For this post, I just want to reflect on how literacy functioned in my classroom for Educ 490. One string of lessons I really liked in regard to this was a group of lessons I worked with my CT on for core competency work. For this grade one class, my CT used “the Six Cedar Trees” as a basis for explicitly teaching core competencies because we had attached each animal and its corresponding core competency to books. We used lots of different stories to connect the students to bigger ideas that we could then discuss. We talked about topics like respect, critical thinking, problem solving, diversity and so on.
For these activities, I would usually start the lesson off with some priming on what we want to be thinking about when we were reading our story. I found this was very helpful because it gave the students a topic to connect the story to and from there asking questions for discussion was an easy next step. We would read our story, stopping to make connections and ask questions throughout and then discuss some greater connections and ideas from the students afterwards. They then would have to do a writing job that was a writing prompt on the topic where they would have to write 1-2 sentences and then draw a picture to illustrate. These tasks are pretty simple for these students but I found the students could easily think of examples in their own lives that could connect to the topic in this way. For example, when we were focusing on problem-solving our prompt was ” A time I had to solve a problem was… I solved it by…”.
This novel by Kobi Yamada was a great resource for discussing problem solving, you could also use this book as a tool to talk about growth mindset. I used many different books for this string of lessons and I will include a few below.
Overall, I thought this string of lessons was a good way to teach using all modes of literacy because it combined reading (being read to), oral language (class discussion) and writing (induvial work). I will continue to use these types of lessons moving forward because I love that they promote those conversations surrounding big ideas for students as well as encourages students to ground their learning through their own experiences.
This story by Clayton Gauthier was a great resource to talk about perseverance and critical thinking.
This story by Peter H. Reynolds was a great story to use for talking about what makes people unique, and why that is important.
This story by Angela Kohler was a great story that gets students thinking about being grateful and what that means.
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