Final Synthesis Blog

Throughout this semester we have constantly reiterated that content-area literacy is vitally important for the education of students.  Before this LLED 3530 course I did not really understand what content-area literacy really even meant. This class has thoroughly prepared me to understand why it is so important and then be able to implement strategies in my classroom to help obtain that goal. 

The most helpful resource in the class so far has been the textbook, Subjects Matter. Page 30 in the textbook has a list of eight reading strategies that are essential for readers to focus on in annotating/analyzing a text. It is important for educators to make sure students are fluent in these strategies to ensure that students become good readers and are able to comprehend texts. The think aloud we did in class were an awesome way for teachers to help students develop these skills in a content-area classroom. There were also other strategies mentioned in the book that would be helpful in teaching content-area literacy in the classroom. Some of these include frontloading with images, reading aloud, KWL’s, dramatic role-plays, partner reading, and post-it response notes.

Having my classmates teach me each of these strategies was extremely helpful and I am thankful that there is now a Google Drive where I can look at these and draw lessons from them if I need to. The point of those strategies were to help increase motivation for reading and provide structure to the reading so that they are applying the reading strategies that they need to the text.

Another helpful activity in class was the book club that we did. While I am still not sure I would do a book club in my science class, it was a very thought provoking and interesting idea. I personally do not think it would be useful to read a whole book in my content-area class based on the project but I did come to the conclusion that I think it would be super helpful to use excerpts from “real life” books rather than just textbooks. This encourages the fact that there is real world application to the concepts that I teach and that they are useful. I feel like students get the idea that they will never use any of the stuff that they learn in school, so I believe book clubs would be helpful in proving them wrong and motivating them more. I also enjoyed the book clubs turning into a podcast. I think creating podcasts is an amazing idea for students and can help increase their literacy so much. It makes students talk and interact with a text together and apply that to the recording. This forces every student to get involved and show their understanding of a text.

Lastly, I enjoyed creating the text set to help myself in the future and help my classmates. The collective effort to create unit plans that involve so much universal learning design and content literacy will be so helpful in all of our future teaching endeavors. It is really exciting to already be getting head starts like that and see that we are all in this together. This semester has been amazing my future teaching has benefitted more than I can probably ever understand.

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Art Blog

I would use the artwork Medicine Woman, by Beverly Buchanan, in a science content classroom. The unit I would base around this piece of art would be a recycling and reusing materials unit. The artist created a really amazing piece of art by finding odd materials and old “junk” and sculpting it to be shaped like a person. Beverly uses old cans, bottles, buttons, fabrics, wood, jars, rocks, tape and more. It would be really cool to show kids this piece of art to show them that materials can be reused and recycled to preserve them and create new things. We do not have to just throw things away and pollute the environment more. Instead we can find new uses for them and that is really impactful for kids to see. I would probably assign a project around this artwork and challenge my kids to create their on sculpture of old materials. I would allow them a lot of freedom to create whatever their imagination desired. The goal is to show them that they can use things over and over that are enjoyable for them to see. If i make them create something specific, then they might not enjoy it as much and get as much out of it. I think it would be really cool to see how creative they could get with household items that they would normally consider “junk.”

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Are Book Clubs and Podcasts a Good Idea in the Classroom?

I think book clubs are a really cool idea and reading is so important for students, but I’m not sure that it is ideal for a content area class. I think it might take too long and you would probably need to give students a long time to read the book to help break it down better. I personally think it is a better idea to go through a content related book and find passages/chapters that you as a teacher believe are important and present those in some way. I think this still offers important aspects of reading and will still help students’ reading skills without placing a huge burden on them outside of class and making it seem like busy work. With those passages being read and being talked about in class, I think it would be super cool for students to create a podcast about it in class. It would show their understanding of what they have read and provide insight into what they are thinking about the text provided and what impact it has on them. It is a way for the students to really get involved and make an assignment fun so I think they would be really into it.

