Most of the third graders in my field placement are at the fluent stage of the "Three Stages of Reading and Writing." They make text-to-text and text-to-self connections during reading time. The students in my class are becoming familiar with the writing process as well. They have written creative stories every month and they will start with a rough draft, then conference with my CT, Katie, or I and then we will go through their story with them and correct spelling and grammar.
As Katie was saying in her post, our CT tries to get his students to use more interesting words by prohibiting them to write the words "big," "small," and "said." He has a list of words on top of the white board that the students can use instead of big, small, and said. When he stops allowing students to use a particular word, he will have them take out their thesaurus and look up "more interesting" words for the students to use instead, and then he will put them up above the white board.
There are a few students in the class, like my focus student Kelly, who are unable to create their own stories, or even sentences without assistance. Kelly is at the Emergent Stage of the Three Stages of Reading and Writing. She knows her alphabet and how to write her name and letters, but when she writes, she does not put a space between her words, and she uses invented spelling. If you ask her to read what she wrote back to you, she will be able to. She understands the concept of print and directionality concepts such as reading from left to right and from top to bottom on a page.
Kelly has improved a great deal from when I first started working with her last semester during TE 301. She is able to follow along during shared reading with one-on-one correspondence, she just has a difficult time writing sentences on her own.
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I think that that is really great that your CT works on the students having a larger vocabulary! My CT has just introduced what a thesaurus is, but the students do not quite understand that the word they are replacing must mean the same thing as the original word. My fifth grade teacher used to do this great thing where she would "bury" words in that she would choose an overly used word, such as "big", and she would make a paper gravestone for it. We would all have to write different synonymns for the word and write it on the gravestone. We would then have a "funeral" in which we would all say a sentence using a new word for "big" and we were never allowed to use the word "big" again. If we used it in a paper, we would get points off on the assignment. It really helped to improve my vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteWhen you go through and check the spelling for them how much do you correct? In the classroom that I am in the CT usually only looks for one to two different things to "correct" and then he pretty much leaves the rest as is. For example one week it was making sure there were no extra capital letters especially in the middle of words. That is a great idea of banning certain words to get students comfortable with using a thesaurus to explore new and more exciting words. It is a habit that I wish that I had sooner in life.
ReplyDeleteHey Amanda!
ReplyDeleteI really liked your story about "burying words" and having a "funeral" for them! I really liked how creative your fifth grade teacher was at getting her students to use new words and develop their vocabulary, plus it just cracked me up:) I love how Michelle and my CT uses this system of "dull words" to get the class to use new words because otherwise students get in the same old rut of using the same small vocabulary of words.