Celebration

The classroom climate plays a crucial role in student success.  That being said, I believe that honouring cultural diversity sets the tone for inclusion in my classroom. As a teacher, I need to be interested in my students’ lives (learning about their families and their culture).  I need to provide opportunities for my students to celebrate their diversity, sharing language, culture, and experience. 

I found a book that celebrates diversity called Anna Hibiscus written by Atinuke which I am very much looking forward to including in my grade two program next year.  It tells the story of a girl named Anna who lives in a large African city with her African father, Canadian mother, twin baby brothers, her grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins. (Click here for a summary of the book.)  I think this book would tie in very nicely with the grade 2 social studies curriculum that looks at communities around the world.  For my social studies unit this year I followed the Hands on Social Studies program, where my class compared our community in Brantford to those in Nunavut and in Zimbabwe. I think reading this text aloud would be a great addition to the program, as it would provide the students with an opportunity to visualize and connect with life in Africa.  For shared reading, I think I would choose passages of the text that we could study as a class, using various reading strategies and making connections to the similarities and differences in Anna Hibiscus’ life compared to our own.  

Come One, Come All – Engagement for All

This comic illustrates the importance of differentiated instruction.  It is unfair to expect a classroom full of students to learn the exact same way.   Students must be accepted and appreciated as individual learners, with their own interests, abilities, and background knowledge.   Differentiated instruction is important to me as it allows me to engage all of my students, ensuring they are successful in their learning.  A couple of ways that I differentiate to support comprehension and understanding for my students are:

• Think-pair-share:  After I have explained something, but notice that some of my students may not fully get it, I have the students turn to the person next to them to explain what they understand.  After about 30 seconds of sharing, I have the students share with the class what they were discussing.  This process generally helps the students fill in the gaps that they are unsure of.
• Diagnostic questions and/or assignments:  Prior to teaching, I pose probing warm up questions (or provide little assignments) to determine what my students know already, what misconceptions they may have and what their learning needs may be.
• Flexible groupings:  I use flexible groupings to provide mini-lessons.  This allows me to provide extra support to students as they require it.

Welcome to Our Class

Community is very important in my classroom.  From the first day of school, the students are taught and practice mutual respect and attentive listening.  Students need a safe environment where they feel supported and comfortable learning.  It is important to create such a climate in the classroom.  For ELL learners, it takes time, practice, desire, and mistakes to learn a new language.  Theses learners need a sense of community when speaking and reading with their peers in the classroom. They need to know that they will be accepted not judged when there are errors in their speech or mispronunciations in their reading. 

As the classroom teacher, I play an important role for my ELL learners; I am their supportive and intentional coach.  I have to make sure that I am using a variety of resources, instructional strategies, and assessment accommodations that will help my ELL learners during the reading process. . 

Resources: Meaning is very important to reading. In order to comprehend a text, you have to be able to understand what is being read.  By providing a variety of resources (bilingual dictionaries, visual materials or artifacts, culturally diverse books that have nuances to their culture or home county) ELL learners are able to draw on previous knowledge and construct new understanding.  

Instructional Strategies: Various instructional strategies such as visual cues, graphic organizers, scaffolding, previewing textbooks, pre-teaching vocabulary, and peer tutoring, will help ELL learners make connections and develop meaning while reading. 

Assessment Accommodations:  ELL learners can be successful in their reading when provided accommodations such as extra time, choice, oral interviews, simplified language, bilingual support, etc.. 

Engagement + Students = Learning

After reading the documents Me Read? No Way! and Me Read? And How!, I started considering the fact that reading programs are sometimes tailored to the girls in the classroom not the boys.  That being said, I am making a conscious effort in my classroom to ensure this is not the case as I want to have equitable learning opportunities for everyone.  Engagement is the goal of my literacy program.  I want my students to be actively involved in their reading and ultimately their learning.   Here are a couple strategies I have used or would like to use in my classroom to keep all of my students engaged:

1)           Have a wide variety of reading materials 

2)           Read across the curriculum (pump up the volume of reading, not the difficulty)

3)           Use the arts to bring literacy to life

4)          Engage the students in accountable talk and critical thinking

5)           Use technology

For the love of books

I am so excited to set up my reading program next year.   As this year draws to a close, I find myself already making tweaks to my current program and plotting changes that I would like to make.  With a main goal of instilling a love for reading, I look forward to helping my students develop the skills they need to become life-long readers.   I have used the Guide to Effective Instruction in Reading - Section 8 (found here ) to help me establish current and future learning goals for my reading program.  

These goals are:

·       I am learning to make sense of what I am reading

·       I am learning to think about what I am reading

·       I am learning to ask myself questions about what I am reading

·       I am learning to make connections about what I am reading

·       I am learning to use my prior knowledge to help me when I am reading

·       I am learning to use textual clues to draw conclusions when I am reading

·       I am learning to use fix-up strategies to help me with my reading