Reading for Intermediate and Advanced Learners, Fall, 2011

I chose a lesson called Gingerbread Phonics to review. I think that phonics is very important especially in kindergarten. Christmas is coming up pretty soon and this is one that I can use in my own classroom. In this lesson the teacher reads the story The Gingerbread Man aloud to students and invites them to read along during the refrain. The next day the teacher rereads the lesson and places sentence strips with the refrain writen on them up for the students. Students will practice reading the refrain and take turns finger pointing to it. On the third day the story is reviewed and students are asked to point out their favorite words. These words are writen on sentence strips and displayed. Special attention is given to the beginning sound of each word. After completing this activity along with a website about beginning sounds students will write their own stories using the new words they have found. These stories can be published on the internet and shared with each other.

I think this is a lesson I could use in my classroom. My kindergarten students are working on recognizing beginning sounds and this would be another way to do that. I am not sure how many of them could write their own stories using the new words, but we could write some sentences and write a story together as a class. I would also like to try this idea with other books. This lesson is easy to prepare for and appropriate for kindergarten students.

I found the Read Write Think website really early to use. I like that each lesson has a grade span and a quick overview. It makes it really easy to view a lot of lessons quickly. I also found it helpful that they list resources and national standards. I will use this website again to find new lesson ideas.
Ashley Montgomery

I am going to share the think-pair-share strategy. I think that this strategy works well for any grade level. I have used it in my kindergarten classroom a few times and I am always surprised at how well they do. The teacher pairs the students up or asks them to select a partner. While reading a selection of text the teacher stops and asks a question. First students are to think about the answere themselves and then share their thinking with their partners. After they have had time to share partners are asked to share their thoughts with the whole group. I always try to listen closly to conversatons going on around the room so that I can point out great thoughts for those who are not comfretable sharing themselves. This strategy can be used with fiction or nonfiction text.

Ashley Montgomery

I use K-W-L very often in my classes. It is always interesting to have the students brainstorm what they know about a subject before we discuss and research it. (K) After doing that, we then try to brainstorm what we would like to know about the subject. (W) Sometimes it is best to share our "want to know" thoughts because the students at times get lazy and do not want to know anything else about the subject OR think they are already the expert about the it. After discussing together what we want to know-we then research and try to find out the answers to our questions. ("L") We record this in what we have "learned." This is a very helpful tool in getting the children to think deeper about topics. There are always things we can learn about any subject-even if we think we know all about it. Maybe we need to look at another perspective to find a "what I want to know." Everyone ALWAYS learns something new using this strategy!!
Sarah Patten