Final Post. :)

Entry 1 - Literature Circles

For our last assignment, we were to create a literature circle for a group of our students and implement it. Literature circles are a great way to engage students from the beginner level to the advanced level of readers. The students become more involved in their learning and begin to take ownership. Literature circles are also a great way to have students begin to discuss the books they are reading and can dive into a deeper understanding of the book because they begin to see how other perceive the book, text, and pictures. I absolutely love literature circles! They are especially great because they combine reading, writing, speaking, and listening -- all the skills that ESL students need practice with.

Therefore, I was extremely excited about implementing my literature circle lesson plan with the students. I chose the book "John, Paul, George & Ben" by Lane Smith to use with my 4th graders since they were learningabout the Revolutionary War. There are 4 students in this group -- three Hispanic boys and one Sudanese girl. All of the students are intermediate level and the book was right on their reading level. On the first day, the students decided their literature circle roles in the group, which to my surprise went very well. The roles were: discussion director, vocabulary finder, literary luminary, and checker. With the implementation, I quickly realized however that the students needed guidance with what their roles meant and how to effectively complete the role's assignments. The students are high enough where they were able to lead most of the discussion. However, there were a few times where I directed the questions because the students were only skimming the surface of the book and not trying to fully comprehend the book. During these times, I have two beach balls for reading comprehension with questions on them when they were stuck for questions. They would pass the beach ball around and discuss the answers together. They were truly engaged and walked away being able to give me a full summary of the book -- IN DETAIL!!!!! :) I will continue to use literacy circles.

Entry 2 - Personal Reflection on Journey through Fieldwork

Throughout my Master's degree program, the fieldwork class is the one where I feel I learned the most. I was able to take all of the things I learned in all of my previous classes and apply that knowledge in an actual classroom and had the help/advice from a mentor. By being able to work in the classroom and complete an action research and case study, I believe I have gained the most from these assignments because I understand to look at the whole student to best meet their needs. Until the teacher does that, they will only teach to half of the student and not effectively meet their needs.

For all teachers, even those who do not want to be ESL teachers, I would definitely recommend the ESL add-on endorsement because with the number of immigrant students coming into the classrooms, it would greatly benefit them to have some background knowledge in working with them. When taking the ESL add-on endorsement program, I would advise you to soak in everything because it is great information to have! :)

Case Study in theRegular Ed. Classroom

When doing the case study, I chose the same student I had for the neighborhood profile and ethnographic narrative. In doing so, a teacher is able to see all aspects that make up a student. The home life, how the student works in the regular ed. classroom, and the student telling me how they feel about their home life and school. I feel like I truly know the student and am completely able to teach the student in a way that will accommodate everything in their life so they are successful because I have completed all of these projects. By completing the case study and ethnographic narrative, the student's teacher next year will have a lot of data and information on the student that will help them to meet the needs of this student.

For my case study, I decided to observe a 4th grade classroom in my school. The student I observed working is a more timid student when working in pairs because they have low confidence in themselves and the work they produce. Therefore, I was interested to see how the student would work with their table because they were the only ESL student and their partner excels in Math. The activity to practice function tables was the student and their partner had to go to 6 tables that have the students practice what they have been learning about function tables. With their partner, they worked together through discussion to determine the answers. Then, they would go check their answers with the teacher and if correct, they would move on to the next table. At the end of the lesson, I was pleasantly surprised that my student was able to work and when it was their time -- they took the leadership role! That tells me that the student is beginning to feel more confident and comfortable in the classroom.

From the case study, I have learned it is important to do the following when second language learners are working in a group environment. They need to have the following to feel confident and work successfully:

• Allow the students a set of mathematical (or any subject) term dictionary. Therefore, the student will be able to recall the terms they have learned to better explain how they determined their answer with their partner. Also, the student would be provided with more chances to use and remember those key vocabulary terms.
• Since the student struggled with longer word problems, by discussing with the whole class before the activity what each problem was looking for might benefit second language learners.
• Lastly, a great strategy that encourages student's language learning success is through group discussion and with other groups. Therefore, the students have more opportunities to use the key vocabulary terms and builds CALP.

Thoughts on Action Research

Thoughts About Action Research -- A Tool to Improve Practice

Action Research is a great tool to use in order to improve your teaching practice. By creating and completing action researches within your classroom, you continually are evaluating your teaching skills and methods in order to be the most effective for the students. A teacher should constantly try to improve their teaching methods and action research is a efficient and effective way to improve our practice that is best suited for the students.

