Heather's Middle School Literacy Blog

Where does literacy belong? Prior to this course, I imagined literacy as something that only takes place in English Language Arts classrooms. One of the reasons I chose to be a Middle Grades Education major over Early Childhood Education is because I thought the responsibility of teaching someone how to read was too great for someone like me. Although I will not necessarily be teaching students “reading,” I have learned that literacy is an all-encompassing attribute of education that needs to be incorporated in all subject areas in school. It extends beyond literature as a subject and even the school walls. It is everywhere. Whether I asked for it or not, teaching literacy is the responsibility of every teacher. Understanding what literacy is and how to use it is a vital skill for students to be successful in the classroom and in the world. In math, one of the main struggles I had as a student was not being able to understand what a problem was asking. It wasn’t that I d...

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Strategy Lesson Reflection: Clustering and Mapping  Our group presented clustering and mapping as a helpful strategy to use in our future classrooms. This strategy is very effective for students to make connections between their own prior knowledge and new concepts. Overall, the lesson went well. Our peers wrote that they appreciated the clarity of our learning objectives stated at the beginning of the lesson. It was helpful for them as students to know what to look for in the upcoming lesson. This provides some structure and scaffolding for students to build off of as they learn in our classroom. Our peers also liked that we incorporated a video as our text. It was a fun and engaging way for them to absorb the content.  Although there were a lot of glows from our lesson, there were also some much needed grows. Many of our peers wrote that they did not have enough time for the lesson we prepared for them. Time constraints proved to be a challenge as we attempted to teac...

Newsela is a website dedicated to providing a variety of resources for both teachers and students.  As a future social studies educator, I have access to primary sources covering almost all subareas of social studies: government, world history, U.S. and economics. Not only does it provide primary sources, but it alters the same source for different Lexile levels. Lexile levels are a scale of reading levels from early emergent readers to adulthood. Students have the opportunity to read the same text at levels altered for their personal reading level. This takes a lot of pressure off of us as teachers to pull resources that tailor all of the literacy levels of students in our classroom. What I love most about this resource is that it is not just specific to one particular content area. This resource is particularly great for social studies because of its access to primary sources and current event articles. However, in the drop down tab, there are plenty of resources for science a...

BOOK CLUBS Prior to reading this chapter, I never would have thought to use a book club in my future middle school classroom. I assumed it would be too time consuming for both myself and students and not having enough benefit to use class time on. After reading, I have come to realize that book clubs are a helpful tool for teachers and students to combine both collaborative learning and independent reading in the classroom. I like that teachers have so much freedom to design the book clubs however they like, and that one attribute of the book club listed by the authors is that "a spirit of playfulness and sharing pervades the room' (243). Reading isn't always fun for students, but the set-up the book club provides makes it a fun time for students in the classroom. Part of what makes the book clubs fun is that students have the power to lead their own discussions with students their own age. This is a student centered activity in which the teacher does not lead the disc...

The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis  This novel discusses the life of a young girl, Parvana, in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. Her father gets arrested early in the novel by the Taliban. To take care of her family, she disguises herself as a boy and works on the streets as the family's "breadwinner." This novel works great with 7th Grade Social Studies Standards over geography, history, and government in Southwest Asia or the Middle East.

Resource Blog #4  The resource usa.gov is an online tool for free access to lesson plans. These lesson plans are U.S. government content within the Social Studies subject area. There are a wide variety of topics explored, from learning about taxes to learning how the Supreme Court works. What I enjoy most about this resource is that it has features besides lesson plans for teachers. There are several different tabs you can choose from to learn more information about specific topics. For example, I can click the "Benefits, Grants, and Loans" tab and learn more about Food Assistance policies and requirements in the United States. This component makes it easy for students and teachers to gain more in depth knowledge about specific content areas. A common critique from students in schools is, "when am I ever going to use this in the real world?" This resource shows how practical the content in Social Studies is and the real life implications for American citizens. S...

MATH IN THE MARGINS  SUMMARIZE  This piece discusses how a group of math teachers, their students, and English Education researchers examined literacy practices within a classroom. What they found is that the writing practices that became present were very different that what the researchers originally anticipated. One group of high school students from rural Iowa and their math teacher maintained a two-year letter communication with fellow high school students and their math teacher in urban Massachusetts. What the researchers found is that the students authentically presented math situations to their pen pals across the country and were able to make meaningful connections with math content and real-world problems. This article discusses the importance of maintaining literacy practices in the classroom to help students deepen their understanding of the content and the world around them. MAKE CONNECTIONS  I found it very interesting that students tended to hyper...

As math teachers, it can often be daunting to compile helpful resources of that fit different learning preferences. I have discovered a resource that caters to different activities and various subareas of math content. Math-drills.com is a helpful (and FREE) resource for teachers to access worksheets, flash cards, and interactive games. One feature that is particularly helpful for teachers is that the free materials provided cover a broad range of topics, such as number sense, arithmetic, pre-algebra, geometry, measurement, and money concepts. You can also narrow down the focus to particular units within those subareas. An attraction this resource offers is that it can be accessed not only by teachers, but students as well. Students can play the various interactive games, such as sudoku, but they can also access vocabulary flashcards. There is also a unit converter feature that allows students and teachers to convert units quickly. Math-drills.com also makes an effort to make lear...

How To Use a Textbook  Textbooks are often seen as the standard text incorporated in classrooms. How effective are textbooks really for our students? The authors of  Subjects Matter  discuss in Chapter 11 how we as teachers should properly engage with textbooks in our classrooms. The reality is, using textbooks as our sole resource in the classroom is not helping our students learn most effectively. The authors write: "Textbook based teaching doesn't work" (178). So, do we completely disregard textbooks? No. Textbooks provide good content for our subject areas. However, we must be choosy with our selections from the textbook and how we present the text to our students.  Rather than present the text by assigning individual reading, use activities that help students engage in the text and draw out the concepts you feel are essential for deep understanding of the subject. One activity in particular that I would like to use in Jigsawing. To use t...