Orthography

Steven (pseudonym) is a first grader at Dog Branch Elementary School (DBES) in Dundalk, MD. Steven entered Dog Branch E.S. in April of his Kindergarten year from the Baltimore City Public School system. In first grade, Steven is in a general education classroom and receives small group instruction for both reading and math. I completed and analyzed five different assessments to identify Steven’s strengths and weaknesses. Letter Name Word Study Assessment The purpose of this assessment is to…

Learning to read is a fun and engaging time period for children, however it can also be very complicated for them to pick up on. As children get to the age where they are developmentally ready to begin reading, they must begin with the basics. This is not something that they can learn with one sitting. Some children will pick up reading quicker than others. It is important to remember that children learn differently and excel at different rates. Just because a student who is developmentally…

My approach to reading has changed over the semester. Before this class, I would just read without taking notes. In reading, I would just read instead of looking up the difficult word or using context clues to figure out what the word means. Now during my reading I annotate and look up unknown vocabulary words. When I look up the difficult word, I would find the closest appropriate definition. This will benefit me next semester and other classes by taking notes and read the questions before I…

The Teacher Who Believed In Me My most memorable moment, during my early years of school, was my seventh grade English Teacher, Mrs. McCoy. She was by far my favorite teacher ever. She made learning fun and enjoyable due to a very energetic and caring personality. You could tell that she genuinely cared about how well her students did in her class. She always worked with her students that needed extra help with the assignments. And I was definitely one of her students that…

DESCRIPTION: We are currently working on opinion essays in our writing unit. Students have been drafting book reviews over the past few weeks, focusing on finding evidence and using persuasive language. Today, I introduced the students to the second-to -last step in the writing process: Editing. We started on the rug, as I introduced the editing checklist. The checklist had four main points – it had students check for capitalization, punctuation, spelling and understanding. I used an…

The writing program used by the teacher comes from Lucy Caulkins. After lunch every day, the class begins their one hour writing block. The block generally begins with a mini-lesson that takes up about 10-15 minutes. These lessons usually involve the teacher modeling for the students different skills and techniques that they will practice in their writer’s notebooks. For the first portion of the year, the class has been mainly working on three different writing skills: how to pick topics to…

Project 1- Reading and Writing and Bechdel: When thinking about the way we read and write as individual’s, we often do not think of someone reading or writing a comic book, we often jump right to the conclusion of a person reading or writing something along the lines of a novel. Bechdel did just that, in creating her comic book “The Ordinary Devoted Mother” she wrote and read in a comic book style. She developed reading and writing as a recurring theme in the duration of her piece. Throughout…

While coming upon a reading by Annie Dillard which was assigned by my drawing instructor. I have come to realize seeing is a special attribute. Annie Dillard an author, narrates her childhood in the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She writes on how we perceive our world and universe. One extreme example she uses people that have cataracts, or blind since birth. These people don’t know the meaning of what color, form, and distance mean. Our vision as an artist is to capture our perspective and let…

I was never the child to sit around bored constantly. If I found myself bored, I would go grab a book. My mom and dad read to me every night as a child and when I could read on my own, they let me read alone before bed. They were always the parents who thought that “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children,” (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkson 23). They taught me how to love reading and made sure I…

Before taking CRE-101, I have never heard about Project Read Aloud. When reading the directions about the assignment I thought this assignment did not come in such perfect timing. My seven-year old sister Ammy has a tough time reading at times. Her teacher and my parents decided to make a plan so that Ammy could get more confident reading. The plan was for us as a family to take turns reading to her before she goes to bed. When picking a partner, the first person I thought of was my sister Ammy…