Strategy Lesson Reflection

Today, Sam and I presented our strategy lesson on Post-it notes. I think Sam and I co-teach really well together and that showed in our presentation. We fed off of each other’s ideas and comments we made while the other person was presenting felt natural rather than interruptions. I also think we presented the main idea of what Post-it notes could really be used for in the classroom and how to utilize them best for our future students. One thing that could have gone a little better was presenting a more specific thinking strategy for the class to focus on rather than asking them to write down main ideas on their sticky notes. We also probably could have had a class discussion on what students wrote down on their sticky notes rather than transitioning straight into what they thought of the strategy. The last big thing that I think we left out was talking more about the thinking strategies being implemented with the sticky notes even though we briefly discussed it. In the future I would just make sure to be a little more detailed and thorough with the presentation. With that being said, I felt really comfortable in front of the class and I believe Same did as well, which could be seen by our demeanors.

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SciShow

SciShow

For my resource blog this week I chose a channel on YouTube called “SciShow.” This channel is cool because it presents material to students in a fun way. The narrators do not have boring voices which helps kids stay engaged. Also, there are funny animations to keep the video interesting. I think this kind of thing could be used as a supplemental resource and maybe as a review after a unit is finished.

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Content Differentiation

Differentiation in my classroom was not really a thing with the level of content given when I was in school. I am not sure if that is because I was in the gifted program or just because my school did not provide different levels of material within each class. There were however a lot of different types of multimodal differentiation in my classes. In high school we had big econ projects that covered areas such as social studies, math, and ELA. Classes would also switch up the learning by providing different types such as through videos, interactive animations, reading, coloring, writing and so on. That was the biggest thing Dr. Royce asked Ms. Maronpot to work on her classroom. She wanted Ms. Maronpot to work on involving the kids more and having them come up to the board and interact with the material. Lecturing can help some students but hands on and being involved in the learning is vital to others. In my classroom, I would want differentiation to be well-rounded and involve all aspects of it. I would want to provide different levels of the material to help include all students, even the ones that are struggling to learn the material. Then, especially since I want to be a science teacher, I want to provide a lot of different types of hands on learning and self-discovery through labs and projects.

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Video Editing for Beginners

iMovie Basics

I chose a YouTube video that shows how to edit videos on iMovie for my resource blog because I thought it would be cool to have a video concept in my multimodal project idea. I was thinking about using this idea in life science with the biome unit. Students could set up and decorate a small “set” that mimics a certain biome and make a really cool video describing the video. It could go along the lines of being a survival video about the biome. Students could incorporate what the weather is like there, what animals live there, what plants grow there, what kind of shelter they would want to survive there and so on. This would be a really cool project to help the students engage their creative side while still learning valuable information about biomes.

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Chocolate!

Rock Cycle Experiment

Who doesn’t like chocolate? This lab is dedicated to the subject of earth science and using chocolate to show the different kinds of rocks on the earth. This is really cool for content-area literacy because it is really relatable for the kids. They will clearly be able to see the differences in the chocolate and use prior knowledge about chocolate to then make that comparison to rocks on earth and the rock cycle. It also gets the kids engaged with the content which I think is also really important for literacy. I think this would be a super fun experiment to do with students and it would be incredibly beneficial.

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Synthesis Blog 3

     Ahhh, the dreaded textbook. As students, we all grew up hating it and immediately protested any reading assigned from it. My AP World History teacher from high school must have thought our textbook was the Bible of world history because we were assigned at least 10 pages of reading a night. By the end of the year I had read that whole textbook, but how much knowledge did I actually retain? Not much. 

     

     So what place do textbooks have in our classroom? A quote from Chapter 6 of Subjects Matter stood out to me, “If all the worrisome test scores and ranting pundits mean anything, it’s that textbook-based teaching doesn’t work” (p. 178). I agree with the text here and believe that our curriculum should not be based around the textbook, but I do think we can utilize it in strategic ways. I really loved the “Guide-o-Rama” study guide provided in the textbook. I think it is an amazing way to get students to read the text intentionally and get the main ideas from the passage that you want them to get. It is like this beautiful little map to help them decipher the text and help them learn how to be literate with textbooks. Personally, I would use this strategy in my classroom but I still would not center my teaching around the textbook. I would take ideas from the text, that I think are important and in the standards and make my own notes or powerpoint to teach the concepts. This way I can get the important vocabulary and ideas and make sure the students know them rather than just throwing them to the wolves with the textbook.

