Since spring of 2014, we have spent a copious amount of time thinking and planning about how to teach this unique group of students. As we mentioned on a previous page, 2/3 of this group started the 3rd grade below proficiency. Nearly twenty percent have already been identified as needing special education and have Individual Education Programs in place. Our goal is to find ways to implement low and high assistive technology to meet all students needs during our ELA block in the classroom utilizing both the Classroom Teacher and Special Education Teacher as a team. Below is our journey through various units integrating both reading and writing together in hopes of making the largest impact on student learning.
Character Study- September-October
This unit focused on teaching the students to find text evidence to support their thinking. We used a graphic organizer to help them organize their ideas.
First gave the student the task of brainstorming a list off all the words that could describe a character. Then we sorted them based upon outer and inner descriptions of characters. The students learned that inner traits are those that cannot be seen with the eye, but observed through actions, words and thoughts. The inner traits were our focus. We utilized the Backchannel app which is part of the Learning Management System (LMS) Schoology. Backchanneling is a way for students to post their thoughts in a chat room format. Their responses show up in real time. This allowed students to read other posts and add to or change their thinking by posting again.
The students backchanneled character traits gathered from read alouds. Then we sorted positive and negative character traits. We had great discussions about how some traits were both positive and negative. This part of the unit was our first attempt at using technology in reading and writing.
Next we modeled how to identify character traits through several whole class read alouds. We focused on how to fill out the graphic organizer and how to cite specific text evidence. Many of the students wanted to list general events rather than the specific words from the text. We took advantage of having two teachers and spent a week working with guided reading groups to find the specific evidence. Then for independent practice the students worked in pairs to read new stories and fill out the graphic organizer.
The final step was to teach the student show to turn their graphic organizers into a character trait paragraph using their evidence. We used sentence frames to help the students craft their paragraphs. We wrote paragraphs as a whole class for a character from a read aloud. As the final assessment students were given a new story to read. They had to read the story, fill out the graphic organizer and write a paragraph.
Paragraph Writing-November
After our character study unit we decided we needed to do some work on how to write a good paragraph. Even with sentence frames many students struggled to craft a complete paragraph. Since this was around Thanksgiving, we had the students brainstorm lists of people and things they were thankful for. Then they chose one topic to write a paragraph. We then introduced the Paragraph Planning Sheet (see student sample below). This is a basic outline graphic organizer that uses symbols to help the students plan. This was from an old writing curriculum purchased by our district before Common Core called Step Up to Writing. We modeled how to fill out the graphic organizer and then the students had to fill out their own. Next we modeled how to take the graphic organizer and turn it into a paragraph. The students wrote thankful paragraphs. Next they chose an “expert” topic. The students selected a topic they felt they were an expert on, filled out the Paragraph Planning Sheet and then wrote a paragraph.
Native American Unit: December-February
Once the students were comfortable with how to write paragraphs, it was time to dive into a research project! We decided to integrate Social Studies for this project and chose Native Americans from long ago as our topic. Before we started researching we wanted to know what schema the students had for Native Americans. We gave the students the topics of clothing, housing, free time, first encounter, school and food. We had the students draw pictures on paper and then add their thinking to Backchannel. We realized very quickly that the students had a lot of “Hollywood” schema and would learn a lot!
The students were divided into four groups and each group was given a region of the country to study. Our initial plan was to have each students or pairs of students research a different aspect of life for the Native Americans to create a collaborative book on each region. We gathered books from teachers and the library and created book bins for each of the regions.
On the first day, we let the students explore the books with their groups. The excitement was palpable. Students were rushing up to us to share the pictures and facts that they had found. Most of the students were most struck by how different the Native American’s housing was from ours of today. After that session we decided all of the students would research housing for their region. This seemed much more accessible than setting them free to research their own individual topics.
We used books and an online resource called PebbleGo Next to research Native American housing. PebbleGo Next allows the students to read or listen to facts on a given topic. This worked great for our below grade level readers. The students gathered facts in their writing journals using webs. They then had to transfer their facts to the Paragraph Planning Sheet and then write paragraphs. This was the first time we had them type their final drafts. We had them use GoogleDocs and then share their final drafts with us. Typing their paragraphs was a painful experience! The students’ keyboarding skills were still developing and they didn’t understand formatting (number of spaces afters words and punctuation, text wrap around feature etc). It took took over a week for most of them to type 4 to 6 sentences. In the end, they were so proud of their work. So were we!
