality product.  In our dyad I spend a fair amount of time working with the strugglers, even to the point of scribing for them, and them copying it exactly to the project or assignment.  I am somewhat torn here, and wonder how this might be very frustrating to a student that for whatever reason can not produce work that would be considered the norm.  They get very frustrated with re-writes to be sure.  How far do we carry this?  I certainly can understand the reluctance to publish something in the hall or in a class bound project with the gambit of writing issues that are very obvious.  The other is sending work home that is edited and corrected for the parents to see.  Should the parents be insulated from this?  Are we doing them a disservice by not sharing the learners true level of literacy?  I don’t know but I will talk to my MT to better understand the reasoning behind it.

I do agree with Routman that we should always expect excellence from our students, and not accept mediocrity.  Perhaps by demanding it the student will learn that there are no shortcuts, and they had better put in the best effort they can.  I have also found it interesting how one teacher is concerned about spelling and the other is much less so.  I did ask the one why she is not, and she says that being overly concerned about spelling on the students part take away from the writing process itself.  Now there is a one grade difference in the two classes which might explain how one feels that at 3rd grade a student should be concerned about their spelling, and how at 2nd grade it is less of a concern.  My own feelings are that students should be actively engaged in getting cohesive, and connected thoughts down on paper first and foremost.

Audubon Teaching Journal

Art docents in today for painting lesson on landscape for fall.  How to use brush strokes.  I find it uncanny, be it in a small sampling, how art can also reflect those kids that may have academic issues as well.  Not sure if they just don’t care, or can stay focused.  SOmeone has had to have done a study on it I am sure.

Warm and Fuzzies - MT uses two jar in the front of the room.  She will grab some and take them out of one jar and move them to the other jar.  One is a good jar, and one not so good.  When the call as a whole is not focused or following instruction she will silently open the jar and take these fuzzies out of the good jar and put in bad.  When they are on task, she will then silently move some back to the good jar.  She does not name the jars but the kids understand them.

Happy Birthday to me.

Audubon Teaching Journal

Today is our observed lesson.  Leia did a great job with her postcard lesson for the month, and I did my math game Pigs, which went well I thought also.  We both did fine on the field instructors assessment, and she provided some great feedback, and tips on class management.   The game of Pig was used to accomplished two objectives, mental math, and an introduction to probability.  The probability I spoke about in the context of taking changes, and risk with this dice throwing game.  I would liken the game to craps for kids. These are some of the following points my field instructor made:

• Focus on only one or two objectives.
• Focus on chance, and risk which are terms children at this age would associate with.
• Focus on what you want them to know, what you want them to look for, and what you want them to listen for.