Brianna Brandt- 12 Questions Post

Brianna Brandt

Inquiry Two, Part A:

Discuss Your Target Area and ‘Core Practice’ for Guided Lead Teaching

Talk with your MT about your idea, and use the information you gained from Inquiry One to respond to the following guiding questions listed below.  Email your responses to your instructor before our Week 4 class (September 26) AND post them on your book club blog:

1.     Describe your target area for guided lead teaching.

My target area is going to be phonemic awareness. Each week I will be introducing some letters of the alphabet and working on the sounds they make and also looking at words that have that letter in them. We will be following the Treasures literacy curriculum as a guide but I will also be including activities of my own.

2.     Approximately how much time per day is allotted for your instruction in this area?

We have a block of time 1 ½ hours long to include math and literacy in each day, so my literacy lessons will typically be about 45 minutes long.

3.     Which Common Core State Standard(s) will you work toward?

I will be working towards the phonological awareness standard RF.K.2- Demonstrating understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds. Also I want students to learn how to read common high-frequency words by sight, which is part of standard RF.K.3 which involves phonics.

4.     How will teaching in this target area provide opportunities for students to learn important content and/or skills that relate to their lives?  In what ways does this learning include learning literacy, learning about literacy, and/or learning through literacy?

This area is very important because it is teaching my kindergarteners the most basic parts of speech that they must build upon in order to learn about others parts of literacy and create their own writing.  Phonemes and letter sounds are the only way for students to learn about literacy, since they can then learn about how different genres sounds and the types of information they can get out of reading. They use phonemes to learn about literacy because letter sounds are the first step in learning how to read/write. And they are important to learning through literacy, because if they cannot read, then they cannot get information from anything written.

5.     What types of classroom talk take place within this target area? To what extent is the talk teacher-led, student-led, or focused on higher-level thinking? What norms for interaction would you like to build within your classroom as you teach in this target area (e.g., see ideas in Chapter 6 of Strategies that Work, the Berne & Clark 2008 article, or draw from some of the readings done in TE 402 on classroom talk)?

I think that there will be a lot of teacher-led talk but I would really like to include student’s ideas as much as possible and leads them to a higher thinking, doing things like going over a letter sound then making a list of what words they can come up with that have that sound in the beginning and then, after practice, other places in a word. I liked the discussion that went on in the Berne and Clark article and know from experience kindergarteners can respond to each other about a story or question, it just takes practice, and I would like to try and include that in my unit and lessons as well.

6.     Which ‘core practice’ do you want to work on developing/improving as you teach in this target area (refer to document “Resources for Developing Core Practices”)? How will focusing on this core practice contribute to your own professional learning?

I want to work on acquisition, use and assessment of phonological sounds, that practice most closely relates to the unit I will be working on and I think that it will be really beneficial to me to learn better and newer techniques for doing this effectively since I prefer to work with younger grades and some of the other practices, although important, are things my current students be doing later in the year and it would take a lot of practice for them to do them efficiently right now.

7.     What resources within the community, neighborhood, school district, school or classroom do you have to work with in this target area?

One way that we fit letter sounds into the school day is while they are eating breakfast we put on a video about letter sounds, it is a cartoon and the kids love to shout out what sound each letter makes once it tells them initially. We have reading assistants for students who need extra help that will be available after the MEAPS. We also have a speech teacher in our school, a library, computer lab, literacy specialist, ELMOs in each classroom and classroom libraries. From the district students can get free eyeglasses if they need them and also get internet for only $10 a month to use in their home.

8.     What additional resources do you need to obtain?

For some of the books the students need to read to practice these letters and sight words, some of the books are missing, so we need to somehow find enough of these books so that every student has their own to practice with.

9.     How will you pre-assess your students in your target area?

I am going to try and pull students aside to finish everyone’s kindergarten test that we gave some in the begging of the year to see who recognizes their letters and I would like to also ask them if they know what sound each letter makes.

10.  What else will you need to find out about all students in your class to help you develop lesson plans for your Guided Lead Teaching?

I will need to find out how much the few students who already know most of their letter sounds do know so that I can develop a way to still challenge them while teaching the others the basic letter sounds.

11.  What else do you need/want to learn about the ‘core practice’ to support your planning and teaching?

I would just like to learn about new ways to help students achieve these core practices that are efficient and to learn about new ways to assess these practices I am using so I can see which ones are the most beneficial.

12.  What concerns, if any, do you have about planning and teaching your unit?

I am mainly just concerned about making sure all of my students are challenged, especially the higher achieving ones, since there is a very large gap between the students who have practiced these things and the ones who have not.