After each unit (or phase of a unit) in my intervention groups, I like to have some kind of culminating experience to build on what we've learned. Here's our hallway display for conference week from our "Build-a-Bird" activity. @goyenfoundation @SoRclassroom #KnowledgeMatters
At the end of our bird unit's first phase, our culminating activity was a readers' theater (like @ClassroomD4 I often use ChatGPT to create content-related readers' theater scripts.) We practiced reading with fluency, using vocab and concepts we'd learned about.
(If you want to read more about the unit, start here:)
After Phase 2 of the bird unit, reading "Spit Nests, Puke Power..." by @lmperdew, we extended an activity in the back of the book - creating our own bird species adapted to specific habitats.
The purpose of this culminating activity:
-apply our understanding of adaptations
- experience personal joy and ownership over our work
- share our writing and learning with others.
Here are a couple of masterpieces - the Desert Crow (aka Hunter) and the Tookalooco.
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There's been lots of talk about implicit/statistical learning after this week's episode of "Sold a Story" from @apmreports, @ehanford, and @CLPeak (and team).
Here's how I think about the role of statistical learning in my intervention context🧵
Some responses to the pod seem to be suggesting that Mark Seidenberg's comments in the ep mean that we return to balanced literacy (BL) but with more phonics in the beginning. But structured literacy (SL) is different from BL in many respects. A couple of years ago... (2/12)
... I put together this graphic (with help and input from some of you!) that outlines different approaches to reading instruction that go beyond foundational skills teaching. (And yes, of course there are blurred lines between these approaches... (3/12)
Student-generated questions are my absolute favorite! Here I'm talking through a couple of questions my students asked to get meta about how we answer them. (1/9) @goyenfoundation @SoRclassroom
Part 2. (/9)
Generating questions was highlighted all the way back in the NRP, but the era of standards-based accountability has led to a lot of focus on students' answering questions posed by the teacher. (TDQs, anyone?) (3/9)
My students have just finished a study of bird adaptations, and they have each created an imaginary bird adapted to a specific habitat, synthesizing their understanding of adaptations. (1/5) @SoRclassroom #KnowledgeMatters
Here are a few of their opening sentences using appositive phrases. (We drafted on white boards and I gave feedback, then students transferred to a final copy, a very quick writing process in the limited time of an intervention block.) (2/5)
Do students need to know the word "appositive"? This episode of Literacy Talks explored what teachers need to know vs. students. My position is similar to what @LindsayKemeny
discusses on the ep: I use the terminology, but the goal is for ... (3/5) literacytalks.buzzsprout.com/1903769/147148…
@ksirach asked this question today so I thought I'd elaborate on how I've scaffolded this strategy for my striving readers, supporting them to identify that most elusive of creatures ... the main idea. (1/9)
I have had so many teachers tell me kids struggle with "main idea." This strategy provides scaffolds so kids can be successful. Below, I lay out how I use gradual release to teach this strategy. (2/x)
(It's called "paragraph shrinking" in peer-assisted learning strategies - PALS; "get the gist" in collaborative strategic reading - CSR. They are very similar. I usually call it "get the gist." ) (3/x)
My planning has changed a lot over the years, and much of the change is due to the writings of @ReadingShanahan, who has written that reading comp is "the ability to negotiate the linguistic and conceptual barriers or affordances of a text." (2019)
Knowledge building and challenging text in intervention, Part 1: Text Choice
When I started as an interventionist, I wanted to bring more knowledge/vocab building to my students who no longer need an intensive focus on foundational skills. @SoRclassroom #KnowledgeMatters (1/6)
I began to develop units - similar to those in the gen ed classroom. This is our unit on birds.
I begin with simple texts to build general knowledge of the topic. Our first guiding question: What do all birds have in common? (2/6)
For this phase of the unit, we read three texts from Readworks and Newsela, starting with the simplest text at the lower end of the grade 2-3 CCSS Lexile band, and moving to more complex texts. (3/6)