Consolidating Understanding: The Connect Two Strategy

Connect Two is awesome. This is something that not only helps students after they have read, but also helps students before and during reading. 

This strategy is achieved by showing students vocabulary words that will be in the text and letting them associate the words with their own meanings. The students can predict what the text may be about, and what the words may be trying to tell when used altogether. So, during reading the students are already having these important vocab words in their heads, which is great. After reading the text, the students can choose a selection of the words (or all of them if there aren't that many) and summarize what that word means/how it was used in the text. This is great for consolidating understanding. 

How I would use it…

I think Connect Two would be a great strategy to use for many subjects, such as language, science, social studies, or reading. Really anything that students have to read, using the Connect Two strategy would help students. I think teachers could do this where the students write it out, or just think about the vocabulary terms and how they fit together. 

My Literacy Experience

It is kind of difficult to remember how I was taught to read. I remember doing short activities in daycare to help me learn about the letters. We would also get rewarded and praised for successfully singing the abc's.

In school, we did numerous activities:

Elementary school:
Alphabet charts each day
Letter worksheets
Tracing worksheets
Sight words
Read alouds
Short word books.. for example: See me run.
Learned some sign language with letters
Placed into guided reading groups
In upper elementary, a couple times a year we would take a reading assessment on the computers in the computer lab to get our reading lexiles. I really hated these and tried to be the first one finished.
I LOVED the Junie B Jones series.

Middle school:
Read alouds
Reading and typing class in 6th grade
7th and 8th: Language Arts class
Reading program: Reading Counts (Had to get so many points per quarter, or you had to sit out in PE)
I read the Series of Unfortunate Events books throughout middle school. I tried to take the reading test for Little Women (worth over 40 points!) and failed it three times. Turns out the movie isn't the same as the book.

High school:
Reading plays out loud -limited teacher read alouds
Language class each year of high school
Vocabulary words each week (We actually used the front loading activities that we went over last week)
Read the appropriate texts, such as Shakespeare and Harper Lee.
We didn't really have to read very much in high school, which is crazy. We just kept a log of the books we checked out each quarter and discussed each book with our teachers.

Each class I took throughout my public education, there was always required reading. Students who really start out struggling with reading and constantly lag each year really suffer as a result of this, because each class is truly dependent upon reading and comprehending the material (maybe except for math).

Mollie's Bio Poem

Mollie.
Creative, organized, kind, funny.
Daughter, sister, aunt, friend, and significant other.
Lover of dogs, sleep, and children.
Who feels excited for the future, slightly introverted, and happy.
Who fears her lesson being observed, losing Netflix, and losing someone close to me.
Who graduates next May, can clean like no one's business, and naps each day.
Who would like to get her pilot's license, become debt free, and travel the world.
Resident of Columbia, MO and originally from Belle, MO.
Wilson.

M is for Mollie.

Frontloading

Frontloading is an interesting activity to use with students when working with vocabulary. Frontloading is basically a mini-lesson that teachers can do at the beginning of a lesson in order to discuss vocabulary. We know that students who know less than 95% of what they are reading really struggle to comprehend it. This is what frontloading helps to do -comprehension through the focus of vocabulary. 

Without knowing it, I have done frontloading activities in my field experience courses before doing guided reading lessons. This also includes just seeing how much students know already in order to effectively teach the lesson. When I did this in the past, I did not use one of the models that we have studied in this class -I just used chart paper and the guided reading books. Students seem to learn a lot through discussion, too, so I also directed the vocabulary mini-lesson around small-group discussion. In order for students to learn, they have to be able to chat. 

My thoughts?

I really like frontloading activities. I think they are straight forward and are pretty clear. However, I do not think these models should be relied upon so heavily or implemented as busy work, but I think they do really help with vocabulary and increased comprehension. 

First class -EDUC 338

I was super nervous going into this class since it is a hybrid course. I have taken numerous online classes, but have never taken one that is live-streamed. Since there were conflicting times for this class next semester at the day campus, I thought I would have to postpone graduation. Thankfully, I found out that this course was being offered in March, and that I would have a classmate, Monica, who would also be enrolling in this course.

Class 3.16.16

Tonight's class was great. I feel like a lot of the groundwork was discussed and I am less confused about what this course will entail. I hope to learn a lot from this course -especially from my field experience placement where I will be teaching the reading lesson. I hope we, as a class, can discuss ideas and thoughts productively and learn a lot from each other. Thanks for reading.

College Education Experiences So Far..

Hello everyone! My name is Mollie Wilson and I am a full-time student at Columbia College. I am studying to be an elementary teacher and will be graduating in May of 2016. At the beginning of college, I was sure that I wanted to teach lower elementary. Now, it is becoming more and more clear that I want to work with upper elementary students, or even middle school. I want to become a Reading Specialist post-undergrad when I obtain my Master's degree.

So far, I have had many classes with field experience in college, each with their own unique experiences. Education courses I have taken with field experience include:

EDUC 100 Into to Education
EDUC 198 Field Experience I
EDUC 298 Field Experience II
EDUC 300 Techniques of Teaching
EDUC 311 Behavior Management
EDUC 331 Teaching of Reading
EDUC 380 Diagnostic and Corrective Reading

I still have to take EDUC 358 Teaching Math in Elementary Schools, which will allow me to teach a math lesson.

In my Behavior Management course, we had an interesting experience. Has anyone heard of TeachLive? For those of you who don't know, TeachLive is a virtual classroom where you can teach students by looking on a television and interacting with them firsthand. It was great to get that practice from inside our course classrooms, but it was definitely stressful anticipating the lessons we taught. Of course, since the course was about managing behaviors, my instructor made it to where the virtual students had pretty bad misbehaviors, and we were given the task of trying to control these behaviors while trying to teach our lesson. It was definitely a learning experience, and we get to use this TeachLive program again in my science course this semester, EDUC 352.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!