Standard 6 - Reading, Writing, and Oral Communication – The competent teacher has foundational knowledge of reading, writing, and oral communication within the content area and recognizes and addresses student reading, writing, and oral communication needs to facilitate the acquisition of content knowledge.
This artifact is a picture book unit creating during my Elementary Literature course. This unit was designed for a kindergarten classroom for the book My Friend Rabbit. The theme of this lesson was friendship and it was my first exposure to exploring kindergarten ELA common core standard and designing a lesson that aligned with a standard.
My picture book unit meets the criteria of performance indicator 6B which states that a competent teacher “Understand the reading process involves the construction of meaning through the interactions of the reader's background knowledge and experiences, the information in the text, and the purpose of the reading situation”. This lesson connects students with the meaning of friendship and further expands on that knowledge to begin to build more meaningful social skills through literature. Through pre, during, and post reading activities, the students connect familiar and functional vocabulary words to how they align with the main theme of our reading: friendship.
This unit also involved open discussion from the students about friendship and how to connect a reading to familiar life experiences. This design aligns with performance indicator 6S, which is that a competent teacher "stimulates discussion in the content areas for varied instructional and conversational purposes". The beauty of this lesson was that the theme of friendship can take on many different personal and individual thoughts and allows for open communication since there is no general "right" answer. This strategy of errorless communication is beneficial for this age group to help promote independent discussion skills.
This artifact is a lesson that I created in my Communication and Collaboration In Special Education: Strategies and Methods course during Fall 2021. For this assignment, we were required to make two core boards. One was to create a board for basic needs of a student and another was to create a personalized board based on a specific activity. I created one on being able to communicate sickness and not feeling well and one based off a game Pop the Pig!
The creation of this artifact aligns with knowledge indicator 6H, that a teacher "understands how to use a variety of formal and informal assessments to recognize and address the reading, writing, and oral communication needs of each student". Prior to creating each board, did informal observations to determine commonly used words and phrases because I wanted these core boards to be as functional as possible. For instance, I first played the game with a group of students of the same age. I wrote down words that they were saying during the game and the words most frequently used were the words I chose to place on the board. I also placed words on there that I know are used during activities or that are continuously practiced, such as "break" and "all done". Using assessments helped me recognize and properly use the communication needs of the students I was servicing.
Overall, this lesson taught me how to facilitate different communication strategies and how they can help service students. While classroom core boards and personalized AAC devices are often used in classrooms, having the knowledge and practice of creating my own to match the needs of my students is crucial.