Free Common Core Lesson Plans

I found this looking for something completely unrelated. I do that a lot. Any waythis site has some great free graphic organizers that I wish I had had in October.

They want you to pay and join up. Take the free stuff and run.

www.inspiration.com/lessonplans/inspiration

Content Knowledge versus Domain Knowledge

Content Knowledge versus Domain Knowledge

Content Knowledge is not unlike content reading. We are still dealing with students’ learning from the science, social studies/history, and math content areas. Knowledge in these areas is certainly enhanced by comprehension of the assigned readings in these content areas.

Domain Knowledge, in Journal of Literacy Research (Alexander, Kulikowich) is  science, social studies/history, and math content. Do students have a lack success in a content area because of the lack of the knowledge the student possess when he/she enters the classroom,  or is the lack of success due to the amount of learning he/she does after entering the content area classroom?

Content Reading versus Domain Reading

Content Reading versus Domain Reading

According to “What is Content Reading” k12reader.com, Content reading is the reading that a student needs to read and comprehend in order to be successful in a particular content/subject area.  Typically content area reading includes science, social studies/history, and math, but not literature.

Domain Reading is divided into two parts (PISA 2006).

I.                    Continuous, which contains: narrative, expository, descriptive, argumentative and persuasive, injunctive.

II.                  Non-continuous, which includes charts and graphs, tables, diagrams, maps, forms, and advertisements.

Non-continuous domain reading is often found in content reading, therefore students much be able to read and also be able to understand these charts, maps, tables they and be able to use the information they take from these to  further understand the content they are studying.

Continuous domain reading will be used by students in both their content and literature studies and any other reading they do in or outside of school.

Diagnosis: The Missing Ingredient in RTI Assessment

Review of “Diagnosis: The Missing Ingredient in RTI Assessment”

By Marjorie Y. Lipson with Pam Chomsky-Higgins and Jane Kanfer

RTI (Response to Interventions) is an approach to identifying students as learning disabled. It is also intended to reduce the number of students with reading difficulties. Standard Protocol intervention treats all the students as if they all are the same. Assessment for struggling readers is missing.

In Vermont the authors have worked with several schools to improve literacy by reassessing how to use the diagnostic data they had.  They began to use more specific areas of reading: word recognition, fluency, and comprehension to construct profiles of student difficulties. The focus was on what type of difficulty was the most common. This could be different in each school.

Research –based intervention plans appropriate for each student what Dorn and Henderson call a “portfolio of interventions.” The results were excellent.

The lesson here is that we do not necessarily need to spend a lot of time or resources on testing children. Teachers and others in the schools may already have assessment information available, which can and should be better used to help students who are struggling readers.

Review of Carnegie study

Carnegie “Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy”

Carol D. Lee and Anika Spratley, Northwestern University

Adolescents may struggle with text for a number of reasons, including problems with vocabulary knowledge, general knowledge of topics and text structures, not knowing what to do when comprehension break down, or proficiency in monitoring their own reading comprehension.

In this study we go from concern of students learning to read to students reading to learn and the special problems with reading in each of the traditional middle and high school content areas.

This study does not suggest do away with general remedial reading courses but to include specialized content areas reading instruction, which can also be a challenge to students who are otherwise good readers.

Science

Requires mathematical literacy, visual literacy, using diagrams, drawings, photographs, and maps to convey meanings. The use of scientific registers in terms of technical vocabulary and syntax must be taught to students.  Often words that have one meaning in everyday discourse have different and highly specialized meanings in science.

The technical vocabulary of science often has Latin or Greek roots which again must be taught to students.

   History/Social Science

Here the problem is largely the textbooks that are used in the schools. Reading difficulty presented by traditional textbooks is based on extensive research about how readers go about making sense of texts. As is evident in these studies, research on text processing indicates any of the common patterns found in social studies and science textbooks can make comprehension challenging (Beck, 1991).

·         Failure to make logical connections between propositions explicit

·         Use of references that are ambiguous, distant, or indirect.

·         The inclusion of information that is irrelevant to the main ideas

·         Density of ideas within individual sentences

Literature

Demonstrating what is entailed in interpreting literature, teacher try to illustrate what readers struggling and competent need to know in order to become good and hopefully life- long readers of literature.

As with other content areas prior knowledge is necessary for students to understand what they are reading.  Prior knowledge needs to include

·         Text structures

·         Prototypical human practices and internal states

·         A range interpretive problems author embed in their work

·         The ability to make inter-textual links

Mathematics

Here I would like to stop and say forget it. Nothing will help anyone understand math.  However the authors of this study would strongly disagree with me.

Again textbooks prove to more of a barrier than a help. As a result, students do not learn to become independent learners capable of acquiring mathematics outside of school when the need arises.

Key mathematics terms need to be explained and real world examples used. Examples that students and take into the real world and use when needed with the classroom teacher present.

Review of "Dyslexia" by Sally E. Shaywitz

This article answered several important questions for me. Most important what is dyslexia, I mean really through the years I read or heard many very different defiintions. It is neuro-biological.  "It is a deficiency in the processing of the distinctive linguistic units, called phonemes that make up all spoken and written words." The smallest meaningful unit segment of language. In the hierarchical modules of language system it is at the bottom. Amazing such a small thing as make my life hell.

Compensated dyslexics, that's Gregory and me. Compensation is better somes days than others. Actually some times of day better than others. I can hold my own if it is earlier in the day and I am not tired.

Truth be told I feel better after reading this article. I had put off as it long as I dared. It was short and to the point. It was enlightening.

Now how do we fix us old folks?

Application Phonemic Awareness Activity in the Classroom

Onomatopoeia Comic Book

(Phonemic Awareness Activity)

·        Gifted seventh grade English/Language Arts Class (two ELL students)

·        Students are finishing a unit on narrative writing

·        Students have two writings for this unit a personal narrative, which they wrote first and now a fictional narrative

·        Students were given the task of individually creating a super hero, villain, and a conflict

·        In class students used a plot outline to develop their stories

·        Stories were peer edited and then revised

·        Students were taken to the school computer lab to type their stories

·        Each student printed two copies of his/her story. One copy of the story was given to the teacher for grading the other for the students to use in creating a comic book.

·        To begin this portion of the project the teacher gives a definition of onomatopoeia (defined by Webster’s as “the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it – as buzz, hiss”) and how it is used in comic books

·        Students brain stormed onomatopoeia words that might be useful in their stories. The words were then written on the white board. This quickly became wild and crazy with students trying to outdo one another with unusual  sounds and spelling(s) of sounds. Of the two ELL students only the boy became very involved in calling out sounds of various actions, he was not as vocal with the spellings. The girl, who is always quiet, did seem to work well in her small group but not in the larger group.   

·        After creating an extensive list of onomatopoeia words

·        The teacher then copied the list of onomatopoeia words on to index cards

·        Each student picked two of the face down index cards and finds a place in his/her that the words will fit

·        We added students swapping cards when the word was also needed by someone else.

·        Because students had been peer editors on several different papers they felt obliged to suggest onomatopoeia words to others. Gifted kids, you gotta lov’em.