Ms. M's Tales of a Teacher: My Personal Teacher Blog

 Today I'm excited to chat about one of my favorite things... structured literacy is an area that I'm passionate about, and I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about it, so let's dive in!  One area of focus for me has been working with students to develop strong phonemic awareness/decoding skills. Since my first Comprehensive training (and since retaking the training this summer) with  IMSE  I've had opportunities to work with students and apply these strategies. One of my favorite activities is using the blending board with large sound cards in which students blend the sounds into words after they study the sound.  I've also attended some workshops through IDA and Learning Ally in which I heard Dr. David Kilpatrick share his research. These experiences completely renovated how I view and now explain the difficulty students experience being able to read words without having to sound them out. Dr. David Kilpatrick describes this process as  orthographic ma

 Today I'd like to focus on sharing something that my co-teacher and I have been working on in our classroom for Writing Workshop with our class. I like to think of this as splitting time wisely. We often know that multitasking can either be useful or well, frankly, useless. We found that having different writing pieces for students to work on works well.  This past unit for narrative writing, we had the students engaged in two different writing pieces. I took the lead with their main narrative writing piece in which most students focused on a personal story they wanted to share. My co-teacher took the responsibility of introducing the students to pattern books using Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle to show the students how to create a pattern book of their own.  Time was set aside for students to create a class book (shared writing) and then students work with a partner to create a pattern of their own. We rotated writing sessions so students had ample time t