Comprehension Connections

This year our school is implementing a Comprehension Toolkit. The strategies we will be using come from the book Comprehension Connections; Bridges to Strategic Reading by Tanny McGregor. We will be using these strategies for math, reading, science, social studies, and health. The vocabulary that my students will need to know for comprehension are metacognition, schema, inferring, questioning, determining importance, visualizing, and synthesizing. This set of words will be new to my first grade, but after reading this book, I think the concrete examples will be a hit with my class. School wide we have had a word of the week from the vocabulary kit by Isabel Beck and the children really enjoy learning new words and their meanings. My plan to introduce this new set of comprehension words will follow the plan of the McGregor's book. She uses concrete examples that can be referred to each time we use each strategy. In order to engage students in academic lessons my scaffolding strategies include modeling language, visuals, gestures, and demonstrations. (Herrell & Jordan, 2008). With the help of McGregor's book, I will help my sudents make connections with the things they already know and explain that it is the same as your schema. there are wonderful posters that I will refer to often and bookmarks to help students with strategies and the new vocabulary. As first graders, they will be learning new words every day. I will have them write new words with a picture in their own Quick Word Book.

Will the new strategies, concrete examples, and visuals for vocabulary be enough for my ELL students?

Herrell, A., & Jordan, M. (2008). 50 Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners(3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

CREDE Standards in My Classroom

The Five Standards for Effective Pedagogy from the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence: http://crede.org

1. Teachers and Students Working Together; Joint Productive Activity
2. Developing Language Skills Across all Curriculum; Language Development
3. Connecting Lessons to Students' Lives; Contextualization.
4. Engaging Students with Challenging Lessons; Challenging Activities
5. Emphasizing Dialogue over Lecture; Instructional Conversation

The standard that I feel is best implemented in my class is 5: Instructional Conversation. In my first grade classroom, the desks are arranged so that conversations between myself and a small group of students can happen daily. My students are reminded of the goals for the day by reading our objectives several times during the assignment. We review class expectations for groups. My students are guided by strips of paper for genuine conversations.This helps keep groups be student centered. The strips of paper say: Ask a question, Say a fact, Give your opinion. This helps my first grade class continue talking to their peers. They also give positive feedback to their fellow students by saying "What I liked about your book was... or The part I liked was when you said..."
The area that could use some improvement would be 3: Contextualization. For my first grade class there are many parents that come the first few days of school and then are not very involved. I feel I need to do a better job learning about my students' families homes and community. I currently send a newsletter home to the students and families to outline the learning activities for the month. Sending an invitation for parents to come at least once a quarter to see the class and their child's work would be a good way to get families involved. If parents and families feel welcome to come to my class it could open the lines of communication between students, teachers and families. My first grade will make connections based on what they already know. I need to build on what they have learned at home and from their families to make meaningful connections.
For Standard 4: Challenging Activities, I feel we can always make a lesson better. After teaching a lesson, I am constantly thinking of how I will teach the next one. There are some things that are already in place like higher-level thinking questions for comprehension. Another area that I challenge my students is vocabulary. We have a vocabulary word of the week and we encourage our students to use the new words they are learning.
(Dr. Roland Tharp, CREDE)
http://crede.berkley.edu/standards/standards.html
Herrell, A., & Jordan, M. (2008). 50 strategies for teaching English language learners (3r ed.). Upper Saddel River, NJ: Pearson.