Mustang Musings
September 29, 2019
It's the most wonderful time of the year....
Chunky Apple Cake. I hope you have had time to spend with family and friends and enjoy some of the wonders of the season.
ARC Focus of the Week
- Begin implementing Engaged Reader Action Plans for students identified as a 1 or 2 in School Pace
- Continue to work on initial leveling of students in School Pace. Every student must be leveled by October 4.
- Assign a Power Goal to students. While you are leveling them you should notice something that they are having difficulty in and need extra practice. That would be their power goal! Go ahead and click that star and let's get to work on helping our students grow!
On Target for IRLA Reading Level
HES creates readers!
On Target for Reading Practice
Teach the Teacher
My "Why" behind "Hooves in a Book" Time
The Power Behind Reading Aloud to our Students
Evidence-based benefits of reading aloud to our students:
- Reading aloud creates a classroom community by establishing a known text that can be used as the basis for building on critical thinking skills that are related and unrelated to reading.
- Discussions generated by reading aloud can be used to encourage listeners to construct meanings, connect ideas and experiences across texts, use their prior knowledge, and question unfamiliar words from the text.
- Reading aloud gives students an opportunity to hear the instructor model fluency and expression in reading technical or literary language. “Through intonation, expression, and attention to punctuation, the reader demonstrates meaning embedded in the text.”
- Reading aloud develops adaptive expertise. Routine expertise relies on automated recall of memorized declarative knowledge but adaptive expertise depends on the acquisition of meaningful knowledge. That is, knowledge organized through connections to other knowledge. An adaptive expert synthesizes knowledge groups to make meaning in new ways to solve unexpected or novel problems. (Hatano 1988).
- Reading aloud helps students learn how to use language to make sense of the world; it improves their information processing skills, vocabulary, and comprehension.
- Reading aloud targets the skills of audio learners. Research has shown that teachers who read aloud motivate students to read.
- Reading aloud to students both slows down and simultaneously intensifies the classroom experience. In a world of sound bites and half-formed ideas expressed quickly in electronic formats, students benefit from hearing complete ideas, expressed with originality and attention, such as one finds in literary language.
From the article What Are the Benefits of Reading Aloud?
That's Powerful!
- A teacher played a song that signaled the students to begin logging their reading steps. Once the song ended, the expectation was that the students had completed their logging and were ready to be signed off.
- A teacher was logging steps into School Pace daily by quickly calling the students names and they responded with the number of steps that they had read the night before and during independent reading that day. She was able to use +4 and School Pace automatically added the number of steps.
Snack and Chat!
National Hispanic HIstory Month- Read Aloud!
Adelita: A Spanish Cinderella Story is a wonderful story by Tomie DePaola. This read-aloud will provide a glimpse into the Hispanic culture and offer an opportunity to build cultural awareness.
Click the link above share this story with your students. Afterward, here are some questions you can use to support their thinking:
- What details did the author include that help you to better understand the Hispanic culture?
- How was this version different from the traditional American Cinderella story?
What can I do for you?
- Modeling
- Side-by-side coaching
- Coaching and modeling of using the IRLA
- Round up resources
- Assist with differentiating lessons or materials
- Cover your class so that you can observe a colleague's class
- Cooperatively plan a lesson or series of lessons that meet best practices
- Serve as another pair of hands for a lesson
- Offer strategies for classroom management
- Help you connect with other teachers in the district
- Lend an open ear for a topic of your choice
- Reflect on student learning in your classroom through conversation and observation
- Work collaboratively to bounce ideas off one another to address a concern
- Evaluate new students to guide instruction
Hardy Elementary School
Email: lhenk@iwcs.k12.va.us
Website: http://hes.iwcs.k12.va.us/
Location: 9311 Hardy Circle, Smithfield, VA, United States
Phone: 757-357-3204
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Hardy-Elementary-School-205065852892284/
Twitter: @Mrs_Henk