Sensory and emotional imagery

I think using sensory and emotional images to enhance comprehension is a very good strategy to use in the class room. We do not have art class at my school so I think it is very important for the students to incorporate art in their everyday learning. I think incorporating art into the students learning is a very good way to show their knowledge of a specific subject. Using imagery also allows students to use their imagination and interpret their own thinking onto a piece of paper. In my classroom we have done a few extension projects on books that we have read. For example we made anti-bullying posters after readings books about bullies. I also think this is an important idea because it is very useful for assessing the student that may not be so good with their words. It gives them a chance to express their ideas in a different way other than writing or talking. In my first grade class many of the students still struggle with spelling and writing. Often times writing frustrates many of them because they feel that they are not successful.

I also think using sensory or emotional images is a good way for students to build upon their prior knowledge. They can take what they know from the story and add their own interpretation of the subject.

For my guided lead teaching I plan to use this concept in at least one of my lessons. I will be doing meaningful read alouds about pioneer life and families. I will use what the students already know about their own lives at home and about their families and will want them to draw their interpretation of what a home or school would have looked like back them and what their home or school looks like now. Like I said before the students at my school do not have the opportunity to have art class. I hope to see the students that are really excited about drawing to excel with these projects.

Text to Life Connections

In chapter 7 Bringing Text to Life it talks about using sensory and emotional images to enhance comprehension. I chose to read this chapter because this is something that I found useful for me as an Elementary student and I still do today. I think the main part of this chapter brings the idea that not every student learns the same way. Some students may get the same concepts and ideas from an artistic, musical, or some other type of reference that the student has dealt with personally. “Paintings can conjure images from the senses and from emotions,” (page 176). I have found that you can have quite a discussion off of one painting or drawing. It is also something that adds to text or information. Images or music can make a connection for a student to help them relate to the topic you are talking about. I think this type of learning takes a lot of effort on the teachers part, and obviously can not be done for every single topic and lesson because there is not enough time in the day for that. Another powerful thing I found in this section was the idea that “teachers know that students who struggle are often disengaged and don’t choose to read outside of school (or within for that matter!).” (176). I think teachers often make this judgement very early and then just keep punishing instead of finding a solution. But I liked that it pointed out that, “yet we can’t take for granted that students create images spontaneously as they read.” (176). If you think about how much TV, video games, drawings, etc that kids are exposed to you will realize that your students more often then not are going to be making mental images of something and will be able to relate some topics to something in their life. If you think that your students can not make images because they do not know how or have not had experience, then it would be important to looking into how to start making those images. Maybe by modeling yourself what images you see when you read a certain thing. Overall, I really liked this chapter and I think it brought up a lot of important parts about how images and text to life connections can really help kids comprehend literature. A lot of time words can be very overwhelming for a variety of reasons, and if you can find something that you can relate to then it will make that large text a little bit smaller.

inferences and comprehension.

The chapter I read was about making inferences about a text to help the reader deepen his or her understanding. The teaching method that was focused on the most was the Think-aloud. I have seen Think-alouds modeled in my classroom by my head teacher but I had not been fully aware their purpose until I read this chapter. To be honest I don’t know if my students have picked up on the purpose of it yet either unless it was addressed in kindergarten.
I learned that making inferences is an important part of reading because it helps the reader retain information that he or she may not otherwise be able to connect other prior knowledge. When a reader begins to ask questions about a story he or she will probably find that he or she has more in common with the characters, plot and setting of the book than was originally thought.
For my Unit plan I am putting together the literary theme of Realistic fiction and the Social studies theme of “Long ago.” One of the aspects I am expected to teach for the Realistic fiction part is the ideas of schema and making inferences. It’s helpful for me to have reasons I can give the students as to why what we are learning about is important.
In my classroom the comprehension strategies that students receive are most commonly given during small group guided reading times. The strategies they are given during this time are mainly related to decoding unknown words instead of comprehension. Some specific decoding strategies include looking at word chunks, using picture cues, and using context clues.

