Sunday, October 5, 2014

Teacher Mini-Lessons & Reading Conference Videos

Rick's Reading Workshop: Mini-Lesson 
I loved the way Rick interacted with his students and got them to really think. As he reads the Wednesday Surprise, he models the exact behaviors the kids need to use in their own reading. I love how he really guides their thoughts by talking about his own and asking about the students. He creates his own theory as he reads the story and demonstrates to the students how his develops and asks the kids to form their own.  I also love how he really knows how to engage his students. These mini-lesson videos are very inspirational and are wonderful for ideas and examples to use in the classroom.



Reader's Workshop, Rena Norwood
In this video, Rena talks about why we would reread a book. One this I really liked about this teacher is how she treated her students in regards to classroom management. When students got distracted instead of telling them to be quiet, she tells them to look at her. When she had to call out an individual student, she didn't call their name in an annoyed voice and tell them to stop talking. Instead, she called his name kindly, and when he looked she would thank him for looking at her. She used positive reinforcement to manage her classroom instead of negative reinforcement. I think something she could have done though is to integrate some more of her ideas to keep the kids thinking instead of having them simply repeat the same ideas over and over about why we would reread a book.


A Reading Conference: Teaching Intertextuality to a Student (5-8)
I love the idea that reading conferences really differentiate students as individual reader and challenge them. This must be a really good student/school though because most people even in my high school didn't pick up on these themes in the text. I really like how the teacher works simply as a guide through these texts, but these student does most of the thinking.


Reading Conferences
This video demonstrates many of the difficulties teachers can have in regards to reading conferences. I think this problem applies more to the older grades, but can become an issue as soon as you get past picture books. When its functions properly conferences like this one can show a teacher that the student is engaged in the book, but also works to guide what the student should be think about while reading the book.

1 comment:

  1. I think that this is a very effective blog. I like your use of another media besides pictures. I think that by providing the videos, it helps us understand mini-lessons and conferences better by use of examples. I think that it would also be effective to add more of how you would implement these in your class and give a deeper analysis of what the videos are providing. You can try making personal connections to the videos of not only how you would carry out these techniques in the classroom, but how it was when you were in school and what was and was not done to improve literacy.

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