Literature Circles are a lot like Writing Circles. Students do not need to join them with anything prepared ahead of time. Each group can have a variety of reading levels. They can also be randomly assigned. The idea is for students to get excited to read what their peers are reading. And, with some practice, to get excited to share their own book!
Growth Mindset: How to Nourish your Mindset to Make It Thrive!
Growth mindset is one of two belief systems we might have about our own abilities. Growth mindset has a more stagnant counterpart known as a fixed mindset. Research has shown encouraging different types of behavior might predict a person’s future successes.
Motivation Research has shown that these two mindsets are manifested from a very early age. Our mindset governs our behavior and our relationship with success and failure. This occurs in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately affects our capacity for happiness in life.
Writing in All Subjects: Over the past two weeks, we’ve explored writing and ways to encourage reluctant writers to simply get words on paper. Now that your students/children are writing, what comes next? Writing can be used as a learning strategy, too.
Research has shown information is quickly forgotten if it’s not quickly reinforced. Writing can help to strengthen a student’s memories of material they’re currently working with.
Writing Strategies: Two Strategies to Help Young (and old) Writers. In my teaching experience, writing is one of the most difficult things to teach effectively. Teaching effective and meaningful writing in a virtual setting becomes that much harder. In the classroom, it has taken me many years to develop what I believe to be effective strategies to teach writing. Two strategies I encourage to help struggling writers in the classroom or at home: Writing Circles and Writing Graphic Organizers.
Writing wounded. What exactly does this concept mean? Many educators, as do I, look at writing as the inverse of reading. If you follow the Montessori method, you discover the fundamentals of writing are taught even before many fundamentals of reading. Writing also happens to be one of the subjects I was given the least guidance in during my teacher training. In my experience, writing is one of the most difficult things to teach effectively. At least, I feel that way at the upper elementary ages.
Written language is a code and children need to be taught how to decode it. Early reading skills include phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, decoding and fluency. But as young readers advance, the development of comprehension skills work differently. Skilled reading is an active process; the reader’s mind is constantly processing information extracted from the text.
There are multiple comprehension thinking strategies available to a struggling reader. Often, many or all of these strategies are working together to assist in comprehension. Here is a breakdown of the seven to which have been found most effective..
Skilled Reading: How do we help struggling readers? As readers advance, the development of comprehension skills work differently. Research shows older readers possess specific strategies to construct meaning before, during, and after reading a text. I now know this type of reading to be called “skilled reading.”
The key to skilled reading is being capable of recognizing words without relying on context at all. This is one of the most well replicated findings in all current reading research.
What is it and how does it improve spelling and vocabulary? Word study is the study of changes made over time to words in a given language. This can be achieved through looking closely at the etymology of words, their roots & affixes, synonyms & antonyms and compound words. Word study enriches our vocabulary and can be used as a highly effective aid to spelling!
Upward social mobility: What is it? In this case, leading researchers have divided up the population into five categories or quintiles. If you are born in the bottom 20% (experts refer to this as the bottom quintile), upward social mobility is the chance you have to move up to the top 20% (or the top quintile). Another term commonly used for social mobility is inequality.
According to The Brookings Institution, there are multiple layers at work when it comes to our personal social mobility.
Montessori method can be quite confusing to an outsider who is looking in. The classroom approach goes against most things we remember from our traditional schooling. It can look chaotic and unproductive. The teacher might look unprepared and not as responsive to student needs as they should be..