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    Engage Striving Students in the Common Core Classroom
    Engage Striving Students in the Common Core Classroom
    Engage Striving Students in the Common Core Classroom
    Ebook257 pages1 hour

    Engage Striving Students in the Common Core Classroom

    By Jessica Gibson

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    About this ebook

    Make reading intervention engaging and effective for striving adolescent students. Thirty-five activities focus on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension and are aligned with the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards from the Common Core State Standards addressing literature and informational text, foundational reading skills, vocabulary, and speaking and listening. Step-by-step directions, materials lists, Common Core standards, variations for differentiated instruction, and reproducibles are included for each activity, and alternative assessment ideas, a reading interest survey, student reading suggestions by genre, and a cross-reference guide to the standards and activities complete this well-rounded resource.   By design, these books are not printable from a reading device. To request a PDF of the reproducible pages, please contact customer service at 1-888-262-6135.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCapstone Young Readers
    Release dateOct 16, 2013
    ISBN9781625216229
    Engage Striving Students in the Common Core Classroom
    Author

    Jessica Gibson

    Jessica Gibson is a mostly self-taught freelance illustrator who graduated from Wayne County Community College with an associate of arts degree. Though she primarily illustrates children’s books, Gibson also creates artwork for magazines and has an interest in character design. With a pen and tablet by her side, she loves creating adorable, whimsical, and sometimes quirky illustrations, ready to brighten up everyone’s heart. You can visit her at www.jessicamgibson.com.

    Read more from Jessica Gibson

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      Book preview

      Engage Striving Students in the Common Core Classroom - Jessica Gibson

      REFERENCES

      INTRODUCTION

      Why I Wrote This Book

      Many students struggle in school. They often move from grade to grade, falling further and further behind. By the time they reach middle school, these children are experienced struggling students. They are turned off to learning; it’s our job to turn them back on. To do this, we must actively engage them in the learning process. Not only must students learn to comprehend text, they must also learn to make connections and think critically when reading. True comprehension goes beyond literal understanding and involves the reader’s interaction with text. If students are to become thoughtful, insightful readers, they must merge their thinking with the text and extend their thinking beyond a superficial understanding (Harvey and Goudvis 2007).

      In the state of Florida, middle and high school teachers who work with struggling readers are required to take 300 hours of reading instruction in order to add a reading endorsement to their teaching certificate. For the past seven years, I have been teaching the last class of this reading endorsement, Reading Competency 5 (formerly Reading Competency 6). This class consists of twelve hours of facilitation detailing how to put together a portfolio that includes case studies on three students, with instructional practices to assist students with the five strands of reading— phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension— plus five lesson plans, which are then recorded as teachers incorporate the gradual release model (Gallagher and Pearson 1983). Teachers must teach one lesson for each of these strands of reading.

      PHONEMIC AWARENESS AND PHONICS

      These middle and high school teachers are often very uncomfortable with the idea of teaching lessons in phonemic awareness and phonics, thinking their students will find it babyish. We don’t teach phonemic awareness and phonics (and often fluency) in middle school and high school! they cry. I assure them as they review their recorded lessons and write their reflections, they will see how necessary it is to teach phonemic awareness and phonics to struggling readers. And they do. These students need tools to assist them with decoding unfamiliar words. Yet we can’t teach phonemic awareness and phonics to middle and high school students in the same way we teach elementary students. That said, teachers of the elementary grades will find the activities provided in this book applicable in their classrooms, as do the elementary education teachers who chose to enroll in my Reading Competency class.

      TEXT COMPLEXITY

      In the twenty-first century, all teachers are now teachers of reading. Whether you formally teach reading, language arts, science or social studies, your students are reading. And with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in place, text complexity is the order of the day. With text complexity comes the need for text-dependent questions to ensure that students are making sense of the written word. Answering text-dependent questions requires students to answer questions based specifically on content. With previous standards, students might have been asked why questions or had to answer questions where they went outside the text and made personal connections. Well-designed text-dependent questions require students to analyze the text carefully and to read word by word, phrase by phrase, and sentence by sentence—thus the need for students to be able to decode words, read fluently, and establish a strong vocabulary. In order to meet the Common Core State Standards, students must be able to analyze, probe, and examine the text in order to extract meaning.

