Experiment #2: Individual Reading

My next experiment is to figure out a way to promote individual reading within the classroom. How can I use my mentor teacher’s class library to promote individual? For this week, we read in the Bomer text about how to enhance student’s reading outside of school’s required text. And that has always been the ultimate question among English teachers. At my placement, the school has, in the past, started a reading incentive program to encourage students to read outside of school. In past years, they have not promoted it that well. This year is different; they have changed the name to “The Millionaires Club” and their slogan is “Who wants to be a millionaire?!” To become a millionaire, students must read 25 books during the year and that adds up to approximately reading 1,000,000 words. At the beginning of the year, they brought in a radio d.j. from the radio station 93.9 and last week the owners of Jimmie’s Diner came and donated $5,000 to give away as prizes. So they are emphasizing independent reading more this year.

            In my Mentor teacher’s classroom, she has two full bookcases of books for her students to use during bell work and to check out and take with them. Some students take advantage of the reading time every day and are reading lots of books, but others dread having to read for a set number of minutes each day. But how are we supposed to expose them to reading for fun if we do not give them time where we can almost “force” them to attempt to read? According to Bomer, “…those who have access to books they would like to read are the ones who read a lot, and they are the ones who do well on tests and other measures of reading success. Moreover, when teachers devote class time to reading, students are more likely to read outside class as well because they get interested in their book” (Bomer 2011 pp. 81). But the question is how do we get the others who do not enjoy reading interested in reading when they are given the chance to read?

            According to Bomer, the goal is to have students read and either while they read or after they read, go back and analyze what they read. That is how they are to get knowledge out of what they read. And a great way of individually analyzing what a student is independently reading is, “during this reading time, the teacher confers…reading conferences are powerful opportunities to expand the thinking that students are able to do…” (Bomer, 2011, pp. 82). I can see how I can integrate these reading conferences into the daily routine at my placement. My goal would be to choose two or three students a day to conference with. I would choose students who I know have been consistently reading the same book and would be able to answer my questions. And then the goal for the future would be to build up the importance of these conferences to encourage other students to read the same book each day.

            I really want to try this in my placement. If the students are really enjoying a book enough to continue and finish reading it, I personally think they would love to talk about it with someone who would be interested in hearing what they say. 

Experiment Number 1: Sentence Starters

Each school year comes with its own set of challenges. And even more, each individual class has in its own issues. A teacher, a professional seasoned with many years of experience, will encounter different challenges every year whether it concerns students or colleagues. This semester, my Mentor Teacher and I are working on a new technique to get our students to learn to write in complete sentences. When the students are answering and writing down questions from the board, we give the students a sentence starter to get them started in the right direction when answering. For example, if the question is ‘What is the name of Johnny’s friend?’, the sentence starter we provide is ‘Johnny’s friend’s name is…’ We have been in school for almost three weeks so we are still in the experimental stage, so the students are getting used to having to answer in complete sentences. We still remind them about the sentence starts every day and some are having a hard time remembering to look on the board for the starters.

          

  A question I have been wondering is whether they will take this skill they are learning in our classroom and use it in their other classes. How do we insure they do beyond mentioning that this skill can be used in their other classes? We could talk to the other teachers, like the history and science teachers, to see if they are teaching that same skill. But I would personally feel wrong about telling another teacher what to do in their classroom. It is one thing to get advice when a colleague is asking for some or looking for new ideas, but it’s another when a colleague tells you what to do.

           

  When these sentence starters are used, we are conducting a whole class discussion on a story we just read. The students are asked the question and write their answers using the starters and answer individually. Once everyone has something written down, we ask the class what the answer is. In Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms, Bomer points out that whole class discussion is very popular in the classroom. This structure is not the best when it comes to developing good writers and readers. “Whole class teaching is the location for demonstrations of and mentoring into things writers and readers do that students have not yet had enough access” (Bomer,2011, pp. 12). Whole class discussions should not be the structured used every day.

            When we first started using these sentence starters, the students asked why they had to use them. It kind of concerned us because these are 7^th graders so does that mean they were not learning to write complete sentences last year? I am not sure how far elementary teachers go in teaching writing, but I would think it would make sense to emphasize complete sentence writing from the very beginning when they are learning to write. I hope that is what happens.