teacher books

One of my favorite parts of teaching is that it's profession where you can continue to learn and improve your practice. I spend way too much on Amazon buying books about classroom management, child development, and improving instruction.

I'm particularly trying to work on my guided reading groups right now. I have a few students who still haven't reached that fluency hump where they are decoding with automaticity, and I'm trying to problem solve. I've noticed one relies heavily on print and phonics without using any context or picture clues. Every guided reading lesson seems to be a lesson on using skills such as "skip the word" and "use the pictures" to find what word would make sense. I'm reading a few books about guided reading to get some more ideas to help her.

Some of my favorites right now are "Preventing Misguided Reading" and "The Continuum of Literacy." I've had "Preventing Misguided Reading" for about a year and I never got around to reading it until the past few weeks. One of the most important takeaways I've had is the importance of lowering books levels for students struggling with comprehension. It's so counter intuitive as a teacher - it's all about rigor! However, we can't get students to engage deeply with a text when they are spending so much time on the the decoding process.

I've found "The Continuum of Literacy" to be really helpful as I'm trying to improve my guided reading instruction as well. It has one to two pages of notes for each guided reading level that have quick hits for comprehension and word work. I've had it open on my desk when I plan guided reading and when I'm teaching my groups as a quick reference.

Does anyone else have good recommendations for "teacher books" they're loving right now?

vocab and the word gap

The 30 million word gap is something that I remember first learning at a Teach for America training 4 or 5 years ago. Even after 5 years of teaching and watching so many students struggle with an obvious vocabulary deficient, it's still hard to comprehend. 30 MILLION WORDS. And those are my kids who are suffering, and my kids who we aren't reaching.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, this year my class has a high ELL population. Of my 19 students, 16 speak a language other than English at home. The word gap is wider and harder to close for them. In January, I tested a student on TRC. His fluency is amazing - he read every nonsense word on DIBELS with time to spare and can decode books we ask third graders to read. However, he couldn't pass a mid-first grade level on TRC because of two words - "greedy" and "lesson." Watching his confusion as he struggled to understand was so frustrating! If only I could ask in Spanish! If only I had taught him "greedy" when describing character traits instead of "brave" or "persistent."

Over the past few weeks, I've really enjoyed learning more about teaching vocabulary and trying to implement it in my classroom. My first attempt at a vocabulary square was pretty feeble, but it gave me a lot to learn from. For my second tiered lesson, I was much more intentional about the vocabulary I chose. Was it something that my kids could understand and access, or was it one of those "Tier 3" words that wasn't as essential to their understanding. It was actually pretty fun to watch my kids engage with new words and recognize them in other settings.

I'm excited to continue trying new ways to introduce vocabulary in my class. I have to keep thinking of it as small steps. It's not 29,999,995 more words to be exposed to, but five more words they've learned.