Monday, January 26, 2009

Essential Literacy Learning Experiences to Support Students' Reading and Writing Growth

How Literacy Is Taught at Our School
Because we believe students learn best in an apprenticeship, we employ balanced literacy teaching practices. This means that we mentor our students by frequently modeling, demonstrating, and practicing literacy skills and strategies with them. Paramount to their academic achievement, our students also engage in daily literacy practice with our continuous feedback and guidance. The following graphic helps to capture our teaching rituals and routines.

Comprehensive Literacy Learning & Teaching

READERS’ WORKSHOP
*living a literature life; phonics; vocabulary; fluency; grammar; comprehension

MENTORING:
+ Modeling & Demonstrating Reading by Teacher(s) & Peers
+ Read Alouds

COLLABORATIVES:
+ Shared Reading
+ Small Group Fellowships/Guided Reading
+ Teacher-Student Conferences
+ Peer Conferences
+ Partner/Buddy Reading
+ Book Clubs/Literature Circles

INDEPENDENT Reading

WRITERS’ WORKSHOP
*living a literate life; writing process (such as drafting, revising, editing, etc.); grammar; vocabulary; spelling; fluency

MENTORING:
+ Modeling & Demonstrating Writing by Teacher(s) & Peers
+ Read Alouds

COLLABORATIVES:
+ Shared Writing
+ Small Group Fellowships/Guided Writing
+ Teacher-Student Conferences
+ Peer Conferences
+Partner/Co-Authoring
+ Word Work/Study

INDEPENDENT Writing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Teachers and students engage in ongoing assessment and evaluation to monitor and determine each child’s individual progress as reader, writers, and learner. To develop responsive and rigorous apprenticeships for and with our students, we must know each child as an individual reader, writer, and learner. Accordingly, we monitor your child’s literacy growth continuously and thoroughly by assessing him/her with multiple tools and data sources. We further evaluate our students’ literacy learning by utilizing developmental continuums which outline the ten stages of reading and writing development as well as the key indicators or behaviors of reading and writing acquisition for each stage of development. By understanding where each child is developmentally, we can customize instruction for all our students so that their literacy learning is relevant and powerful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aren't blogs fantastic? It is so exciting to come across other people miles away who are teaching literacy in similar ways. I am a literacy consultant working in the UK and, like you, are literacy teaching and learning is based around the apprenticehsip model. Thank you
web www.deseducation.org/literacy
blog: http://literacyresourcesandideas.edublogs.org

Anonymous said...

Apologies for the typos - our and -ship