Teaching Strategies
Local Partnerships in Our Community
The Clinician 1 of Behavioral Health of our local counseling partnership, Foothill Family Community Health Center, has taken it upon herself to learn our PeaceBuilders program used at our school so that she can build a solid learning of what it looks like for our young students to become peace builders as a part of our school culture. She has initiated summer camps for students whom teachers recommend, and students she has been working with during the school year that could benefit from and become peace builder role models in the coming year. She has also initiated collaboration in the first trimester with Transitional Kindergarten and Kindergarten teachers at our school to lead lessons in our classes about being peace builders. She also offers lessons as needed or requested at times throughout the school year. We will work together with our counselor and grade level teachers to have her lead lessons transitioning us into this unit with reference to vocabulary and phrases in our PeaceBuilder pledge. For a fun entry event into this unit, we can also include our third and fourth grade buddies in this collaboration with their published work done last year using this same idea of vocabulary and phrase-by-phrase interpretation.
We are also fortunate to have a partnership with our city art museum, San Jose Museum of Art, where they send docents as art teachers to work with our students once a week for eight weeks. One of the assignments in their curriculum last year was for students to create themselves as superheroes with a specific cause. This year, we can collaborate and coordinate our peace builder type of hero as a theme for that assignment. They have great fun expressing themselves through art, according to the specific instructions of how to use and combine the tools of an artist. They can further practice their skills in illustrating their stories according to the genre of the week, expressing themselves in this important mode of early writing.
Project Based Learning
Project Based Learning (PBL) starts with this entry event into a unit and is a great strategy to help teachers plan effective and engaging lessons as a process to reach a high quality end product. As an example of an end product of a project, students will create a way to present their self-stories as portraits of peace builders and members of our community to a public audience. This may well be another fun “wax museum” activity, with students expressing their own important bio information. Coordinating my unit in conjunction with our grade level PBL will be done collaboratively in the beginning of the trimester or the trimester preceding the unit and will involve plugging in the components of the unit into our PBL template which features more detailed elements of competencies.
The PBL planning involves eight main areas of competencies for the teacher to address. The first element is “Significant Content” which ties the project to the Common Core and Content Standards, such as our Writing W2: Write informative/explanatory texts in which they name a topic, supply some facts about the topic and provide some sense of closure. The second element is “A Need to Know” which involves creating a list of questions students have and considering what students need to be successful in reaching a high quality end product. The third element is “A Driving Question” that is open-ended yet focuses on the heart of the compelling project, for instance “How can we share our personal peace builder stories and dreams with the community?” The fourth element is “Student Voice and Choice” which allows students to express what they have learned incorporating their own style. The fifth element is ‘21st Century Competencies” ensuring collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity/innovation. The sixth element is “In-Depth Inquiry” which drives students’ authentic search and discovery in answering their own questions. The seventh element is “Critique and Revision” which involves planning for drafts, peer feedback, and revision along the way to a high quality end product. The eighth element is “Public Audience” which means to invite parents, peers, and representatives of the community for the exhibition or presentation, including a question and answer time at the end. A link to more PBL information is included in the “Internet Resources” section.
Daily 5™ Reading Strategy and the CAFÉ Menu
The Daily 5™ strategy is a way to structure literacy time with reading, writing, and independent work. Students have five different reading and writing choices to help them reach their independent goals. The teacher helps students develop skills to meet their goals through whole-group and small-group instruction, as well as one-on-one conferring. The five different choices for students are: Read to Self, Work on Writing, Read to Someone, Listen to Reading, and Word Work. In these groups, students will have a chance to share, read, write, and revise their peace builder stories in literary categories of folktales, poems, and autobiographies/self portraits of peace builders as the unit progresses.
The CAFE menu consists of four categories corresponding to the letters of CAFE. Comprehension (C) is the category for skills to help students understand what they read. The kid friendly statement is “I understand what I read.” Accuracy (A) is the category for skills to help students read the words. The kid friendly statement is “I can read the words.” Fluency (F) is the category for skills to help students read with accuracy, expression and understanding. The kid friendly statement is “I can read accurately, with expression, and understand what I read.” Expanded Vocabulary (E) is the category for skills to help students understand, find, and use interesting words. The kid friendly statement is “I know, find, and use interesting words.” The menu is referred to when the teacher has one-on-one conferences. (Please see Internet Resources)
I will be using strategies of Daily 5™ (what students do) and CAFE (how students use specific skills) in conjunction with my Guided Reading groups. The class is divided into small flexible groups that receive differentiated instruction and support to meet their individual goals. This is done during our daily Universal Access time where I meet with a different group each day, allowing me to meet with each group and each student at least once each week.
Guided Reading
Guided reading is a teaching strategy to use with all readers for all levels, differentiating instructions for all students to strengthen their reading skills, comprehension and fluency skills, and problem solving skills to figure out words, concepts, or ideas not previously encountered. Teachers use leveled groups to meet students’ individual needs, specifically building up students’ reading strategies in order for them to become independent readers. “Guided Reading supports good reading habits such as problem solving, comprehension, and decoding.”21
I will be using Guided Reading during my daily Universal Access time, which means that students will be divided into five leveled groups. I will combine Daily 5™ with my Guided Reading time to give student groups choices for reading, writing, and independent work. The group that meets with me for that day has Guided Reading support and assessment as well as differentiated reading and writing to meet their Daily 5™ goals and targeted CAFE component. This all takes place as students progress through the days and weeks of this unit, working on literature elements and writing skills.
Gradual Release of Responsibility: “I Do, We Do, You Do”
The Gradual Release strategy used in our primary grades begins with direct instruction usually to the whole group while modeling expectations, following with opportunities to practice the skills and expectations together as much as needed, until finally students are released to do the work independently. This is a great way to teach identifying literary genres activities, using specific reading strategies, and identifying elements necessary in writing in various literary modes. “It is clear from previous research that modeling is a major feature of direct instruction. It is equally clear that after modeling is completed, students need opportunities to work with new learning in a supportive learning environment and gradually have opportunities for increasing levels of independence.”22
Visual Thinking Strategy
This unit implements the Visual Thinking Strategy (VTS) in a modified manner. VTS is based on Philip Yenawine’s book, Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines. Use the techniques to draw out prior knowledge, vocabulary, and critical thinking. This strategy allows several entry points for all students to feel comfortable and confident in sharing their ideas beginning with what they see in the illustration in a read aloud book or a photograph projected large enough for whole class engagement. Students verbalize with minimal teacher interruption what they see in the illustrations. They may notice and mention lines, colors, characters, actions, etc. and all answers will clue me in on their prior knowledge and understandings. For example, picture book covers can be projected to help the class study and pull out information to help make predictions about the books. They can also practice their observational skills with the background of gender roles, multicultural role models, and hero characteristics as the unit progresses. The VTS activities are helpful to also build in young student skills in listening, taking turns, sharing, and collaboration.
Using a modified VTS for my unit involves prefacing some lessons with our specific concepts of gender roles, cultural representations, and heroes. When gathering students closely around the projected image, ask these three open ended questions: “What’s going on in this picture?”, “What do you see that makes you say that?”, and “What more can we find?” Paraphrase the students’ comments neutrally, points at the area being discussed, and link and frame each response. Students need to look carefully at the artwork, describe what they observe, back up their observation with evidence, listen respectfully to others’ input, and discuss multiple possible interpretations. This strategy also helps students practice Common Core standard RI6: Distinguish between information provided by pictures or other illustrations and information provided by the words in a text. I look forward to the rich discussions sparked by observations, disseminating meaning and purpose set forth by the illustrator and author together.
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