Final Synthesis Blog

One of the most impactful moments from this semester for me, was the Ted talk about the “average” student and how if we teach in a way that suits the “average” student, then we are actually teaching for no one because every student has different skills, struggles, and needs. Therefore, there is no average student. One skill that can be very different amongst the students in any particular class, is each student’s individual reading level. We as teachers need to understand that in our class, from good readers, to bad reads, to ELL readers, they all have different needs to be able to read the same text and complete the same assignment.

            Some activities that we did and learned about that can help meet the needs of these students to help them become better readers was the Think Aloud activity and the differentiation lesson. Think Alouds are good for all students in the class because you can model to them strategies that effective readers use. According to the “Subjects Matter” book by Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Steven Zemelman, effective readers visualize the text, connect the text to their own experience and events in the real world, question and actively wonder and interrogate the text, make inferences about the text, evaluate the text, analyze the text, recall the information in the text, and self-monitor the text if there were any parts that they were confused about and needed to read again. When doing a Think Aloud with our students, we focus on of these strategies and model to the students how an effective reader uses that strategy when reading a form of text. After doing this, they should know how to use that particular strategy on their own when reading through some text. You can also teach students how to read certain class content text. For example, if students are reading about the results form a science experiment, they may not necessarily need to read the entire passage about the experiment. You can teach them how to go through the text to find out what the experiment was about (in the introduction) and how to find the results at then end. All of the specific details about the experiment and every step about how they did it may not need to be read, so you can teach them how to find and pull the important information from specific texts without having the read the entire thing. Teaching students and preparing them (or coaching them how to take the test) for the reading that they will have to do on standardized tests is also a form of reading that requires certain skills to be able to do effectively. Using Think Alouds to demonstrate to the students how an effective reader reads a standardized test question from each content area is a helpful way to model to them how they should do it. Another helpful lesson was the lesson about differentiation and the video about content differentiation in third grade science. This showed how to conduct an activity and meet all of the needs of the readers in the class. Using multimodal forms of text is a way that can help all students to read and understand what it is that you are asking them to do. Having an interactive board that the students can manipulate, reading the instructions out loud so that struggling readers don’t have to struggle to read the instructions, and providing pictures, are all ways that can meet the reading needs of the students in the class. Nowadays with each student of most schools having their own laptop or iPad with their books on it, there are many ways that you can incorporate technology and multimodal forms of text to help out all of the students. Even the ELL students have open access to use the internet to help translate words from the text to help them understand. On an iPad, Siri can even be summoned to read highlighted text, so an audio option for struggling readers is available through technology. Technology can also be used to front load with images before your lesson to help students visualize what they are about to learn. It can be used for podcasts, dot-storming, play posit, and even tweet the text, which are engaging activities for the students to participate in using their form of technology (iPad, laptop, or phone).

            Each content area requires certain skills that students must use to effectively read the text and  material for those particular content areas. These are just a few of the activities and lessons that I thought were impactful from the semester that can be used in my future classrooms to help cater to the needs of all students, to do so. Certain students will need more help than others to do basic assignments and readings, but these lessons and activities can be implemented to help all students succeed and become better readers and better content area readers.

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Incorporating Art in a Math Class

A piece of art that I found in the UGA Museum of Art was this stained glass piece depicting St. George and the Dragon done by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The complete description read, "Window depicting St. George and the Dragon, ca. 1880-1920, by Louis Comfort Tiffany and studio." Since my area of specialization is math, I was trying to think about how you could use this piece of art to also teach math concepts. There are many geometrical shapes within the stained glass that could be talked about and discussed. You could print out copies of the picture and ask students to find as many different shapes as they can and then have them discuss with a partner the different shapes that they found and also discuss what it is about that shape that makes it what it is. For example, “I found this square. I know that is a square because it has four equal straight side and four right angles.”

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I was also looking at as a way to incorporate and talk about fractions. Within the chest plate of the figure displayed, there are three main colors that are all of equal or similar shape and size. There are shades of green, yellow, and orange. As a teacher, you could discuss how together, all of these parts make up the chest plate and that the chest plate is the unit amount or whole. Then you could have the students find the fractions that each color make of the whole/unit amount, which is the entire chest plate. So, if there are 100 pieces that make up the chest plate and 21 of them are shades of yellow, then yellow is 21/100 of the chest plate. You could also lead a discussion about decimals and percentages because 21/100 is also 21% of the chest plate or .21 of the chest plate. You can have your students find these fractions, decimals, and percentages by printing out copies of the art and giving it to them. Once they have determined what each color makes of the whole, they can share with a partner their findings and how they find each fraction and then converted that into decimals and percentages.

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Book Clubs

One thing that I have found interesting about the book club that we have been doing, is that our book actually goes better with a different subject than the one that it was pitched for. Hidden Figures was pitched as a book that would be good for a math class, but as we have been reading through it, it seems like it would fit better for a social studies class to talk about civil rights and women’s rights. However, your team of teachers could get together and assign this book as a reading to discuss multiple subjects, which I think could be a fun way to incorporate the book club in all of the classes. For social studies it is heavily weighted with civil rights and women’s rights issues that can be discussed in class. For science, there are a lot of physics references that could be discussed. And for math you can also talk about the math involved with the physics as well as some of the other mathematical references (although there is less than we thought there would be.) It could be a fun way for students to read a book for all of their classes and discuss in each of them, how it applies to each subject and dive deeper into the class content that is in the book. My area of emphasis is math and I don’t think that I would do a book club in my math class, but in other classes, I think that it would be great. I like reading and discussing the content with my groupmates and I think the students would enjoy it also. Plus, reading is good for students and if we can create a fun book club assignment and let them pick the books (like we did in class), I think they will be excited to read the book and hopefully have fun doing it which could be beneficial in them developing a love for reading. Also, allowing them to see how the class content is relative in the real world. My other area of emphasis is social studies, and I think that I would use it in that class because certain books could be heavily weighted with material that lines up directly with the curriculum material.

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