LLED 3530: Hannah

“Newsela” is a great website to help students who have a hard time with reading and reading comprehension skills. Teachers select from thousands of articles to assign to students, then they take a quiz or write about what they read. This can be a great resource for us as teachers because we will be able to assign our students readings for our content area based each students’ lexical score. So this in turn benefits us and our students because they are getting the material needed for our class, at their own level, while helping them improve their reading and reading comprehension skills. Word Count: 102    Newsela  

Personally, I really enjoyed the strategy lesson. It was a great way to really see how a lesson plan works from start to finish and be the one who makes it. One thing that I thought went well was the example of a passage from Harry Potter that we gave the class to practice “Tweet the Text”. It was a great pop culture reference that a lot of students could relate to because they had either read the books, seen the movie or heard all about it from their obsessed friends. Another reason I think it went well was because students got to use Twitter in class and create a community online by using #LLED3530. One thing I think I would do different in the future is to do a better job of giving directions for activities. I felt Carlee and I mentioned the directions once then just expected everyone to catch on. Next time I will be sure to have the directions posted for the activity on the board and leave it up there or have pieces of paper with directions on them and pass them out to t...

In high school I felt I had a love hate relationship with textbooks. On the one hand it was nice because I had the resource for my class at my fingertips, but on the other hand it was boring. So boring. I found this chapter very intriguing because it gave some great examples on how to use the textbook better as a teacher, but also some other resources to use in place of the textbook. One thing that really caught my attention was that this book recommends for teachers to be “vigilant” (Daniels and Zemelman, 2014, p. 201) in looking for other textbooks for your class. I think this would be such a great idea because I can remember many of my teachers growing up saying “I really don’t like how the textbook presents this topic” but we would sometimes still have to use the textbook because it was required of them to do so.  I personally think that having multiple/ other resources teachers can avoid this problem and help the students learn material in the best way possible. O...

     Activity Circle is a great program to be used by all content area teachers across all grade levels. The program is accessed through an app where teachers create activities for their students to complete. Teachers can ask students multiple choice questions, to draw pictures, and to fill in the blank. Teachers can also add articles for students to read, as well. This is a great tool to use because it targets so many different learning styles through so many different activities offered. It also allows teachers to monitor students’ learning closely to determine their understanding of the material. Another great feature of this program is that you can share with other teachers and even parents. This is a great resource for us as future teachers to use because it will help students learn in different ways, allows us to track their learning, give us the opportunity to share with other teachers, and help keep parents up to date on what’s going on in the classroom....

     One of my biggest fears as a future teacher is coming across students who are not fluent readers. Teachers are already crunched for time to get their content material taught before end of the year testing, and then to add the problem of students not truly being able to read at their appropriate grade level presses teachers even more. I felt this chapter laid out practical ways that teachers can help students become better content readers and better readers in general. One thing that I really want to focus in on in my class is “giving instruction rather than just giving instructions” (Daniels and Zemelman, 2014, p. 283).        In my schooling experience I felt that too many times my teachers would just give us textbook pages to read and expect us to read them without any problems or too many questions. Other than boring me out of my mind, that technique never did anything for me and honestly I was more confused about...