The Relationship between Fluency and Comprehension

A fluent reader is “any person who can read smoothly, without hesitation, and with comprehension.” If students are to comprehend what they read they must be able to accurately identify the words they read. Both the chapter and articles I read seem to define fluency with the word comprehension, insisting that students cannot be fluent without having an understanding of what they are reading first. There are four components of fluency that include accuracy, automaticity or speed, prosody, and comprehension. It’s important to remember that a small mistake might not appear to matter when a student is reading, but even the slightest misstep, something as simple as mispronouncing a character’s name can turn out extremely problematic for comprehension. Even incorrect pausing has been known to negatively affect comprehension and therefore fluency.
In my classroom, students are assessed with an AIMSweb standard test and DSA running records to determine their reading level. Based on their score they are put into guided reading groups. In their reading groups they read and are taught at their instructional reading level, however when the students read to a partner or take a book home the book must be one level (based on the Fountas and Pinnell leveled books) so that they can practice their fluency. The idea is that if the book is overall less challenging at a lower level they will be able to build their accuracy, rate, and comprehension skills rather than learn new skills. This way students are learning new reading skills during their reading groups for part of the day and then practicing and perfecting fluency skills during Daily 5 and at home.
It is crucial that we keep up on students reading through continuously assessing their reading levels and fluency with running records so that they continue to grow and be placed within the correct levels.

Reading assessments

There are many forms of literacy assessments used at my school. Right off the bat the teachers conduct running records with the students. They do this so they know what level the students read at. It helps the students find an appropriate level of reading for the students. We use these records to place students in reading groups. Running records are also a good way to monitor the students’ progress within the reading groups. They will allow us to notice if the books are too easy or hard for the students and it will also show us if a particular students makes great strides and should be moved into a higher level group more quickly. We also used Aimsweb in our school. This assesses letter sounds, letter naming, phoneme segmentation, and nonsense words. They are given one minute for these tests. For example, one of the sections asks the student to read as many letters as they can in a minute. The teacher proctoring the assessment marks the mistakes and then scores the final results.

There have been many gaps between the assessments that we have given our students. The running records, for instance, provide evidence of what a student knows about letter, sound, and word recognition to help them understand the text. This assessment tests some of the reader’s comprehension of the text. The Aimsweb assessment does not test for any comprehension whatsoever. As a result of these two tests there is a student in our class who is one of the top three most advanced readers but he placed in the “red zone” for the Aimsweb testing. I think it is important to assess all of these reading strategies and it is also important to take all of them into account, not just one. It is important to use all of the assessments together so that all aspects of reading ability are covered. These assessments should be used as tools to help your students, not just as a way to “place” them. Using multiple assessments lets the teacher see more specific areas that a student might need help on. For example if the student can read fluently he could still have trouble comprehending what he is reading but it is important for these two aspects to work cohesively.

Comperhension and Fluency

Reading fluency it the ability to read quickly with few errors and effective comprehension. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand a text, both at a surface level and a deeper level. In order for students to achieve reading fluency for a more challenging text, they must have some strategies for how to make sense of information they are not familiar with. As was addressed in chapter two some students may find comprehension strategies to slow them down but this is probably is because the book they are reading is a book they are already fluent with. Because each student may struggle with different aspects of a specific text, it is important to understand what aspects of a text each student is struggling with. Chapter 3 told how certain students may get hung up on surface structure such as the letters, words, or grammar in a text where others may have problems with meaning of concepts and the purpose of a piece or they may lack background knowledge that is important for understanding the author’s intent.

In my classroom each student has been assessed to find their reading level. We have a book box for each student where we put books that are at their level that they can practice reading during daily 5 time. Each student also has their own book bag. For those we have the students take a book home that is one level below where they are. This is to give students opportunity to gain fluency with their parents at home. They are allowed to bring the books back as frequently or infrequently as they want. During daily 5 time students also get time to meet with the teacher to read an at-level book where the teacher will give the student specific comprehension strategies pertaining to his or her specific needs.

Walpole and McKenna

The big idea from this article was using an informal reading inventory to determine individualized plans for students when it comes to assessing word recognition. Since I knew the article was discussing word recognition, I figured it was most likely something I could apply to my first grade classroom. To me the strategy explained in the article was efficient and an organized approach when you are working with a whole class. All the students read from the same grade level reading passage and after that passage is read by the student apporximately 5 minutes of reading then the teacher will decide if it indicated the student is fluent at his/her grade level or not. If they are not then they should be given some type of sight word assessment and some type of phonics assessment dealing with decoding strategies and from there, there are four categories they could fall into: Weak sight vocabulary and weak decoding, good sight vocabulary and weak decoding, weak sight vocabulary and good decoding and good sight vocabulary and good decoding. Depending on where the students fit as a result of the informal assessments they will be narrowed down to what they specifically need help with.


