Week 9 post: Fluency and Critical Standards with Book Club

This week’s reading about assessing students and then also chapter 5’s topic of developing fluent readers were very useful readings for us as future teachers. I enjoyed reading all of the assessment techniques that Tompkins laid out in chapter 9 because there are many authentic assessments in there that I never would have thought of. Chapter 5 was most applicable to my field experience because many of those concepts, such as concepts of print, phonological awareness, letter recognition are ones that we focus on in my kindergarten classroom. Each day is filled with literacy in our classroom and we ALWAYS do lesson on concepts of print and letter identification multiple times a day. Many of the students in my class don’t yet understand letter-sound relationships and that skill determines whether or not the student is ready to move on to first grade next year. These skills are very basic and lay the foundation for the rest of the student’s education.
Many of the assessments that I saw in Chapter 9 were many that my CT uses with our students, or some that my professors in the College of Education have had us practice and become familiar with. I was very interested to see all the different notes about how to nurture English learners in their struggling during assessment. First, Tompkins talked about using an attitude and motivation survey to find out what makes them want to learn and also not using tests to assess these students, but rather portfolios that display their own samples of work or audio tapes that can record their words.
For my mini lesson I have chose to focus on the part in chapter 5 of the text when the children go to Strawberry with Big Ma. The mini lesson is designed for sixth grade students. First, we would discuss what “discrimination” is and why it is important. Next, I would put the students in groups of 3-4 and then give them a small piece of paper with a prompt on it that describes a situation. They will have 10 minutes to prepare a skit of their situation and present it to the front of the class. They will also be told that prior to presenting, they must decide if what their situation demonstrates is or is not a form of discrimination and why. Hopefully, this will allow me to further promote discussion among the class after each skit about what was happening. After each skit, we will talk more in depth about the situation in chapter 5 and how negatively it impacted Cassie and her siblings. The prompts I would give would be:
1. Blue eyes vs. Brown Eyes
2. Boys vs. Girls
3. Getting blamed for something your sibling did wrong
4. Cassie and Lillian Jean in Strawberry
5. Getting a poor score on a spelling test