Week 9

This weeks readings were very interesting to me. I am curious about assessments as I still suffer from test anxiety. I am constantly looking for and thinking about other ways to assess students so as not to make them feel anxious. Tompkins had a lot of great ideas. 

Tompkins also talked about the word wall and high frequency words. I see this in my placement everyday. At the kindergarten level, they are constantly working on literacy. They have literacy centers for an hour and a half every day. This is a great way to build fluency. There are different stations that all work on different things. THis idea of centers can be taken into book club as well. The different centers could just be different activities of the week. For example, there is a center that works on ending sound matching. THere are pictures and the students have to draw a line to match the pictures up that end with the same sound. This could be done to work on fluency at the kindergarten level in book club. 

I work with a small group of students on tuesdays on high frequency words. These words are words that are in everyday language a lot but are hard to sound out phonetically. It is great to see these students learn these words because it is increasing their fluency and reading abilities. 

For my mini lesson, in regards to Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, I would have the students design a cereal box. THis would be more of an ending assessment. THey would have to create their own vision of the story on the front of the box. On the back of the box I want a self written synopsis and what the reader ranked this book as far as stars and why. On one side panel, will be a self written description of the main characters. On the other side panel would be a word search with definitions.