6.  Reading, Writing, and Oral Communication

The narrative writing lesson as well as the final narrative draft are both artifacts that go along with the IPTS standard 6: 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. 

The narrative writing lesson was about a five week long process that included mini lessons, teacher modeling,  time for independent work, self and peer editing workshops as well as final draft workshops. The narrative writing piece was a time for students to zoom in on a small snapshot of their lives and write about it. The students chose a variety of different topics such as baseball games, family vacations and meeting their pets for the very first time. During the mini lessons the students learned about choosing a topic, introductions, conclusions, dialogue, figurative language as well as how to replace verbs, adjectives and nouns with more vibrant words to keep the reader interested. 

From the narrative writing lesson I learned how to effectively communicate expectations and instructions as well as  model a lesson and how to guide students in the right direction without discouraging them from doing their work. For example, many students struggled with understanding that their narratives needed to be a small snapshot of a moment in their life, many of them expanded on the moment which lead them further away from the topic. Other students struggled to put their thoughts into words.  By modeling how to write a narrative and how to put my thoughts into words the students were able understand what their job was for the narrative writing. I also learned that some students need more guidance or "push" when working on a piece of writing. Because of this I learned to make accommodations for those students by having them tell me or the paraprofessional in the room what to type and we would type for the student. 

This artifact came from one of four guided reading groups in my classroom at Meadow Ridge, where I student taught. During guided reading time teachers work with students in small groups of 6 to 7 students per teacher. In the reading groups students are working on their phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The guided reading groups met with a teacher 2 times per week where the group would finish a short story, discuss the story elements, vocabulary words and complete a small project from the guided reading book of the week. This project came from a guided reading group that is leveled at S/T/U. The group finished reading The Elephant in the Room, which told a story about a girl from Africa who wanted to raise awareness on saving the elephants. The group researched an endangered animal, created a small poster with information on how to save the animal and then presented the poster and information to the class. 

This artifact  goes along with IPTS standard 6: 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. Guided reading focuses on the students' reading, writing, and oral communication in small groups where every student is able to read aloud, answer and ask questions as well as communicate their thoughts and feelings about a text either in a group discussion or in a project format. 

The guided reading artifact has taught me how to combine reading, writing and oral communication all together in one classroom activity. Guided reading is extremely important because when teachers are able to meet with students, they are able to them how to think about a text, how to analyze the text on their level as well as how to talk about the text. Guided reading will also help students with their fluency as well as expand their daily vocabulary.