The work I give my students is intentional. I try to never give my students something just for the sake of giving them something to do. I am always trying to improve their skills, increase engagement, and open them up to reading a little bit more every day. Lucky for me, and my students, I am incredibly passionate about what I teach. Books have been a passion of mine for my entire life, so modeling a love of reading comes very naturally to me. My students think its hilarious and are always poking fun at me about it. The way I look at it, the more I normalize a love of reading, the more opportunities they have to start to feel the same! Students need reading role models, and I realized quickly into year 1 that very few of my students had one. I have tried to fill that gap as much as possible.
My classroom focuses the very most on close reading. The Common Core Standards for sixth grade reading are skills-based. I have tried to instill reading habits in my students. My students know that we read, select vocabulary, use context clues, annotate, and summarize absolutely everything we read. I know that by the end of the school year, my students will be so sick of following the same reading steps but I do believe in them wholeheartedly. Of course, I bring in new reading strategies all of the time and am always looking for new ways of getting my students to dig deep into our texts. I genuinely love the classic steps of using context clues and annotating so I try not to stray from those foundational habits.
Below are examples of work my students complete on a weekly basis. On the left is a fairy tale we close read together in the fall. By the end of it, my students copies were covered with annotations, notes on vocabulary, and highlights of vivid descriptions. On the right is a picture of a weekly bellringer sheet. My students read a passage and answer multiple-choice questions throughout the week using distractor analysis.
My classroom focuses the very most on close reading. The Common Core Standards for sixth grade reading are skills-based. I have tried to instill reading habits in my students. My students know that we read, select vocabulary, use context clues, annotate, and summarize absolutely everything we read. I know that by the end of the school year, my students will be so sick of following the same reading steps but I do believe in them wholeheartedly. Of course, I bring in new reading strategies all of the time and am always looking for new ways of getting my students to dig deep into our texts. I genuinely love the classic steps of using context clues and annotating so I try not to stray from those foundational habits.
Below are examples of work my students complete on a weekly basis. On the left is a fairy tale we close read together in the fall. By the end of it, my students copies were covered with annotations, notes on vocabulary, and highlights of vivid descriptions. On the right is a picture of a weekly bellringer sheet. My students read a passage and answer multiple-choice questions throughout the week using distractor analysis.
I work really hard to pull engaging texts for my students. When I have planned units with engaging texts I have seen my classroom transform. This happened for the first time last year, after state testing when I brought Tupac lyrics into my classroom. I love music, and was desperate to keep my students engaged without the state testing pressure we were all so used to. I decided to try using song lyrics as my text for the week and my students freaked for it. I had incredible engagement that week and I knew something special was happening in my room. The next week, I taught my students all about Lauryn Hill and we close read her song Everything is Everything. This year, I bring music into my class much more often. In the fall, I would incentivize students with the promise of Hip-Hop Fridays, which is when we would close read song lyrics if behavior had been solid all week. I loved this because I was rewarding my students with something actually beneficial and engaging, instead of just handing out bags of hot chips if they are good. Using engaging work as an incentive changed my classroom culture so much this year.
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I believe that my students and I can learn what we need to learn and practice the skills they need to be successful while also reading texts that mean something to us. My students have made inferences and observations based on pictures of Black Lives Matter protests and have identified the life lesson or theme in famous quotes by Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and Muhammad Ali. These lessons are always so much easier to get wins out of because I am meeting my students halfway. I expect them to work, and I think it is fair that they expect the work to not be overly dry or dull. The way I see it, my lessons are a daily opportunity to show my students that I notice who they are, what they care about, and who they want to be.