Week 8

1. Having an affective writing program is very important and crucial to the students learning. The important components of a good writing program are personal connections, conventions, and inventions. 2. I think it is important to block out time periods for the students to have to do their writing assignments and also some personal writings of their own. I would make sure if there was any down time that the students were writing in their journals. 3. You can have the students write about their own personal experiences that have related directly to the subject. If they have been through the same thing then they can discuss that in their writing. 4. Through students work you can find the most common mistakes your students are making and then implement lessons and tools for the students to use to correct these writing errors. You can also see which students are understanding and comprehending assignments and reading and those who are not. 5. When you do any type of creative writing or personal writings I think is the best time that you promote student inventions and experimentation. Also I think that once you have your students confident in their writing skills that this will allow them to be a little bit more risky with their writing and they will really be ale to use their abilities to their fullest potential.

QRI 5 Analysis

The student observed doing this QRI 5 analysis was a thrid grader and an ESL student. She was started off on the first grade level reading word lists, where she was able to idenfity the words on the list, so moving on to the passage was the next step. With no prior knowledge of the students reading abilities you could quickly tell her certain habbits. She easily becomes discouraged but with some encouragment she is able to read the words and move on. The first passage that she read was on level one and was called "Mouse in a House." When asked about the topic she was able to show she was familiar with 65%. As she went on to the passage you could notice that she struggled with words and their endings, for example she would say went when the correct word on the paper was wanted. When finished with the passage she had a total of 9 misuces, which pur her on the insturcional reading leve. She was able to recall about 22 of the 44 retelling ideas and scored at an instructional level for the questions that she answered. The assessment was moved on to the second grade evaluation level since we were working with a thrid grade student. She scored only 22% when asked the concept questions for the story. She seemed to struggle more on this level and was unable to retain specific information fromt he reading passage, so her comprehension was not that great. She had a total number of 13 miscues when reading the passage "Whales and Fish" and she only was able to recall 11 out of the 49 ideas on her own. however she seemed to be able to answer the questions about the story most accurately. She once again scored on the instructional reading level. Overall one would say that this student is not reading on grade level. While she was able to get through the passages and struggled over certain parts, overall her performance was not that great. I would reccommend that this student not only works on their reading skills but their confidence as well. Confidence seemed to play a major roll in this students abilities, she second guessed herself many times and would stumble over words in the passages taht she was able to identify in the word lists. Also working closely with the teacher as well as the ESL teacher and practicing will help greatly.

Week 6: COCA

This assessment type that is described in the article I think is a great way to evaluate a readers comprehension levels. The COCA method allows teachers to work closely with students to get a better understanding for what kind of reader that particular student is. This method offers two different books to chose from, one on Dragonflies and the other on Salmon. I like that you may choose which one you may want to use for your different students. Also I think it is a good idea that the book has some fill in the blank areas, so the students are not simply just recognizing words and trying to read text but they need to show they are comprehending the text by being bale to take a word from their own brain and putting it in the text themselves. Also the idea that teachers should be prompting the student reader and asking him or her questions through out the evaluation to assess their comprehension levels is a great method. I have never seen an assessment where the words were not provided on the pages for the students to use as a visual aid so I would deffinitely be interested in either putting this method to use myself or observing another teacher using this method to see how well it works with different types of learners.

Christopher Myer's: A Writer's Story

This video clip provided lots of positivity when it comes to students being different from one another and yet all being relateable to not only eachother but to the stories that they are reading. I really liked how the author in the video clip exposed his insecurities and struggles as a child growing up through his own stories that he wrote and to the student's in the class to let them know being different is okay. I also thought it was a great idea that he had them come up with a story based on a character that they made up as a class and gave a certain problem too. In my classroom I would definitely do an activity with the class to have them be the writers of a short story in a similar way. To have them come up with a character, a problem for the character, and the story line is a great way to get the students involved and motivated to read.

Question: Would you try to do this as an activity in your classroom? If so, how might you go about doing it, similarly to what we saw in the clip or do you have any other ideas?