We need to teach our children to think and the mosaic strategies do that. This is true of all students from our GT students to our very low special needs students. This year I am spending a lot of time on procedures - how to do everything that needs to be done in my sixth grade resource room and the time is paying off in big dividends. I am seeing great things happening particularly in my reading response journals and partner reading. I am using some of the great ideas that I got from the book Bringing the Outside In to work with Vocabulary development. I completely agree with some of the past comments on leveled readers. They have their purpose but leveled readers do not give that struggling reader the desire to push on to strive to read that next word or line. That desire comes from the rich text that grabs and holds their attention and whets their appetite to know more and more. I pair a lot of fiction and non-fiction for my folks because at their level the non-fiction is much more appealing reading presented on a level that they can read more independently. I read Andie Cunningham's book last year - Starting With Comprehension and I have gleamed lots of ideas for working with my students. I use a lot of rubrics for grading. Students must successfully complete X number of tasks relating to a topic in a designated time frame. Not all work is written response. Some is oral, some is hands on, some is on the computer and some is showing what you know with drawing. This accommodates the needs of most of my students and levels the playing field considerably.
I am constantly learning and attempting to improve my service delivery. This is my 33 year of teaching and some areas are definitely the best because of what I am learning from this and other online forums for teachers. Keep up the good work and glad to be back in operation on Mosaic. June 6th. Grade Resource KY _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org.
