Teaching Tolerance: Bringing Culture into the Classroom

84% of classroom teachers in the United States are white, American females while our students come from all over the world and all have extensive and interesting backgrounds. What are some ways in which teachers can close the cultural gaps in the classroom and make it feel like home for everyone. The truth is: Culture matters. 

One way the students can learn about different cultures, or help other classmates understand specific cultures is by bringing different aspects of one's culture into the classroom. The students can create, plan, and invite other classes to a cultural food fair. Just a heads up, remember to keep food allergies in mind when your students are cooking or tasting each others food!

Another way the students can learn about different cultures is to learn about the different types of music or dance a culture listens to or performs. The students can be paired up or put into small groups. Each group can research, listen to, and learn different cultural dances. They can then perform these in front of the class. The teacher can even help the students set up a community showing of what they have learned.

Another great way to have students learn about different cultures is to share folklore with them. Have them each research a folklore story of their choice. They can choose any country of origin. Have them try and find out as much as they can about the story: when and where it originated, what kind of story it is, and how it relates to the history of the country it originated from. The students can learn the folklore story and tell it to the other students in the class. Not only  is this fun, the students can learn a lot by becoming story tellers. Encourage them to bring in music to play in the background or different props to get the audiences attention.

I hope these all come in handy when teachers are trying to bring culture into the classroom. As I said before, culture is VERY important. By bringing this into the class, the world becomes a smaller, more inviting space! 

The Art of Inference

There are many kinds of books that can help students learn to infer information that is not implied or directly stated in literature. Some types are books in which students have to infer meanings of words, predict endings, use pictures as well as the words, and search for a change in a character. Books that spin off from a well-known tale, have a surprise or twist ending, have subtle humor, and force students to delve into a theme are also very helpful.

The OnTarget Strategy Books, by the South Dakota Department of Education, provides a wonderful list of books that can help students infer throughout their reading.

Even though books are very important in helping students learn the art of inference, teachers can also play games and use activities in the classroom so the class as a whole can learn together.

One activity that teachers can do is called the Trash Bag Lesson. This is a game in which the teacher, before class, packs a bag with different objects. The objects can be things like a baby bottle, a tennis ball, a comic book, and so on. The teacher would tell the students that this bag was found in a dusty attic somewhere and they needed to go through it to find out about the person to whom it belonged. The teacher would have different students come to the front and pull the objects from the bag. The class could think about what each object tells about the person. By pulling out the tennis ball, one would infer that the person who owned the bag liked to play tennis. Many different inferences could come from this game. Students can learn that even though no one explicitly told them that the owner of the bag plays tennis, has a child, and likes to read comics; they still were able to infer that these things about the owner.

Another activity that a teacher can do is to bring in old photographs from the 1800's and early 1900's. These can be found in the library, online, or maybe the teachers has them of past relatives. The photos should have some sort of funny element such as a crying baby or an invention that is no longer around today. The teacher can show these pictures to the students and have them infer what is happening in the pictures.

There are so many other ways for teachers to help their students learn the amazing and important art of inference. By using creativity, teachers and students alike will be able to infer about anything!

It's that time of year again...

The Indiana Statewide Test for Educational Progress, also known as ISTEP+, is back again! All of last week, students in grades 3 through 8 sat down in separated desks with two, sharpened #2 pencils to take test after test. These tests measure students' mastery of basic English language, science, reading, writing, and mathematics skills. The Indiana Department of Education (http://www.doe.in.gov/achievement/assessment/istep-grades-3-8)  summarizes the ISTEPs as:

The purpose of the ISTEP+ program is to measure student achievement in the subject areas of English/Language Arts, Mathematics, Science (Grades 4 and 6), and Social Studies (Grades 5 and 7). In particular, ISTEP+ reports student achievement levels according to the Indiana Academic Standards that were adopted in November 2000 by the Indiana State Board of Education. An Applied Skills Assessment and a Multiple-Choice Assessment, which are required components of the ISTEP+ program, are used to measure these standards.

 Since I am observing in an Indiana classroom and will most likely teach in Indiana after graduating, I was think about what  Indiana classroom teachers can do to help students prepare for a test that determines so much for a student, their teacher, and their school. I have come up with a list of appropriate activities that I feel a teacher can do to make these tests less stressful for students. 

