According to Tim O'Keefe and Mills, I learned that responsive teaching begins but does not end with kidwatching. Kidwatching is a process that the teacher begins with the students and it is on-going in the classroom. When students have conversations that the teachers have with the students make a difference in what they are learning throughout the time in the class. Having these one-to-one conversations helps the teacher understand the student's thoughts and can add to their responses to keep them engaged in the story. Another growth that is developed during this time is the literacy aspect. When the students have a comfortable feeling about what they are reading and how to explain their understanding, makes them express themselves more. This reminds of what I do in the class with conferencing with my students during independent reading time.
Each week I try to conference with majority of my students even if it's between classwork time. As you noticed I did not say instructional time, classwork time. This is when the students are at the table working and I call a student over to read to me within 10 minutes. As they are reading I have padlet pulled up on the computer, so we can go straight into the responses. (See examples below) I love recording what they are learning because it shows me how they are reading, what they are learning, and how they are explaining what is going on in the book. To make them think about what they are reading, I would ask them a question like "What do you think will happen next?" or "What would you do if you were one of those characters in this book?"
As we continue to read each day and there reading levels increase, by knowing their sight words and understanding their letters and sounds makes me want to take them up to the next level and increase their level of thinking. I love keeping them on their toes cause they keep me one mine!
Independent Reading Link
http://padlet.com/wall/kbgtleacwls7
Thank you for the padlet link! I enjoyed reading some of your conferencing notes! I really like that you are using the SFA decodable readers. Not only are they great for working with CVC words, and sight words, but they are scaffolded and great for comprehension. They are some of the best decodable books for comprehension. I also like how you ask your students to extend the story by asking " what do you think will happen next?" I would love to hear some of their answers! We will be learning more about conferencing coming up in our R2S course.
ReplyDeleteHi Teresa,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed viewing your padlet and how you are using this tech tool to deepen your students' thinking about what you read and as a formative assessment to determine what they are understanding about what they are reading! Thanks, Dawn