2009-2010 TSS Blog: 2009-2010 TSS Blog: MARCIA TATE- Brain Based Strategies
I am so glad that I had the opportunity to hear Marcia Tate's presentation. I feel that she re-energized me as a teacher. I have been out of the classroom for two years. I am a half day academic coach and a half day reading teacher. Even though I used a lot of her strategies when I had my own classroom, when I reflected on how I am teaching reading I realized that I had moved away from these great teaching methods. I have been using the Guided Reading approach, which I feel is the best way to meet the needs of struggling readers. However, with that being said, there are several ways that I could "spice" up my Guided Reading lessons. I decided to incorporate more music and movement into my lessons. One way that I incorporated music was to teach rhyming words with the song "The Name Game". The kids loved it! I also decided to use role playing, visualization, graphic organizers, and drawing to help improve comprehension. One activity that I tried was to take a page from the text and photocopy it onto a transparency. I then projected it onto the wall so that the children were the same size as the character. The children had to go up to the character and speak for him/her (what would the character say if he/she could talk to us). My children liked this so much more than simply retelling the story. I found that graphic organizers gave my students more confidence in their abilities to comprehend what was read. It helped them organize and plan out their thinking, so that when it came time to discuss the text they were more willing to share ideas. The graphic organizers gave them a crutch to lean on during our discussions.
When I model lessons in other teachers classrooms I make sure that I model using manipulatives, reciprocal teaching (turn and talk, reflection, peer editing), and project based instruction (in-depth, spanning across several weeks, real world writing projects). One thing that I did with my own students was share stories about my life. Every morning we would start the day by sitting in a circle and sharing something that had happen to each of us the night before. I would write and share stories about my life during Writer's Workshop. I would make connections to my life during Read Aloud and Reader's Workshop. I guess that I moved away from this because I am just popping into another teacher's room to do a lesson and I feel like I don't really know the kids and they don't know me so they would not be interested in my life. After hearing Marcia Tate, I decided to share stories about my life with them. Wow, did this change how the children responded to my lesson. They opened up as writers when they heard me open up as a writer. I became a real person to them. My next plan of action is to try to incorporate more games and technology into both my reading and coaching lessons. I tend to shy away from games and technology because I find them difficult to manage. I took a chance and modeled a prefix game in a 3rd grade class, the kids loved it and were all on task. Marcia Tate was wonderful and I plan to keep sharing her strategies with my mentee and other teachers that I coach.
Monday, March 29, 2010
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I really enjoyed the session with Marcia Tate. Our school became a Cornerstone school this year and I think I was so busy trying to implement my lessons so they would be “just right”. That I somewhat lost sight of teaching the whole student. Marcia reminded me that I could not only teach better but smarter. It’s amazing what students can accomplish when teachers are aware of the capabilities of the brain. After the session, I started planning my lessons based on Marcia’s lesson plan template. The next week, my students really enjoyed the lessons, they were engaged and exited about learning because we were singing and moving and around. One student said later in the week, that I should teach like that all of the time. What a wake-up call!
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