I think this strategy could have been very effective in my classroom. First grade focuses a lot on word recognition and what it means to be a fluent reader. We also did a lot of assessments anyways and I feel like I do not have any specific information about the reasons why individual kids are having trouble with fluency. We began assessing right away with just having the kids read lists of 200 sight words but this strategy seems like it would save time since the students who read through the passage fluently would not have to go through all the 200 sight words as another assessment. Also, by doing a sight word assessment as well as a phonics assessment for the students that had trouble with the passage, will help the teacher understand why they are not quite fluent readers yet. I have students in my class that I am not sure where they are struggling but by doing the assessments in this order and if i did the sight word and phonics assessment right after each other I think that would help so when I am done meeting with that student right away for a couple minutes i could reflect and make notes about what was weak or good. I think starting with this strategy narrows it down to find out what assistance and extra practice is needed instead of waiting and seeing if I notice along the way where they are struggling.


As a professional depending on my grade level I would need to figure out how to determine what an appropriate passage would be to use to do the informal reading inventory. I would also need to make sure I am consistent when determining if a student is fluent or not.


For my unit I am focusing on class discussion and within those discussions some of the goals is to have the students connect the text to themselves which can relate to writing in the sense that if they do journal write the topic could be about how they connected to the story of the week. I will also be reading aloud so there will be a lot oral vocabulary some of the student may try to incorporate the oral vocabulary I will be teaching into their writing. As writers i know my students need more practice in adding details to their stories and that can connect directly to group discussions about the book of the week or when we make a graphic organizer and how we are sharing ideas to add details to our graphic organizer or pointing out the details in the books we read so they can try to create more details in their own writing.

Mindful Reading

This chapter is about monitoring and revising comprehension. The first thing that really stuck out to me in this chapter is on page 54, "Like surgeons, proficient readers are adaptive." They are able to look at a problem and think through it. They are also able to solve comprehension problems independently. A big part of comprehension and fluency is conferring with students. Especially in primary classrooms, students greatly benefit from conferring. In order for students to become more proficient in comprehension they have to work on some strategies. Some ideas are to make sure students know that when they read and listen they have to make sure that what they are reading makes sense. For this it is important to to think about the characters, setting, plot, conflict, and solution.

These are all strategies that we are using in my classroom. Like in chapter 4, my CT and I confer with our students daily. Our students are still not familiar with comprehension strategies. Later on in the semester we are going to review different comprehension strategies. I think this is important because if you have a student who can read to a high level and then not remember what it was about, then they are not being a successful reader.

I think comprehension and fluency work together as well as being different. I think comprehension is thinking about the details in the book and and recognizing the different parts of the text. Fluency is important because students need to read at a rate where they can understand the text. These two things work together.

Salach and Marino

The article I read was actually a compilation of 3 other short articles written by different writing teachers. The first teacher shared her belief that conferences are an essential part of writing workshops and shouldn’t be avoided no matter how challenging they might be. He also lists 15 guidelines that should be kept in mind to have a successful conference such as “find specific things to praise, keep them short, etc.” The second teacher prefers to think of the conferences as “conversations” that mimic the personal talk he has with friends and colleagues. He wanted to stress the importance of remembering that the point of writing conferences is to teach writers strategies that they can use even the next day when their conference is over. Our goal is to help them become better writers on their own. He said “we are also writers, talking to writers” and that our personal experiences with writing are important to share with students. He also suggested that even though the goal is not perfectly constructed, errorless writing, conferences themselves should have a predictable two part structure consisting of 1-talking with students about the “work” they’ve done and 2-how to be better writers. The final teacher focused on the fact that beginning writers need to learn from teachers to value their own experiences and voice, but that this can be a long process and doesn’t come with step by step instructions. She brings up the point that too often when students are having trouble thinking of a topic to write about frustrated/busy teachers find themselves saying “just go sit down and think,” which only leads to more wandering and complaining from students sighing, “ I don’t have anything to write about.” Instead she suggests: talking! She calls this “rehearsal” where by simply talking to your students and finding out what they do know, they too hear out loud what they know and therefore could write about. The idea is that they get to “rehearse” what they will write. She too concluded with 3 underlying principles to consider: 1-“talk is important in rehearsal,” 2-“be the learner,” and 3-“put yourself in situations where you are writing and getting response.” The common theme between the three was that as teachers we need to remember that the goal of conferences is to “teach the writer, not the writing.” This exact phrase was actually quoted in each!

