Class 2 – Literacy

From this week’s literacy lesson, a point that really stood out to me is the importance of front-loading lessons with a few key vocabulary terms or themes. Front-loading lessons, using a variety of tools (Ex: Frayer model, alphaboxes, words in context, etc.) to get students really engaged in thinking about those terms, allows students to activate their prior knowledge and make personal connections. In turn, this allows students to better understand and more actively participate in the instruction of the guts of the lesson. Because of our class example of comparing and contrasting revolution and reaction, I personally felt more interested in the following non-fiction reading regarding the Boston Tea Party. The quick write and gallery walk with images made me think more deeply about the words “revolution” and “reaction” than I had in the past, and it was a great warm-up for the rest of the class. I think young students would feel this way as well. Also, not only would they be more interested in the activity that follows, but the teacher would get a good gauge early on of what students already know and which students need additional encouragement and guidance throughout the lesson. I agree that neither copying dictionary definitions nor writing sentences (with likely incorrect usages) for vocabulary words is a good use of time. It is much more useful to have students learn the words in the context that is needed for the related lesson.  My favorite graphic organizer that we used in class was the one that was the most personal and said, “I will remember this word by connecting it to…”

The readings from this week reminded me of many of the non-fiction comprehension strategies that we have studied in Reading 1 and Reading 2, and just as Lisa said, many of the literacy strategies that we discussed in class are very well aligned with the reading SOLs, so it was great to see how easy it should be to integrate social studies material into our reading comprehension lessons. Also, the idea of comparing and contrasting content vocabulary words (like revolution and reaction) reminded me of what we are currently studying in Diverse Learners about ways that teachers can encourage students to move through the cognitive stages of development by presenting counterexamples and pointing out inconsistencies to help create a cognitive conflict for the student to drive deeper understanding.