Answering this week’s blog questions is a little bit difficult for me. My class has been focusing so much time during the past couple of weeks on MEAP preparation that we haven’t had a lot of extra time to include many aspects of Book Club Plus into our daily routine. During the past couple of weeks, my classroom’s literacy program has consisted of handwriting for about 10 minutes in the morning, and about a half an hour of independent reading time in the afternoon. Thus, there isn’t much to compare. I do know that my CT is very familiar with the Book Club Plus framework, so I am anxious to see the comparisons once we start spending more time on them.
The readings did touch on one thing that I see a lot of in my classroom: creating groups. Even for creating things like seating charts, organizing students is huge. There are a couple students that can’t be in a group together, there are students who need to be with other students, there are students that you want to reward for good behavior by grouping with friends, I swear it’s like a giant puzzle. Before implementing this aspect of book club into my classroom I would have to really think about how I want groups to be set up.
If I were to try out some aspects of book club in my classroom I would definitely have some type of self-evaluation for the students to do. My class already does a lot of self-evaluation in other subjects, so this would be a format that is familiar to them. My students recently filled out a parent FYI form about how they think they are behaving in school so far, and it is extremely interesting to me to see how the students “grade” themselves. There are a handful of students, of course, who give themselves perfect scores when they really should not have, and there are also some students that grade themselves pretty hard, when they are actually doing very well. Having students reflect on their own participation and effort gets them thinking about those things.
I think it would also be helpful to give students some type of guidelines or rubric up front. This way, students know what the teacher is looking for and they can come up with a plan so that they can achieve the goals. This could also help the teacher. If you know the goals of what you would like your students to be able to do, you can better plan lessons that will help students get there.
I’m not sure I totally answered the questions, my blog got a little off topic, hopefully that’s okay.
Hi Amy!
ReplyDeleteWhile reading through your post, I found a lot of similar things going on between your classroom and mine. My class is preparing for the MEAP as well and unfortunately, hasn't spent as much time focusing on reading as I would like. I know once the MEAP is over, their focus will be geared more towards reading and writing, which will be beneficial to comparing with the Book Club Plus framework. I think it's great that your CT is incorporating a lot of group work into her curriculum. I find that my CT tends to gear her curriculum towards more individulized work, so I'd love to see my students working with other people more often. When you say that you would incorporate more self-evaluations within your class, what kinds are you thinking about? I really liked the idea of the "Grade Yourself So Far" evals! Well, nice job on your post and I'll see you tomorrow! :)
-Emily