Standards and Curriculum

Our school follows a curriculum from Focused Instruction for our reading instruction. The curriculum that is given either feels too constricting since it does not take into account the experiences and culture of my students or it doesn’t actually hit on all the standards. Due to this, when planning and instructing, we have to make sure that we adapt the curriculum we are given to meet our students’ needs or to even just meet certain standards that are not reached with the curriculum. The standard 5.10.4.4 (exemplified in the screenshot below) identifies using roots and affixes as a context clues strategy to determine the meaning of unknown words. Nothing within the curriculum has us explicitly teach this standard in a unit. The evidence below shows how we took standards that we were given and adapted curriculum to ensure that students were receiving the appropriate instruction.  

Since our curriculum did not provide any explicit ways to teach roots, our team decided to create our own ways to ensure students were learning the material. The curriculum stated to have students “use context clues” to find meaning of unknown words in “Esperanza Rising”. In order to scaffold this more, the first change we implemented to the curriculum was the creation of a “root wall”. The root wall (pictured below) allowed us to incorporate roots into everyday learning, rather than just a one-time experience. According to Barbara Moss in “Making Independent Reading Work”, it is important for students to learn words contextually rather than out of context like memorizing vocab words. Therefore, we do a mini game to introduce a new root for the week and put it above the root tree. Then, as students find the roots within their own independent reading books, they put it on the root tree along with a definition. The root tree has helped students take ownership over their own words and use strategies contextually. We also have students record this in their journals.

The second adaptation we made was the creation of a root word wall. While students were finding words contextually, we also wanted them to be familiar with an abundance of words within each root. Students created the word wall (pictured below) on their own by finding five words that contains the root and writing the definition on it the paper.This helped students understand how the definition of the root was embedded into the definition of the word. For example, students knew “mis” meant “not” and “mistake” meant “Not doing something correctly.” The word wall has helped students think of creative words and the process of creating definitions.

Last, we took all of these strategies and as we are reading “Esperanza Rising”, we have students use the strategies of roots to understand the meaning of unknown words. Rather than doing what the curriculum suggested and just teach students to find roots within words, we adapted the curriculum to implement scaffolds that would allow students to be successful based on where they were at coming into the school year.

Classroom Management

After spring break I thought a lot about classroom management. I wanted to make sure that after a week off of school, students were still held to the same expectations and were following routines that were set at the beginning of the year. Therefore, I’ve been trying to find a couple strategies that I can try in my classroom after the break to ensure that the classroom is still following Edtopia  listed multiple strategies that I was interested in trying out in the classroom.

I can sense that my students are beginning to get bored with repetition and are especially antsy near the end of the year. It doesn’t help that we are doing a lot of test preparation right now as well. One of the first things the article suggests, and what stood out to me the most, is “Follow the first step of hypnosis”. The idea being that it is much easier for students to focus on something they’re already doing rather than being told to do something different with multiple steps involved. Often times I have students freeze and give multi-step directions, hoping for the best. The idea with the hypnosis technique is that you can give students an easy in. For example, I have started doing a countdown and ask students to point their eyes towards me. I give no further directions until I see 100% compliance. Then I give further directions about what I need next. This strategy has been working a lot better because normally when I do a countdown from five, students are already looking at me so to say “point your eyes toward me” is an easy in that doesn’t waste much time. That way they are also ready to hear next steps from me and aren’t distracted by anything else.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that after lunch and recess, my students tend to be extremely energized. The quiet, calm feeling from the morning seems to go out the door after lunch and it takes extra energy on my part to instill that same sense of calm. Even just coming through the classroom door, students have a sense of energy that wasn’t there in the morning. I liked number 5 on Edtopia and wanted to try it out. The author had each child line up outside the door before entering and answer a content related question before being allowed through the door. I really liked this idea because it could be a good way to review content before MCA’s, it would be a calm way to enter the classroom and each of them can independently get started on the prompt on the board without getting distracted by each other. If they don’t follow these expectations exactly, they get sent to the back of the line which annoys them so this typically works out well. Based on this tip, I’ve noticed that students are excited to anticipate what the question might be as they come up the stairs, are less likely to get distracted by each other in the classroom and naturally calm themselves down. It has become less taxing on my part to calm them down.

While I have been focusing on incorporating these two strategies into my classroom, it takes time. According to Harry Wong’s research in effective classroom management, teachers should use a three-step approach for teaching classroom procedures. This includes explaining, rehearsing, and reinforcing (repetition) until students have it be a habit or routine (The First Days of School). So, before I started the line up and ask questions routine, I explained to students what it would look like, why we are doing it and expectations on following the routine. After explaining, we rehearsed what it would look like and repeated it every day until we got in a routine of doing it. What I liked about using this article to inform instruction is that it’s never too late to introduce new routines and have a classroom reset. While it is helpful for it to happen within the first  months of schools, it works just as effectively near the end months of school too.