1. Teachers need to understand that this is not a test that students can "cram" for. The teachers can find plenty of time in their curriculum to go over specific examples, show questions from past tests, and clear up any questions the students may have.
2. The teachers not only should prepare them for the content of the tests, but should also review some test-taking skills such as reading every question thoroughly and paying attention to any bold, italicized, and underlined words. 
3. The teachers should take the students to a computer lab to practice using computer skills as some schools will be giving part of the exam on a computer.
4. The teachers should explain to students that even though this test is important, it is not supposed to be stressful and it is not the end-all to everything. This test, in part, shows the teachers what they need to work on when teaching in following years, so it's not all on the students.
5. The teachers should not give the students any homework the nights before ISTEPs and should encourage the students to get plenty of sleep and eat a well-balanced, healthy breakfast. If allowed, apples and bananas could be provided for the students to eat as they unpack their bags in the morning.

I hope that all of these ideas can be helpful. I plan on using every one of them when I become a classroom teacher. There are also many helpful tips on the Indiana Department of Education website listed earlier in the blog. Good luck to all of the teachers and students out there who are part of the 2013 ISTEP program!

The Last Piece of the Puzzle

I've been learning about different strategies that children can use to learn the letters in the alphabet, how to put them together to read words, and how to put words together to read sentences. Comprehension of the sentences and books they read is the last piece to the puzzle!

Cause and Effect is a great strategy that teachers can use with any age. By choosing a story that has many different problems and solutions, such as Whose Mouse Are You? by Robert Kraus, the students can create a circle story in which they arrange the different situations in the book to see what and when things happen.

The Detective Game is also a great strategy that can be used with every student. Students can pretend they are detectives to find out what is going to happen in the book. They can act out different parts and continue acting past the part read so they can try and predict what will happen next using what they previously comprehended. 

Visualizing what is happening in a poem or story is also a great technique. After reading a story, students can draw the pictures that belong to the words. They can share what they drew with their classmates and explain why their picture includes the elements that it does.

Anchor Charts are something the class can make as a whole. The teacher can lead a read-a-loud, stopping in certain places to add ideas from the class to the anchor chart. The chart can have some topics like "Questions Before Reading," "Questions During Reading," "Found the Answer," "Inferred the Answer," and "Need More Information." 

Read-A-Louds are very important for students to do when they are working on comprehension. Not only should the teacher lead read-a-louds, I think it would be a great idea for students to do read-a-louds in small groups with their classmates. That way, they are inferring and questioning different parts of the books by themselves and learn how to do this independently. 

As Pat Johnson and Katie Keier state in Catching Readers Before They Fall, "We believe that all children, from the very start of learning to read, should stay actively focused on meaning making. For some average readers and for all struggling readers, this needs to be explicitly modeled and supported. We want all students to learn to think as they read." I think that by using the comprehension strategies mentioned above, each student will learn to think as they read! :) 

Books! Books! Books!

After listening to the podcast conversation between Dr. Betsy Baker and Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer discussing Text Complexity, I thought it would be helpful to compile a list of books appropriate for each grade level.

1. How to be a Friend by Laurie Kransy Brown and Marc Brown is a book where fun dinosaur characters show different ways to be a good friend.
2. Alphabet Adventure by Audrey Wood is a book that brings the A, B, C's to life so younger children can learn the order of the letters, what they look like, and the different sounds they make.
3. David Goes to School by David Shannon is a book about a little boy named David who wrecks havoc in the classroom. Kindergarteners will find Davids antics silly and mischievous! 

1. The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister is a wonderful book about a fish that promotes sharing, kindness, friendship, and happiness.
2. Junie B.: First Grader, Toothless Wonder by Barbara Park is a book about a first grader who is about to lose a tooth and is having trouble dealing with the loss. First grade students can really relate to this book!
3. The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle is a book about a ladybug who is a bully. This book shows how to treat people nicely and how to share.

1. The Best Seat in the Second Grade by Katherine Henah is a book about a little boy who waits patiently for the day when he can be Hamster Helper in class. 
2. Dogku by Andrew Clements is a great way to introduce poetry and haiku into the classroom. 
3. Get Ready for Second Grade, Amber Brown by Paula Danzinger is a story about a girl named Amber who has to deal with a school bully.

1. 7x9=Trouble by Claudia Mills is a great way to introduce multiplication into the 3rd graders reading. The little boy in the book has trouble with Math, just like so many 3rd graders.
2. Chocolate Fever by Robert Kimmel Smith is a book about a boy named Henry who eats too much chocolate.
3. Because of Wynn Dixie by Kate DiCamillio is a book about a little girl named Opal and her dog, Wynn Dixie, and the friendship they form to bring a little town together.

1. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinny is a book about a boy named Greg who starts at a new school and has trouble fitting in.
2. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl is a book about James and how he escapes his horrible life to and becomes a hero to his new insect family.
3. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis is a book that invokes imagination in a magical world.