From there they were able to choose one of the other topics (clothing, free time and food) to research and write an essay. We modeled how to do a Google search and tried to teach them how to narrow their topic to get better information. They took us a too literally. They really struggled to find appropriate information. We eventually limited them to PebbleGo Next and emailed them prescreened websites with a variety of information. They did much better. Some of the reading was too difficult for our struggling readers, so we tried using the universal access feature on the Chromebooks, but that proved to be tricky. Some students had access to Google Read & Write which will read highlighted text from a website , but that also didn’t work on every website. We did need to read some of the content to a couple students. We spent a lot of time modeling how essays were like a series of paragraphs about the same topic. We used the same stars and dashes paragraph planning sheet to draft the body paragraphs of their essays. After they hand wrote their drafts from their planning sheets, we taught them how to format within GoogleDocs. We created an anchor chart for them to refer back to as they typed. They used dictionaries instead of spell check to fix their red squiggles. They were much more successful this time. They looked like actual essays! If we thought we were proud the last time, we were really proud this time. It was amazing the difference!
SETT Framework
As part of the requirement for the grant, we received training in the SETT framework to problem solve students who were not making progress. SETT stands for Student, Environment, Teacher and Technology. At the end of the Native American unit we choose two students to put through the SETT framework. We chose two students who we felt had understood the structure of writing but were struggling with output versus other students were producing writing but struggling to grasp the structure. We called a team meeting that included our principal, occupational therapist, speech therapist and school psychologist. We brainstormed what assistive technology we had already put in place and what additional pieces we could try. Please see the documents below that share our ideas for moving forward with one of our students.
Fairy Tale Unit-March-April
For our next fiction unit we choose to focus on fairy tales. We first started with the elements of a fairy tale. We read several examples and identified the elements that made fairy tales different than other types of stories. We used Backchannel to share our thinking about the elements. We also had them partner read stories and create discussion posts in Schoology regarding the elements they identified in their chosen fairy tale. We then dove into a review of our character study, but with a twist. The students identified that most fairy tales have a hero and a villain, so we focused on identifying the hero and villain and the specific evidence from the story that proved they were a hero or a villain. We also used a story map graphic organizer to help us identify the lesson learned from a fairy tale. We discussed how we could learn a lesson by identifying the problem and how the characters try to solve that problem. We provided the students with sentence frames to share their thinking about the lesson learned.
For the assessment for this portion of the unit we created an audio recording of the version of Cinderella that the students were to read. We had four below grade level readers listen to the audio recording while tracking in the book and then complete a fairy tale elements chart and a hero vs villain character traits chart. We felt the audio recording created independence and eliminated the subconscious cueing that teachers don’t always know they do when reading with a student. We were very impressed that all of the students listened attentively and tracked in their books. They also went back and re-listened to certain portions of the story. The assessment took two days and all four students requested to listen again on the second day to help remind themselves of the story. Success!
For the next portion of the unit we focused on perspective. We read a traditional version of The Three Little Pigs and then The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. We discussed how the Wolf could either be viewed as the hero or villain depending upon which version of the story you were reading. The students had to gather evidence from both the original and retold versions. They then had to choose whether they thought he was a hero or villain and write a persuasive paragraph using text evidence to support their claim. We once again used our trusty Paragraph Planning Sheet. For the final assessment we again had them use an audio recording of Cinderella.
After completing the reading portion of the unit we dove into writing fairy tales! We pulled back out the fairy tale elements chart and the students brainstormed ideas for each of the elements. They then created heroes and villains for their stories. Next they created problems for their heroes and villains and brainstormed possible solutions. Finally, they used the same story map from writing to map out the events of their stories. For the drafting portion, we had our two students who used the SETT Framework on try using Speech to Text with their ChromeBooks. We had mixed results. One student caught on quickly and was able to use the tool productively. Each time the student uses it, he gets a little bit better at navigating with it. For the other student it was a major distraction. He could not get past the errors. At one point the speech to text came up with an inappropriate word and it was downhill after that. We had a frank conversation with the student and he agreed that it was a distraction and he was better off with paper and pencil.
Poetry Unit-April-May
We started our poetry unit with a mini-lesson on inferring. Luci’s student teacher, Callie, had gathered random items (button, chop sticks, fabric, etc) from her neighbor and had the students make guesses as to whether her neighbor was a male or a female. Then she talked to them about how they made their guesses. She revisited what schema meant and how the combination of schema and their evidence led them to inferring. We discussed the elements of poetry and how to understand poetry, we need to be able to be like detectives looking for clues/evidence about meaning to infer.
Next we read another poem with the title removed, and taught the students how to “close read” a poem by reading key words in the phrases and thinking about what it reminded us of. We showed them how they could “think note” using the comment feature in Google Docs. We “close read” a few lines together and had the students turn and talk and then share their ideas out with the class.
The next day, we shared that same poem in a GoogleDoc. We showed them how to make a copy to create their own doc. We modeled “think noting” with the comment feature again. Then turned them loose to “think note” on their own. We came back as a group and shared ideas periodically throughout the session. We were amazed by many of the students ideas! They picked up the skill fairly quick. We practiced the same skill again with another poem with less modeling, and they demonstrated even more skills!
Finally, we gave them sentence frames in Schoology “I know this poem is about ____ because…” and had them respond.
Wow! Your work is impressive!
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