Saturday, January 30, 2010
Kids are Funny
I came to an interesting realization this week. Kids will do anything and learn anything if they think it's a game or a chance to color! I work my ela classroom in rotations. Students are in groups of five. After the initial one or two days of whole class instruction, I have them rotate through "centers". I am lucky that I have five computers in my classroom, so one center is computer time with compass learning where the instruction is tailored to their needs according to their map scores. I have to say that this program does seem to work. Student reading improvement has been noticed. They love, love, love this program. I have another center where they are responding to literature through reader's theater or script writing of their own to retell whatever story or read aloud I have presented that week. They love acting out the stories. This week I tried having them change the viewpoint in the book Rainbow Fish. The theme of sharing or giving away your stuff to make friends drew a negative response, but students had difficulty expressing another viewpoint. Still, they tried and that's what counts. We'll be trying that again. I also have a reading rotation for self-selected reading. They respond on a reading log, and once a week I have all students share something about what they are reading. The last rotation is the one that astounds me. I just started incorporating it this week. I have manipulatives that require students to take a group of sentences and put them in sequence so that they create a paragraph. All of the paragraphs are nonfiction. For example, one is about the first womon doctor. Another about a famous tight rope walker etc. The students love doing this activity and ask when it will be their turn to play this "game." it is amazing how well they are learning to find main idea sentences and appropriate closing sentences in order to help them put the other events in sequence. After the first couple of tries with my guidance they are off and running by themselves. These manipulative also come with answer keys that I let them check for themselves. They are learning so much and don't even know it!
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Don't you love how simple little things can be so engaging for kids??!! Your idea sounds great and obviously the kids loved it! I like the idea of the sequential order of putting the paragraph together! I did a similar activity at Christmas with a letter a child wrote to Santa about what she wanted. ALL of my classes did the activity and ALL of my classes got stumped in several places! It's a great way for them to work together and sequentially! I'm also impressed with your rotations you have going on......I'm just not there yet. Kudos to you!!
ReplyDeleteBeing in special ed, I do different types of progress monitoring with the kids in my Learning Strategies classes as well as my inclusion classes. It is a tremendous amount of work, but the research says it makes a difference. Just this past week I asked one of my kids what he thought was the most difficult thing about reading. His response was about, "all those different words on a page." Then he followed up with, "I don't have that problem now. It's easy." I asked him what he thought the difference was. He has been in one of our more intensive reading classes as well as my LS. He replied, "Our timed reading. It's our timed reading." I almost fell out of my chair. I have been religiously using Anita Archer's 6-Minute Fluency program daily. We graph our performance daily. The kids love it. What you are doing sounds like the rotations with Read 180. I would love to be able to do that also. Sounds great.
ReplyDeletei love the idea of rotation, I usually use compass learning or USA Test Prep as a warm up for 5 students, I like the idea of the sequential paraqagraph.
ReplyDeleteI use to do centers in my fifth grade ELA and SS classroom. They loved this time and was always disappointed when "work" time was over. Thanks for pushing my thinking.
ReplyDeleteBill