In my classroom we use the Lucy Calkins which is actually a writer’s workshop curriculum. A major component of Lucy Calkins is writing conferences that we carry out on an individual bases as we walk around the classroom. Since the beginning of the year I have already been doing a version of a writing conference with the students, but I know realize that maybe I have been focusing too much on the “writing” and not the “writer.” Mt CT and I never actually discussed what to talk about with the students during the conferences, just to try and check in with them to see if they were accomplishing and understanding the tasks given to them in the beginning mini-lesson that day. With the tips from these articles it seems like I was helping them solve the small short term issues the students were having at the time , such as sounding out a word, or mechanics, when in reality it would be better to talk to them about experiences and the process of writing so that they build their confidence as a writer.

As a professional I need to really sit down and take the time to reflect on myself as a writer. Its been so long time since I’ve actually written creatively or thought about what I enjoy or struggle with as a writer, that right now I fear it might be difficult to connect with my students “writer to writer.” These articles really prove how important that is, so that even as I put on my teacher shoes I can continue to grow as a professional by remembering being a student.

Even though my unit will mostly be focused on comprehension, the module made me realize how comprehension and writing can be very tied to each other. Generally, we assess the students’ comprehension orally and informally, but I could ask them to write in their journal about what they took away from a story. That would then require me to have an understanding of their writing ability and preferences as well. Some students share their ideas better verbally and some better through writing and others may struggle just the opposite. As I plan my instruction I think it’s important that I provide my students with a variety and “jigsaw” of assessments of sorts.

Kovalcik and Certo

The article titled The Poetry Café is open is about students learning the art of writing poetry. The students are in second grade and they are doing a unit about poems from Lucy Calkins. In order to teach the students about poetry there are a few mini lessons for the teachers to use to teach these techniques to the students. The first mini lesson is called “color and rhyme”. The teachers use poems to model the technique of rhyming. They use poems that use color words because these words have a large handful of exact rhymes which would make it easier for students to use words that they know. The students are then given time to create their own poems that involve rhyming. The second mini lesson is called “repetition and alliteration”. They started this time by reading the students a poem which demonstrates repetition and alliteration. “Colorful use of words adds richness in language within the framework or poetic expressions. (90)” . They then told the students that the definition of alliterations is, “two or more words or syllables, near each other, with the same beginning consonants”. The students were then directed to write their own poems using this aspect of poetry. The third mini lesson is called “Can you say ‘onomatopoeia?”. The teachers began this mini lesson by having students come to the front of the room and model making a noise such as clapping your hands or stomping your feet. They then informed the students that the words that make those sounds are called onomatopoeia. The fourth and final mini lesson is called “collaborative poetry”. The class then created a web as a whole. In the middle of the web were the words” our class is like…”. They added to the web as student came up with ideas. The class then made a class poem together. They then shared their poetry to their family in a café like setting.

I would definitely use this approach at my grade level. I am in first grade and we use the Lucy Calkins curriculum for our writing piece. I think the main piece of writer’s workshop is the modeling. In my class the students model the correct way to do something and they model the incorrect way so that other student can see what they should and shouldn’t be doing. The students respond very well to the way the Lucy Calkins curriculum is set up. We just started the introduction to petry in our writers workshop. The lessons in first grade do not go as in depth as those that were demonstrated in the article but they were given a few examples of poems. Some of the students were very eager to begin writing poems. If I were doing this same thing in my classroom I would do it about the same. I wouldn’t try to introduce such complex ideas to them because they still have a lot of growing to do in their writing but I would maybe include one or two more lessons about poetry than they currently have. I think the idea of doing a poetry café give the students such a sense of ownership in their work. If they concentrate and work on one poem I think they could make it great by adding details to it and some of their known words. My students are also very good at detecting rhyming words so I think they would be able to add that technique into their writing also. By inviting their parents and friends it gives them the chance to brag about everything they’ve done. I think this is important and writers to share you work because it provides positive feedback and it can also provide them with constructive criticism which will lead to them growing as writers.

In order to use this in my classroom I think I would need to know more about poetry myself. I also think it would be good to use examples of poems that are on the same level of their writing. Somewhat detailed but generally still simple and using easier words than were used in the article. I also think it is very important to be able to confer with the students in a productive but not overpowering manner. I have experienced some conferring in my classroom with the Lucy Calkins piece but it a very hard task to master. It is very hard to ask students leading questions in order to provoke their thinking.