1. Holes by Louis Sachar is a book about a boy named Stanley who is sentenced to dig holes. This is a thriller that all students can get into. 
2. Savvy by Ingrid Law is a book about a supernatural family where each member has superpowers. 
3. Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech is a book about a 13 year old girl who desperately tries to find her mother by telling stories.

1. Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko is a book that follows a boy named Moose who moves to Alcatraz with his family in 1935. He lives his life in new surroundings with his Autistic sister.
2. Call of the Wild by Jack London is a book that takes place in the extremely cold Yukon and is about sled dogs.
3. Smile by Raina Telgemeier is a book about a girl with a variety of dental issues like braces who feels bad about herself.

A lot of these books can go up or down a grade level based on the child's reading level. 3rd grade is a great time to get students interested in chapter books. A great way to get students hooked on reading is finding them a book series that they find interesting. If you, as a teacher, can do this... their interest in books will never end! 

Vocabulary Development Can Be Fun!

Vocabulary development is essential for early learners. Children have to use vocabulary in their every day lives. After listening to the podcast by Dr. Baker and Dr. Susan Nueman where they discuss using categories to teach vocabulary to preschoolers, I wanted to try to come up with some other ways we, as teachers, can introduce and teach vocabulary to our students in a fun and inviting way.

The first game that came to mind was Scrabble. When I was an ESL teacher in Korea, the older children loved playing Scrabble. Then I started thinking. Can a primary student really get into such an adult game? Is there a way to make it fun for them too? I'm still stumped on whether this would be something they would enjoy.

A type of game that I always loved as a kid were puzzles. I think that students would really love doing crosswords or word searches. You could make this fun by using clues to what the vocabulary word is instead of just giving them the word to find or fit in the boxes. Another puzzle type game that would be fun is hidden messages. Just like Ralphie from A Christmas Story liked to decode things, some students in your class will have the same interest. Hidden messages are the way to do that!

Kids can also play bingo with sight words. The teacher can have different students read the words out loud and if they have them on their bingo cards, they can cover them up. They could win an eraser or pencil if they win bingo.

Another great word game that my students loved playing in Korea was called Word Work. I would put the students into groups of 4 or 2 and have them change one letter in a word to make a new word. I would see how many different words they could make in a 3 minute time period. This also helped them understand word families.

I hope some of these games are helpful in the classrooms of fellow teachers! Let's keep the fun in vocabulary development!!

Balance

Balance is essential in the classroom, especially when working with emergent readers and writers. I listened to a very interesting podcast with an interview with Dr. Piasta, a developmental psychologist and applied educational researcher. She has spent her life finding ways to incorporate alphabet instruction into the classroom without just drilling children with flashcards. She said that we, as teachers, need to find the balance between alphabet instruction and phonological awareness instruction. But where is this balance? And how do we make this interesting for children? I have some ideas :) 

One way to bring alphabet instruction in a fun way is to have the kids make their own alphabet book. As a class, the students and the teacher can brainstorm different objects that start with each letter of the alphabet. The kids can then make their own books by writing the uppercase letter and the lowercase letter and drawing or painting the object. This will be fun and it will help the students understand not only what uppercase and lowercase letter go together, but what order they go in with respect to the alphabet. This also can help with phonological awareness because the students can read the book by saying the letter name and then read the book again by saying the sound the letter makes. 

Another way to bring alphabet instruction into the classroom in a fun way is to play alphabet charades. The teacher can pair up the children. Each pair can draw a letter of the alphabet out of a bowl. Each group will have a turn to come in front of the class and use their bodies to make the letters. The students in the class can guess what letter the students are making by either saying the letter (or saying the sound the letter makes if the teacher is trying to incorporate phonological awareness). 

There are so many different ways to find this balance between alphabet instruction and phonological awareness. What ideas can you come up with? 

Agency and Interest in the Classroom

No student is the same, so why do some teachers try and teach them all the same way? After listening to the podcast interview between Dr. Rowe and Dr. Baker, I have thought of some ways we can work with the different "agencies and interests" in the classroom. Dr. Rowe refers to "agencies and interests" as the way we think about children and the way they seem to come to school and play and are interested in different topics and things in the classroom. Dr. Rowe works mostly with 2-3 year olds, which is a bit younger than the age group that I will be working with, but I love her idea of finding out the agencies and interests of each and every child to help promote more interesting and fun writing for the student.
Some children love to write, and some can't stand it. How do we make writing interesting? How do we, as teachers, find out the interests of our individual students? I think the best way is to talk to our students. To sit them down one by one and simply just ask what they are interested in. Do they like dinosaurs? Do they like cars? Do they like to play house? Once a teacher finds out their interests, he or she can use those interests to come up with topics for writing. Then, throughout the school year, the teacher can bring in different topics and ideas that are similar so the students horizons broaden and they want to write about more topics. For example, if a student likes dinosaurs, you can have him or her slowly read about how researchers say that birds today are the closest relation to dinosaurs. Have them work with the topic of birds. After that, you can bring them into the topic of birds/mammals/reptiles/etc. These topic changes can go on forever, and if done right, the student will continue to keep interest. The point here is to make writing interesting! When writing is interesting, children will want to write. Children who want to write will build literacy skills without knowing it.
Establishing literacy in each and every child in the classroom is every teachers dream. And establishing this literacy while the students are engaged and interested is something that every teacher wants. Roll that into establishing literacy while what the students are doing is worthwhile, well, that's something that every teacher strives to have in their classroom.

