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Dear Maureen,

 

I hope that you have had a nice summer! We were very busy at SummerPrep this year teaching literacy and I’d love to share some highlights with you! Thank you for dropping off all of those wonderful books for us to use with our students. I read The Smallest Girl in the Smallest Grade as an interactive read aloud to my class of rising first graders and I think my students enjoyed the message of that special book. I do feel that my read aloud was overly long and many of my students had trouble focusing. Next time, I think I would have limited my turn and talks to just two or three experiences and established more specific expectations for turn and talks prior to beginning the book. I was fortunate to have a mentor teacher who teaches Tier 2 vocabulary words using the Seven Steps method every day in her classroom, so I had a lot of support for teaching vocabulary. I thought my vocabulary words went over well and we even had a bonus word from our science unit: mortar (our students seemed particularly attached to that word for some reason!) I chose Words Like Confetti for my shared reading and it related well to our other lessons on using sensory language. Students enjoyed the images in the poem and were able to identify many of the sensory words. Our final performance task involved writing I Am From poems and I was so proud of our young students as they explored the writing process from start to finish. I was especially excited about the drafting lesson that I taught. Our class wrote for a total of 16 minutes broken down into 8 minute blocks! Although handwriting is still a concern for some rising first graders, they all had wonderful ideas for their poems.

 

This fall, I hope to learn more about teaching reading, especially for students who may not be able to read at grade level, or in the early grades when reading skills are still being established. We had some students who could read fluently and others who had quite a bit of difficulty and I am very eager to learn the ways in which we as teachers can support those students who need extra scaffolding. I also hope to learn more about the ways that teachers can explain the writing process to students. I was a writing tutor in college and I taught a revision lesson to my first graders this summer. I hope to learn the ways in which we can encourage students to improve their work without making them feel their first drafts were totally inferior. I am sure we will address these things and many others in the fall. I look forward to our classes!

 

All the best,

Jessica Karpinski

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.