Ideas Generated from My Action Research Project

In my school, most of the CORE ESL students struggle with being able to demonstrate their knowledge accurately on reading assessments. The students struggle with understanding what the questions are asking based on their limited English proficiency (reading skills and vocabulary). My action research focused on the two research questions:

• When provided with a reading assessment that assesses students' reading skills and comprehension, if the students can read the passage aloud into a "whisper phone", will the students' ability to answer the questions improve?
• When provided a weekly reading assessment over the story, if having the teacher read the questions to the students right before and then having the students read the questions through a "whisper phone" to the teacher afterward, will the grades improve? (The teacher should read the questions and have the students first discuss what the questions are asking.)

The ideas generated from this project were to discover whether the discussion of the questions prior to testing and allowing the students time aside to read aloud the question and passages to a teacher would help improve their testing scores.

Suggestions Based on My Findings

A brief overview of my findings is all of the students read their entire test aloud into the "whisper phone" and every student that was assessed made a significant increase in the grade on the post-test on Friday. Therefore, my suggestion for other ESL teachers based on my findings would be:

• Allow the students a chance to read the test aloud. When the students are read their test aloud, they are able to score better on the assessments because they take the time to read each questions and answer. They also seem to feel more comfortable and not rushed.

Plurals/Observation #2

Teaching Issues

In second grade, my students are beginning to learn about plural endings. They breezed through the concept of nouns with no problem. However, plural nouns are giving them major problems. After interviewing my third grade student last week, I knew that plurals gave all ESL students difficulty. My student had stated that he found reading and writing in English easy and grammar was the hardest -- especially plurals! Teaching grammar to ESL students seems to be a challenge. With students not using and writing in English at home, they do not have the prior knowledge of using plurals and their rules. Therefore, they seemed to struggle with that mini-lesson this week.

The mini-lesson began with a quick "I Have, Who Has?" game with plurals. I wanted to be able to see what my student's prior knowledge with plurals were. The students did well with the activity, however, I was afraid they didn't truly understand the rules. With this in mind, I thought of a way for students to visually see the rules and have something to refer back to if they needed it, so we created a tree map focusing only on adding -s, -es, and -ies to make words plural. Next, they each had a word sort bag with words and had to put them under which ending would correctly make it a plural. They worked in pairs with guidance from me. The students struggled and would not refer back to their tree map. However, once they began to work together and remembered their tree map, they all did just fine. At the end I wanted to test their knowledge on the subject without embarrassing any of the students, so we took out our white boards and practiced. I would write simple words on the board and have the students write the plural form. The students consistently wanted to just add "-s" to everything. We struggled and will definitely revisit the concept more this week.

After the lesson not going so well this week, I am going to create bookmarks for the students to keep with them as a reminder to help with the rules. Unfortunately, plurals is one of the harder parts of grammar for students to remember. Therefore, I think my students would benefit from having a constant reminder. I also think it will be important to provide my students with a number of opportunities to be exposed to the rules so they become automatic.

Second Language Acquisition/Ethnographic Perspective

With my students, allowing them to explore with a partner seemed to work well in promoting second language acquisition. They had to discuss the words and their endings to figure out which rule applied. They also had to defend their answer and revisit the concept if they disagreed. It helped them think about the rules and concept more in-depth. This particular group seems to be able to work best in a group or partnered setting. They are my lower group and sometimes are overlooked because they go with the answer others give. By having them have to work with just one partner and defend their answers, they did very well. They were able to build confidence in themselves by having to defend their answer.

In this group, I have 1 Arabic student, 2 Sudanese students, and 4 Hispanic children. With this group being so diverse, the issue of integrating culture and linguistic diversity emerges. Each student had a different level of understanding of plurals and their rules. Therefore, we worked on hearing just the "s" sound on words like "balls" and the "e" sound when adding "-es" to words like "churches". To better meet the needs of these second language learners, I think it would be good to know the rules of plurals in each student's language (if their are any) or what their knowledge is about plurals in English. Therefore, you can tap into their prior knowledge of plurals and better assist them. Culture specific items were not incorporated into this lesson because it was a brand new concept that we took the time to develop the skill.