I think in order to prepare for my Guided Lead Teaching lessons I need to read the Lucy Calkins books carefully and learn the language that they use so that I can carry that language over to my students. I will informally assess their writing in the weeks leading up to my lesson. I will review the works that they have done and I will see if they have made any progress so far in the year and it will also give me an idea of things that I need to concentrate on and focus on while also introducing new material. In my classroom the students write four days a week. I don’t think a formal assessment such as a writing prompt would be effective. I think it would be just as easy for me to read their works and informally assess them from their daily writings.

Bilingual Special education

The article I read was “Becoming a Reader and Writer in a Bilingual Special Education Classroom.”

The article introduced the OLE (Optimal Learning Environment) Program. This program was developed after researchers noticed that Latino students who were English language learners were often placed in special education classrooms where their acedemics scores saw little improvement. The OLE program is derived from a constructivist teaching framework which focuses on feeding off the language skills students already have.
The 12 main factors that the OLE program tries to incorporate into each classroom are
Student choice, student centered instruction, whole-part-whole approach, active participation, meaning followed by form, authentic purpose approximations, immersion in language and print, response, community of learners and high expectations.


The article broke these down by telling the story on how the OLE program transformed a student by the name of Diego when it was implemented into a Bilingual Special Education classroom.
When Diego entered kindergarten he neither knew English or Spanish because his mother spoke a Guatemalan dialect at home. It wasn’t until 4th grade that he was able to attend a school resource room that followed these OLE factors. At that time he was at a K-1 reading and writing level and a 3rd grade math level.

The resource room teachers set high expectations and implemented strategies such as shared reading, interactive journals, and literature study and writers workshop, while taping into students’ cultural experiences, and current skills in a authentic way. For Diego, tapping into the skills he had such as his verbal Spanish skills and his love for drawing, motivated him to engage more in his education. By the end of one year Diego had made about 3½ years worth of growth.

I strongly agree with the ideas of a constructivist form of teaching. Children’s cultural backgrounds and initial languages should be viewed as assets within the classroom instead of learning disabilities. In order for their initial language to be an asset in the classroom however that requires an educator who is able to tap in to the language. In order to use this in my classroom it seems I would need some more background with Spanish and other languages spoken among my students.

The list of 12 characteristics for optimal learning environments is helpful for me to keep in mind as I look at the characteristic of my own classroom community, so that each student with be able to reach their full potential and not just the bilingual one.

Deidra M. Gammill-Learning the Write Way

This article was about an approach to writing to use across curriculums called writing to learn. The article distinguishes between writing to communicate and writing to learn, writing to learn is described as : “students use language to shape, order, and represent their own experience to reach fuller understanding (Fulwiler and Young, 1982). The idea is that students can learn by writing as opposed to the view that writing takes a long time and just takes away from instructional time. It helps students to think critically, self question and use prior knowledge as they take ownership of their writing and learning.

I can see how this can fit into the first grade curriculum of my classroom in language arts as well as in other areas mainly math. I can see this working later in the year, right now most first graders have a very hard time writing and some are still learning letters, so they may have the ideas in their head but they are not able to write them. There are others though whose writing is amazing and they are shy and I can see where they would rather write in a journal instead of participating in a group discussion. One part of the article compared a group that wrote in math journals versus those who participated in discussion and there was no significant difference in their gains, so that shows that using language this way in general is beneficial. I really like the idea of using a K-W-L plus chart and I think that is something I could do for my unit. As a class they have filled out concept maps but the teacher is writing the comments from the students on the board but that is something they could copy and put in their journals to reference later and add to.

I would like to see other examples and examples from first grade if I were to use this in my classroom. I would also need to look into our curriculum and see where I could incorporate it, it may be easy to just do a K-W-L chart rather than the concept map the curriculum is using and I like how the KWL chart makes more connections to what they want to learn rather than the concept maps we have been using are just very straightforward what do they know. KWL would also give a better idea of what students are interested in learning about and possibly ways to connect it to science or social studies. Overall I would need to do some more reading on this approach.

Since we are using a new literacy program I am spending the next couple weeks observing the kids and how they are reacting and interacting with the material. I will need to continue taking notes on the students in regards to the different sections of the literacy block. We have completed various beginning of the year formal assessments and have grouped the kids in 3 different reading levels. We also used informal assessments and writing portfolios for some students who according to their computer testing tested very low but in reality they are in the advanced group. It was just more confirmation on how one cannot simply go by standardized testing, and for this particular student it was an English as a second language issue.