Module 4

Literacy Across the Curriculum-
This is a great plan that incorporates reading, writing, science, social studies, and the arts.  This unit clearly defines why literacy across the curriculum is important and focuses on skills in various content areas that are about a topic that many students would have a high level of engagement with.  Literacy is important in all content areas and not just in reading or writing class.

Webquests are a great way to encourage inquiry within your students as well as hit on various levels of Bloom's Taxonomy and incorporate various skills across the curriculum.  Students typically find webquests fun and exciting and are engaged while completing them.  They are however, a big task to take on as a teacher.  I have incorporated pieces of webquests into my reading and social studies stations but have not used a full webquest for students to work on.

RTI and Reading Strategies-
RTI has become a hot topic in education.  Years ago many people believed that taking data on a low student would qualify him or her for special education services.  Now with the redesigned RTI system, data is colelcted based on the specific needs of a student.  The intensity of the interventions and data collections increases as a student moves through the RTI process.  The data collection and the interventions are very prescribed and calculated.  It has become increasingly more difficult to get to the SST portion of the RTI pyramid due to the success of interventions that are being put into place early on in the school year.

My school uses the RTI pyramid that is found in the GADOE information.  We are required to collect and analyze the data before coming to a meeting about the child or before SST.  I have used interventioncentral.org and find it very helpful.  It has many probes for various subjects and skills.  It takes some of the work out of the RTI process with the many probes that are already created for teacher and student use.  I have also used easycbm as a reference for reading fluency passages.  Many of these websites will allow you to input the student information and it will track and graph the data that is collected.

The instruction provided through RTI supports the differentiated instruction models that we have discussed in class as well as the ones we implement in our own classrooms.  The goal of RTI is to decrease the number of students that are being placed into special education programs without the support of various interventions that should be implemented to allow for student success.

Many students at my school go through the RTI process around 3rd or 4th grade but in 5th grade we have many students who still need basic instruction of reading skills.  Our ongoing assessments of students determine their needs in various areas and it is important that as an upper grade teacher that I know how to effectively teach basic reading strategies because there are many students that come into 5th grade not knowing phonics patterns or decoding strategies. As the curriculum gets harder they fall farther behind. Children need constant modeling and guided practice of skills before they can be expected to use those skills efficiently as they read, speak, and write.

Flexible Teaching Strategies
As our culture changes and evolves so do our students.  It is important for us to be up to date on the newest technologies and instructional practices that we are using with our students.  Many of these new practices go hand in hand with the RTI process.  Our teaching methods must change and evolve in order to reach the most students as possible in order for them to be successful.  I have seen a drastic change in the way my school has taught math over the last few years, this also applies to how we have taught reading and writing.

I really like how interactive the writing lesson is for the students.  You can tell that this teacher has built up to this lesson and the students are very engaged as they are encouraged to collaborate and communicate with each other as well as participate in the creation of a sentence. The teacher used basic sentences and then expanded the students' sentences to create more detailed sentences. This is by far a very different approach to sentence creation than when I was in first grade.  I do not remember this much interaction when learning how to create sentences.


Strategic Reading Instruction-
This powerpoint discussed how teachers must scaffold the learning and doing of reading.  Students need support in the early years (or later in their education if they are a lower reader).  Students need to be taught the skills of fluency, comprehension, and phonics and phonemic awareness and need to be gradually released as they learn throughout the process.  I liked how this power point laid out what other students can be doing when a teacher has a small guided reading group.  This is also a perfect time during the literacy block to incorporate other content areas such as science or social studies.  Students can be working on word work or listening to a book on tape that has skills or concepts from other content areas.  During this reading workshop time students should also be given the chance to read books of their choosing to encourage a love of reading.

Students need practice with reading and vocabulary strategies.  The reading strategies vocabulary power point provided a lot of ways that teachers can get students acquainted with their reading in order for them to think as they reada dn become a more involved reader. Fluency encompasses a wide range of reading skills and allows for a student to be a more efficient reader if they are able to fluently read a passage or text.