Engaging and Worthwhile literacy practices + every student in the classroom = Amazing

Kids Dig Literacy

Literacy is not only the ability to read and write, but it's being able to think critically about the written word. Literacy is a life long process, not something that can be mastered or finished in a day. Literacy really is all around us. It's everywhere we look. Dr. Guttierez has come up with a way to describe this and she calls it the Third Space. The Third Space is basically the talking and reading behavior that students are doing that is not directly going on in the teachers lesson plan. Students are using literacy without knowing it. 

As an experiment, a group of teachers and I went on a 'community literacy dig.' A literacy dig is where you go to a place where children go and observe literacy in action all around you. You can write down the words that you see, the phrases that you hear, new vocabulary that is unique to this place, or even bits of talk heard around you. We decided to go to a restaurant called Finch's Brasserie in Bloomington. Finch's focuses on serving food straight from the farm to table. Because of this unique concept, you can imagine the amount of words and phrases that are unique to this restaurant. To start off, a large portion of the menu is in French. This opens up a whole new type of literacy. Some words that are in English that are unique to a restaurant are server, hostess, waitress, gluten-free, whole-grain, produce, receipt, and coffee. Other words that are unique to this establishment are mussels, wood-fired, Bloomington vicinity, Finch, Brasserie, and Soup du Jour.

Finch's also offers a menu called Baby Bird Food. Not only is this a cute play on words, it is made specifically for Birds (children) 12 years old and younger. It offers selections like mac and cheese, penne with butter, cheese pizza, and baby bird soda. By having a menu like this, Finch's is giving children the chance to develop literacy without knowing it.

All around, you can see literacy in action. From street signs to advertisements. From bus schedules to grocery store coupons. I challenge you to go on your own literacy dig. To see the literacy world through a child's eyes.

"Writing can contribute to the building of almost every kind of inner control of literacy learning that is needed by the successful reader."

Chapters 5 and 6 in Catching Readers Before They Fall speak about building a comprehensive literary framework for the emergent reader and writer. The components used for reading are Read-Alouds, Shared Readings, Guided Readings, and Independent Readings. The components used for writing are Morning Messages, Community Writings, and Independent Writings.
In Interactive Read-Alouds, the teacher reads to the students, but also engages the students in conversation before, during, and after the reading. This helps students build connections, comprehension strategies, and delve further into the story. Another strategy is Shared Reading. This is where the teacher reads one-on-one with a student or in a small group. This is a strategy in which the teacher helps the student build an effective reading process system while fostering a sense of community learning. Guided Reading is another component used to help emergent readers. In Guided Reading, the teacher plays the role of an observer and records how the students put the previous strategies to use. The last strategy is Independent Reading. In this situation, the students are able to choose their own books, with the help of the teacher, to read alone. This gives students the chance to make mistakes and self-correct themselves while reading and to have a chance to read many types of stories. Johnson and Keier state on page 83, "If our ultimate goal is to have children become proficient readers then we must make sure that there is a great deal of time and choice within our independent reading time. Readers need to enjoy a variety of texts, choose favorites, and live the life of a reader." Not only are K-3 teachers helping emergent readers, they must also give attention to emergent writers. One of the components used to help emergent writers are Morning Messages. Morning Messages are a time for students to use a fill-in-the-blank type letter provided by the teacher to help build their writing skills. This is something that can be done every morning to help foster a love of writing. Another strategy to help emergent writers is Community Writing. This is where the class as a whole work together to write. Community Writing can be done over time so the students have a chance to think about what they have learned and think ahead. The teacher uses open communication during Community Writing. The third strategy used is Independent Writing. This is where the student can self-monitor to see if what they have written sounds right and looks right. Teachers can use Read-Alouds, Shared Readings, Guided Readings, Independent Readings, Morning Messages, Community Writings, and Independent Writings to help the emergent reader and writer.