On December 16 Sarah Hartman and I met to discuss word study and take a deeper look at the Fountas and Pinnell Word Study book that the district has provided for us. Sarah has been using it in her classroom and she is helping me understand it better. At our meeting we took a deeper look at what word study looks like in the classroom every day, for example tasks, management, process, and routines. We looked at lessons to see if we thought they were first grade appropriate based on when we are supposed to teach them. We found that not all the lessons have enough rigor for where the students are at at this point in the year. Has anyone else found this to be true? Sarah and I decided to map out lessons to be taught for the next month until we meet again to discuss how the lessons went, how we can improve our instruction, and student achievement. Our next meeting will be at the end of January and we will be looking more into word study and starting to discuss Responsive Classroom as well.
-Sarah and Heather
We have found the same thing. What we have been doing it skipping the lessons that are more of a review and using those in our reading small grouops for our low groups. Some of the lessons we turned into a review game. We also found it easier to incorporate the phonics into our comprehension time so we do phonics 2-3 days a week and comprehension the other 2 or 3 days. I hope this helps. Now we are seeing that we may repeat some of the lessons with the new spelling so we will have to look at that next year to be sure we either skip over those lessons or come up with something new for spelling.
ReplyDeleteSince we last met, Heather came into Sarah's classroom as Sarah modeled the daily routines and activites involved in word study. Heather found this very helpful and was able to start implementing one of the activities (consonant LOTTO)in her classroom. Her students found the game to be very helpful and it is now a part of daily centers.
ReplyDeleteNow we are are going to turn our focus to Responsive Classroom. Heather modeled for Sarah how to run a morning meeting including a greeting, sharing, activity, and morning message. Heather gave Sarah a list of greetings and activites to use during her morning meeting. We spent a lot of our time going through the activies with Heather explaining them. During the month of January, Heather is going to watch Sarah run a morning meeting and give constructive critism to make Sarah's MM more effective.
In February, we will finish up with Responsive Classroom and look at MAP scores and how to improve student performance.