Nouns with ESL/ Observation #1

Teaching

With my third graders, I have an hour to spend with them everyday. On this particular day, we focused on Language Arts because the students struggle the most with that particular aspect of English in their classrooms. The purpose of the lesson this week was to review everything they had been discussing about nouns in their classroom. To begin with, we discussed what nouns were (person, place, or thing). I had a few objects or pictures that could be categorized under a person, place, or thing. Each student got a few and had to sort them under person, place, or thing. We then discussed it as an entire group. Secondly, we went on a Scavenger Hunt around the classroom and school to locate all of the nouns. The students all did a great job with this aspect of the lesson because it was just a quick review of what had been discussed in their classrooms.

When we came back to the classroom, the students were given an activity where they had to cut out words and place them under person, place, or thing. This activity was a informal way to assess whether the students needed more time on identifying nouns or if they were ready to move onto proper and common nouns. One of my students in this group is a CORE student, therefore I made modifications for her and worked one-on-one with her so if she needed help sounding out a word, I was there to provide support. Once the students were finished, we checked them as an entire group.

All of the students had a great time with the Scavenger Hunt around the school and did an amazing job! They completely grasped the concept and were ready to move onto proper and common nouns for the next day! :)

Community

The students are all such great friends because they have been in ESL together since 1st grade. Therefore, they have been able to create a sense of community and are very helpful to one another. If someone needed help with a word or the concept, the other students were very respectful and considerate. They did not make fun of the student or laugh. The students in this group are extremely loving and caring students! During this time, my EA works with a Non-English student. Normally they work on different stuff than my group does, but since he is in the same class and is able to identify most nouns in English now, he came along on the Scavenger Hunt. All of my 3rd graders are Hispanic and were so helpful with the Non-English student. They would speak to him in English until he did not understand something and would quickly speak Spanish to him to help him understand. They truly want everyone to be able to learn English.

Most of the students in this particular group, are intermediate which means they had to have scored a 3 on their ELDA the previous year. However, due to time constraints, I have one CORE student. I see all of the students for an hour since I do have the one CORE student.

Ethnographic Perspective

During the lesson, I observed the students working cooperatively with each other. They have been together in ESL for 2 years now and all have developed a strong relationship with one another. By observing, you can tell that they have a strong desire to learn and want the best for the other students around them. All of these students come from families who place a high value on education and therefore so do the children. Informal interactions occurred during my lesson and you can see that students are very considerate of one another and are helpful to each other. From the interview, my student answered the question regarding two of the other students in ESL. He stated they were his friends because "they helped him when he did not know an answer." Therefore, demonstrating the community and interactions the students have with each whether they are formal or informal.

If an outside observer came into the classroom during this lesson, they would have seen different types of learning happening. I try to provide the students with as many opportunities to view the concept as I can to help reach all students. We learned about nouns through visuals, auditory, listening, and kinesthetic learning. Also, I like to introduce the vocabulary the students need to have in the beginning, then guide the students through a very hands-on and engaging activity, and at the end have them work individually or in pairs to complete an independent activity. Therefore, I know where the students need help and can make the appropriate accommodations for the independent practice or review the next day. I like having the students work together during the guided instruction because it helps all of the students take on the tutor role and feel welcomed and accepted. They aren't forced to tell answers they may not be sure of until they have had a chance to work with their partner and discuss it. Therefore, they are actively taking a role in their learning and being able to discuss the concept to revise their original understanding or be able to thoroughly explain the concept they understand. The students then know they are all welcomed and accepted no matter where they are in the English proficiency.

New Beginnings

For the past year, I was a graduate assistant at MTSU. I graduated in May with my Masters and am continuing my ESL add-on endorsement. While I am taking my last class this semester, I am also a first-year ESL teacher! I have close to 30 students I see each day in grades 2 - 5. I work with an amazing and supportive group of teachers who have helped me adjust to being THE teacher. :) A big difference from student teaching and I must admit at first it was very overwhelming. However, when you get 30 hugs and see the "ah-ha" moments from the students, you realize that the stress from paperwork, evaluations, etc. is all worth it! I also am in a school where the ESL population is mainly Hispanic students and am grateful to have a full-time EA who speaks Spanish fluently. The biggest challenge I have so far is being able to communicate with the parents. I am using the little bit of Spanish I know so that way I communicate directly with them, but use the EA for most translations. I am excited to share my journey with you as this year progresses!