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Visually Enhanced Learning Activities (VELAs)

The Biology Coloring Book

This is a super cool resource that one of my favorite teachers in high school used with us all of the time. This coloring book lets students learn in many different ways. On the front of the page it has a reading about whatever topic it is. For example if the page was dedicated to mitosis, it would have an article describing what happens during mitosis. Then on the other side is a picture that you are supposed to color code and it visually shows all of the processes of mitosis. This is an awesome resource for teachers to utilize with content literacy in science because it allows you to teach the material in multiple ways.

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Synthesis Blog 2

     Reading through Chapter 11 of Subjects Matter made me think about what content-area reading was like for me growing up in school. Generally I could understand and analyze a text pretty easily in any subject but physics was always my kryptonite. It was always really hard for me to visualize what the word problems were asking in physics so I could never fully piece the problems together. When the text brought up turning the words we read into mental pictures to better understand a text, I was able to relate and think back to my 11th grade physics class. 

     A quote from the text that really resonated with me is, “All the great teachers who describe success with struggling readers focus on the essential process of developing students’ trust. In order for students to really put themselves on the line and try something new with reading, they have to trust that the teacher is there to help and be there for them without making them feel bad about their mistakes. With the goal of becoming a teacher, I need to keep in mind that I have to build my trust with each and every student so that they can fully believe that my goal is always to help them achieve everything to the best of their ability. One strategy that stood out, because it was mentioned in both the text and in class, is “think-alouds.” These are important in the classroom because generally my brain can work through a text a fairly easily and I do not even think about the cognitive processes my brain takes to analyze a text. Using a think-aloud, I can help my students think about what is going on inside of my head when I read through a text so that they can then work on thinking about a text in a similar manner. This strategy is definitely not one to forget about when I have my own classroom.

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Resource Blog 1

http://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/who-should-teach-disciplinary-literacy-and-should-we-integrate-the-curriculum#sthash.G29PUDc7.7JrIKa6v.dpbs

For my resource blog this week I chose a blog written by Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The part of the blog that caught my eye is Shanahan talking about whether ELA teachers should be integrating content-area literacy in their classrooms or if the content-area teacher should be teaching literacy in their subject. He makes the point that it is difficult to make an ELA teacher try to approach a text in the way that an English teacher, scientist, historian, and a mathematician would at the same time. This blog post would be good for content-area teachers to read because it shows that it is important for the content-area teacher to teach literacy in their classroom.

Chapter 2 Synthesis Blog

The first week of class and Chapter 2 of the book have really opened my eyes to what content-area literacy is and what reading really means. A quote from the book that stood out to me is, “Now we’re starting to see content-area reading from a kid’s-eye view: how students can read every word on a page without deep understanding…” (Daniels and Zemelman, p 28). As a teacher you can assign a reading to your students and they might be able to decode every word but if they are not literate in the content. This inspires me to want to include methods in my classroom to help students actively read, meaning they develop the reading into meaningful concepts as they decode. When I was a kid in school I never really thought about all of the methods I was using to comprehend texts because it had always come pretty easy to me, so it was cool reading about the different strategies and how to make sure you’re an efficient reader. I really loved the GPS analogy that the textbook made. It made it very clear that familiarity and prior knowledge is so important in comprehending a text. The content-area literacy unit from the first week opened my eyes to how important being literate in a specific content and this week’s chapter helped me understand the aspects of what being a good reader is. I hope the textbook shines some light soon on what strategies we can implement in the class to make the students better content-area readers and pull from their network of schema.

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Josh Hendricks