Sharing Literacy Lesson Design and Implementation Through Professional Collaboration

Sharing Literacy Lesson Design and Implementation Through Professional Collaboration

            When planning lessons for diverse students, the teacher must first assess the students in order to know the academic level of the students.  ELL students may have difficulty understanding the spoken word in English so it is ideal for teachers to use pictures or hand gestures when communicating with ELL students.  Students should be encouraged to speak their home language in the classroom and at home, because it helps students to successfully become bilingual (Bauer, 2009).  It has been my experience that the Hispanic parents of my students do not encourage their children to speak Spanish at home but the older household members still speak the home language to the students (Bauer, 2009).  So often the students are caught between two worlds of language so it is the responsibility of literacy teachers to provide a safe passage for these students into the world of English attainment.

            I have gained a large amount if insight during this course and I have learned effective strategies to reach my diverse learners.  Teachers should practice anti-bias education because every student deserves the best chance to acquire and excellent education regardless of their culture and/or economic status (Derman-Sparks & Edwards, 2010).  In order for diverse students to thrive in the classroom they must feel safe, secure, and accepted.  This course made me examine my own beliefs of how to infuse culture responsiveness into lesson planning.  I never realized until participating in this course how important it is to invite students to use their home language when they are expressing themselves in the classroom.  I also learned that I needed to include pictures with vocabulary words and the language should represent the students. Students bring a wide variety of experiencess to the classroom and it should be the goal of the teacher to find out about the strengths that students bring (Mazur & Doran, 2010).   It is a great idea to conduct oral interviews in order to find out information about the student’s background, family customs, and what topics hold the student’s interest (Indiana Department of Education, Office of English Language Learning and Migrant Education, n.d.)  I plan to utilize all of these literacy strategies in order to ensure all of my students to succeed.

Lesson Plan Submission

            I chose the book Peter’s Chair by Ezra Jack Keats for this lesson because it relates to home experiences that are familiar for English and Spanish speaking students.  It also contains great vocabulary words (stretched, fussing, cradle, whispered, muttered, chair, believe, and special).  The story tells of a little boy name Peter who suddenly has a little sister and he notices that his life is changing.

            The lesson starts with examining the book cover and asking the students to discuss what they see.  Next I told the students about some of my favorite toys and invited the students to mention their favorite toys as I wrote the responses on a chart.  Then we discussed what it meant to outgrow toys and what feelings may arise.  Students are more engaged when stories are connected to home life. when they connect the story to home life.   Next I introduced the vocabulary words (The words were written in Spanish and English along with pictures.   During the reading we took a “picture walk” and we made predictions together about the story.  I asked “I wonder” questions and discussed what Peter may have be feeling during the transitions in the story.  After reading we examined the prediction chart and then we checked the validity of the predictions.  Next I administered a shared writing  exercise so the students will be able to view how sentences are formed and how to apply phonemic awareness skills.  Interactive writing is a way to show students how to convey meaning to writing and it reinforces the English language to ELL students (Williams & Pilonieta, 2012).  Interactive writing is a great model to show my young kindergartners how to initiate writing and put ideas to paper.  After this exercise the students drew pictures about what happened in the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  This lesson focused on the following Common Core State Standards:

RL.K.1- With prompting and support ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

RLK.2 – With prompting and support retell familiar stories, including key details.

RL.K.3-With prompting and support identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.

RL.K.4- Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text.

            The students were evaluated by teacher observation process and how well the students are able to discuss the story and if they could accurately identify what happened in the beginning, middle, and at the end of the story. and if they understand the process of checking predictions.  Most of this lesson went well because the students were excited and completely engaged.  To my disappointment the majority of the students could not identify the different parts of the story accurately.  I will use the overall strategies from this lesson but next time I will make sure that I model how to identify the beginning, middle, and the end of the story.

References

Bauer, E. B. (2009). Informed additive literacy instruction for ELLs. Reading Teacher, 62(5), 446–448. 

Derman-Sparks, L., Edwards, J. O., & National Association for the Education of Young Children. (2010). Anti-bias education for young children and ourselves. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Deussen, T., Autio, E., Miller, B., Lockwood, A., & Stewart, V. (2008). What teachers should know about instruction for English language learners. Retrieved from http://educationnorthwest.org/resource/669 

Indiana Department of Education, Office of English Language Learning and Migrant Education. (n.d.).Authentic assessment. Retrieved September 4, 2014, from http://www.msdwt.k12.in.us/msd/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/authentic_assessment.pdf  

Mazur, A., & Doran, P. (2010). Teaching diverse learners: Principles for best practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Williams, C., & Pilonieta, P. (2012). Using interactive writing instruction with kindergarten and first-grade English language learners. Early Childhood Education Journal, 40(3), 145–150.