      VOCABULARY: ENCOURAGING PERSONAL CONNECTIONS AND METACOGNITION

      Vocabulary is the meat and potatoes of comprehension. Without a substantial vocabulary, comprehension is meaningless. Students must develop complete concept knowledge of words they encounter. They must develop strategies to be able to make connections to words and be provided a variety of activities to use new words. According to Robert Marzano (2004), students need multiple exposures to a word before they understand it while reading and can use it in their own speaking and writing. All students require vocabulary development, especially English language learners, students from low socioeconomic areas, and students who are struggling readers.

      Words! Words! Words! Words are our oral and written form of expression. Therefore, the larger our vocabulary, the more effectively we can communicate in both oral and written form. In order to become proficient in any academic area, students must develop a wide breadth of academic vocabulary. Janet Allen (2007) tells us, The why of vocabulary instruction is easily answered: in the absence of a repertoire of effective instructional strategies for teaching those words that are critical to students understandings of a variety of texts, they will continue to struggle in their content classes.

      The Common Core State Standards place an emphasis on vocabulary development, not only in language arts and reading, but also in the content areas. Students must be able to decipher unfamiliar vocabulary as well as phrases, which will lead to ultimate understanding of the text.

      As I learned from teaching my students, making personal connections to vocabulary words is an effective way to teach vocabulary. These connections encourage students to think about the words they must learn. The vocabulary activities in this book allow for just that. Background knowledge of vocabulary and concepts are an integral part of comprehension. It is extremely difficult for young readers to construct knowledge from something they are reading if the topic and important vocabulary are completely foreign (Kelley and Clausen-Grace 2007).

      Metacognition allows students to think about what they are thinking. By making connections, asking questions, and visualizing what they are reading, students become more proficient readers. Vocabulary is key because without words we have no sentences, no paragraphs, and ultimately no text.

      VOCABULARY: PROVIDING INSTRUCTIONAL VARIETY

      As Carol Jago (2011) states in her book, With Rigor for All: Meeting Common Core Standards for Reading Literature, Students need a robust vocabulary not only to read literature but also to express what they think about what they are reading. Since students learn new vocabulary in a variety of different ways, we must provide a toolkit of many strategies to learn new words. The traditional vocabulary instruction whereby students look up words in the dictionary is no longer effective. Often definitions are not clear to the students because they don’t understand the words used in the definition. The vocabulary activities in this book have been tried with students in many classroom situations. Students actually get excited about learning new words when the activities are engaging. And the learning sticks!

      STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

      As with everything done in the classroom, student engagement is the key to learning. The amount of student learning and personal development associated with any educational program is directly proportional to the quality and quantity of student involvement in that program (National Institute of Education 1984). Research shows that engaged students learn more, retain more, and enjoy learning more than students who are not engaged (Dowson and Mclnerney 2001; Hancock and Betts 2002; Lumsden 1994; Voke 2002). In my book Student Engagement Is FUNdamental (2011), I provide a variety of activities that allow teachers to get to know their students. Today’s students come to school with much baggage, and it’s the teacher’s job to know the students. Once a positive rapport is established in the classroom, students feel comfortable making mistakes and can learn from their mistakes. Students also learn to respect their fellow classmates and the fact that individual differences are what make the world go round.

      The activities presented in this book engage students as they are required to become metacognitive about words. Opportunities are presented for students to ask questions, visualize, and become creative when working with new words. According to Camille Blachowicz and Peter Fisher (2002), the effective vocabulary teacher presents new vocabulary in ways that model good learning. This type of instruction develops learners who are active, who personalize their learning, who look for multiple sources of information to build meaning, and who are playful with words. Good learners are active. As in all learning situations, having the learners actively attempting to construct their own meanings is a hallmark of good instruction.

      Students are accustomed to multi-tasking and staying busy. Educators must use this to engage today’s students. Ask your students if they prefer engagement or boredom. A study conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2006), The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts, found that nearly 50 percent of 470 dropouts surveyed said they left school because their classes were boring. This is quite an indication that students would rather be engaged

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