Reader's Workshop

Attending The Columbia University Teachers College Reading Institute was life-changing for our team. How do we invite children to become Readers? Do we start with them, or do we start with our textbook teacher edition? At the Reading Institute, we learned that we start with our children! We find out what they understand about print and what their relationship has been to print, and through a series of authentic assessments and workshop mini-lessons based on their needs, we deliver instruction that is differentiated, meaningful, and relevant to their lives! For both the English and the Spanish speaking students in our classrooms, print has become a source of enjoyment and pleasure. It has become their fund of knowledge, and it is central in their learning life. We have personally witnessed non-readers in September, aggressively tackle the print before them and proudly identify known words and use strategies to read unknown words. We have found our readers discover more about the features of text, genres and author's purpose. It has been a revolution to witness five-year old children take such an interest and ownership of literature!  

Writer's Workshop

"Writing might be magical, but it is not magic.  It's a process, a rational series of decisions, and steps that every writer makes and takes, no matter what the length, the deadline, even the genre."

Donald Murray, Pulitzer Prize Winning Author

How do you take young children, who have not written beyond one-page journals, and teach them about writing personal narratives, explanatory and expository texts, and poetry? At first sight, it is daunting, but by following the Units of Study for Primary Writing and the Curricular Plans for the Writer's Workshop K-8 by Lucy Calkins, we have discovered a way to use balanced literacy to support our young writers on their journey. At the Columbia University Teachers College Writing Institute, our teachers were challenged to understand balanced literacy and to use phonics, phonemic awareness, shared reading and writing, interactive reading and writing, and Writer's workshop to support students in thinking about what they know about the world and using a combination of dictating, drawing, labeling, and writing to share that with an audience.  

Again, our students went from a very limited repertoire of writing skills and resources, and now they work diligently to write books across genres and use their phonics lessons to get as many words as possible down on paper! 

Project GLAD

Just when Aldama teachers were wondering how to make their delivery more interesting and differentiated, we attended the Project G.L.A.D. training. Using chants, songs, and pictorial/narrative input charts, students are invited to work in collaborative groups to learn about content in science and social studies. Language Arts skills are embedded in each activity, and students develop robust, academic language because of the explicit instruction and fun activities that reinforce language.  

CGI Math

Oh where, or where has CGI math been, oh where, oh where, could it be? We learned about CGI Math at the 1st TIIP grant meeting because members of the UCLA Math Project were attending. We were fascinated by the explanation of the student-centered and developmentally appropriate approach to teaching number sense and algebraic thinking. We raised funds to attend the Summer 2011 training and got busy right away with Counting Collections and Math Word Problems.  

Our challenge has always been how to give students a sense of confidence when working with counting, naming quantities, matching numbers to quantities, and mental math. The CGI Math approach has given our students opportunities to move in math from the concrete to the abstract. Today, our students:

• have a firm grasp of place value
• can count beyond what is required in their grade level standards
• if unable to name a two or three digit number, they can tell you how many ones, tens and hundreds that number has
• understand that algorithms represent stories of things that happen to quantities.
  

Occidental College Foreign Language Project

What do children need to read, write, and explain their work with numbers? Children need language! Given that we are a Dual Language program, half of the students in our class (especially in the primary grades) are at levels 1 and 2 in learning their new language. In addition to carrying out instruction in different content areas, we are always thinking about how to make content comprehensible to language learners, and we are conscious of scaffolding our lessons so that students have an opportunity to produce in speaking and writing.  

The Occidental College Foreign Language Project serves foreign language teachers in Southern California. Their goal is to develop teacher leaders in world languages and culture. In Dual Language, because our mandate is to teach the standards in content in two languages, there is not a heavy emphasis on language development in the content areas or a focus on the culture of the target language. Our classes with the Oxy Foreign Language Project have allowed us to be explicit about the cultures associated with the Spanish language and to use special strategies in language development that support comprehensible input and an accelerated language learning.