Reflections and Notes

August 23, 2012
www.storybookonline.net
Thank you, Mr. Falker

What characteristics of personal narrative does this story illustrate?
- Gives a personal account of Trisha's daily experiences with struggling with reading (a specific event) in chronological order
- Tells about her other passions~ she loved to draw, daydream, and go for walks with grandmother but was discouraged because she did not feel smart
- Talks about how Trisha feels when she loses her grandparents
- Tells about their move to California and her hopes for her new school, but she was still unable to do the reading and she was teased
- She did not understand her reading tutoring at first~ building letters and reading all kinds of words
- She still felt dumb, but after 4 months Mr. Falker and Ms. Plessy gave her a book to read and she recognized all of the words that she had been working on
- "Knowledge is sweet"; she cried tears of happiness after she discovered that she could read
- She grew to love school
- The end of the book shows that the author is the little girl in the story

What about this craft is done well?
- Gives insight to how Trisha might read and sound out words (descriptive)
- Can feel the emotion of the story in each experience
- Speaks well about how the grandparents pass away

September 9, 2012
Write a reflection in your Writer's notebook during a time of writing in your classroom this week. You could include what the activity is that students are partaking in, what type of instruction the students receive prior to independent work, how the students seem to respond/behave during this time, etc

For the past few weeks, the entire 4th grade has been working on personal narratives and the difference between autobiographical and biographical writing. Last week, I was able to assist a 4th grade student named Tara, who is in the Special Needs program at Winterville Elementary School. She was having trouble starting her assignment, so I was able to help her decide on her topic of going to the pool with her family. We worked on adding in the all-important describing words, which made her paper ready for the next week's step of revision. When I was in the classroom this past week, I had the opportunity to facilitate some of the students as they took their revised pieces through the final draft process for their personal narratives. Mrs. Johnson allowed the students to organize themselves at the beginning of class and passed out pieces of lined paper for them to use when copying their revised drafts down for their final drafts. She gave them a good deal of independence during the writing workshop and told them that all they needed to do was to copy their draft word-for-word onto the new paper. However, I noticed that several students had improper grammar, incorrectly-spelled words, and were lacking some punctuation. I think that this is why Mrs. Johnson had me walking around the classroom; many of the students raised their hands and asked me to check over their work. I should have probably asked Mrs. Johnson if she wanted me to immediately give them the correction or if I should have directed them to a thesaurus or dictionary. The only problem was that I did not see any of these resources in the classroom. There appear to be a good amount of books and basal readers, but I do not think that there were really any tools (aside from the 3 computers) for students to facilitate their own learning and revision. Another problem is that many of these children do not have phonemic awareness and are struggling with particular combinations of letters when writing; they know when a word looks incorrect but many of them do not have a grasp on what letters they should be using instead. For example, one little girl asked me to look over her paper and I saw that she had mentioned wearing "a fancy dress and high hills" to a family reunion party. When I asked her if she could think of another way to spell the word heels, she listed every vowel except for the letter e. (When I tried to give her a hint, I stretched out the word, so as to help her hear the long e sound as heeeeeels) She was a little discouraged, but I just looked over the rest of her paper and assured her that she had spelled every other word correctly! I saw that there were several students who missed parts of the verb (such as saying 'was' or 'were' hungry, funny, happy, etc) I think that continued writing practice will be a corrector for a lot of these problems, but if students are still repeating the habit and not understanding, I think that there will be problems later on. Obviously Mrs. Johnson cannot reach every misspelled word, punctuation mistake, or run-on sentence, so I think that having my partner and me in the room during Writing Workshop will provide her students some extra help and allow us to identify the areas where they need improvement. Overall, I really enjoyed being able to see the kids' excitement with their pieces and how diligently and quietly they worked when copying their drafts; they were eager to complete as much as they could before the class was over. I think that the atmosphere of the Writer's Workshop in Mrs. Johnson's classroom is calm and it runs smoothly; the students (and I) were surprised at the way the time elapsed so quickly. I am excited to see how they respond to other assignments once they move on from personal narratives.

October 18, 2012
What strategy did I use today when I was writing?

• Reflection-based; introspective writing that allowed me to think about how I can easily find faults in myself that I would never have imagined when I was younger. I received inspiration from a photo of a baby girl and I thought about how when I looked at her, I saw the beauty and light that she radiates. I know that I have something to offer, but sometimes I criticize myself too harshly.

What do you do well as a writer?

• I think that I have the ability to identify with the subjects I write about and I try to put myself into the context of the piece.

October 30, 2012

     Over the course of my field placement, I have had the opportunity to observe Writing Workshop almost every time I am in the classroom. I think that many of the children are engaged during this time and I have been pleased to see them accomplish small milestones along the way. For example, many of them have become more confident spellers and are willing to sound out a word or even trying to write it themselves and then circle it for me to check later, rather than asking me to just spell it for them. My mentor teacher is very diligent about giving the students time each day to work on some aspect of the writing process, whether it is drafting a piece that they are working on long-term, or even something as simple as describing their current daily routine. I think this is a very important and habit-forming practice for fourth graders because they are beginning to see the connections between writing and other subjects.

     I liked that my mentor teacher was able to use one of the our study on the topic of opinion papers to really engage her students. On the first day of the lesson, she posed the question "Should boys and girls be allowed to play on the same sports teams?" While this appears to be a relevant question, my mentor teacher noticed that there was a good deal of ambiguity, as the students did not really have a strong opinion on the topic. Instead, she chose to take an approach that I think Ms. Cowhey would approve of; she presented a new topic. She asked the class to explain why the school should or should not make kids wear uniforms. This topic resonated with most all of the students, and they were able to create more concrete details to support their points of view.

     This week in my field placement class, I observed as the students created and wrote in their science "Weather Journals". My mentor teacher prompted them to draw conclusions and make predictions based on what they noticed about the weather patterns throughout the past couple of days. She also asked them to explain the similarities and differences in weather forecasts, such as the relationship between the predicted high and low temperatures from yesterday to today. The students were also particularly interested in the current event of Hurricane Sandy. I thought that my mentor teacher used this topic to do something similar to what Cowhey talks about in Black Ants and Buddhists because she  drew on the students' curiosities and helped to guide them into their own exploration about the topic. She asked them to look at how the storm system has moved over the past couple of days and then posed a question about the impacts that the storm has already had and will have on the lives of those living in the Northeast. She mentioned that the Subway system in New York was flooded, which prevented many people from using their main source of transportation. She then asked students to think about how they would feel if some of their modern conveniences were taken away from them and shifted to a social justice perspective by asking the students what they could individually do to help the victims of natural disasters. I like how she seamlessly integrated the concept of history in the presentation of current events, as well as explaining some of the scientific implications of aggressive storm systems. From here, she introduced the genre of informational research papers and gave the students an extensive list of weather patterns and scientific topics to research. My mentor teacher encouraged them to pick a topic that they personally thought was interesting. The options ranged anywhere from the various weather conditions (snow, sleet, fog, rain, hail, etc) to natural disaster events caused by the weather and climate (hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis  etc.) I think that the students are excited to begin this new stage in their writing careers, as it will allow them to step away from the easier, opinion-based writing that they are used to composing. Sometimes the students still have trouble staying on-task, but we are hopeful that the time that they spend in the computer lab next week will inspire them to complete their deadlines and make them more desirous of honoring the short time that they have to write down their thoughts.