Children have playfully experienced digital text before entering their first classroom, therefore teachers should use this engagement to develop rich activities into early childhood settings (Oakley et al., 2018). I believe one reason why we as educators choose to do what we do is we want to support the development of a natural love for learning and doing this requires us to meet students where they are in the academic needs, but also by using student interests to nurture that love.. Students enjoy computers and hands-on learning, and the freedom to explore many resources available (Moss & Lapp, 2010). We must also consider the behaviors of early readers and the features of digital text that may or may not support early reading (Bates et al., 2016). For example in my classroom, I have taught my students to use pencil erasers of a craft stick to track print on an iPad because often touching the screen creates a shift in print or could open a link, etc.. Often the use of new literacies is left out of primary classrooms, but it must be remembered that all students should be able to read, write and communicate online as it does affect their futures (Forzani & Leu, 2012).
This Week in Mrs. Hager’s Classroom
In my classroom this week I engaged every learner with digital text during our small group lessons. I myself was finding myself somewhat bored with our leveled readers that come with Wonder’s. This made me stop and pause my planning. Children have a natural interactive learning style that the affordances of the internet nurture and support in a natural way (Forzani & Leu, 2012). Why not engage all my learners in this experience if even on a smaller scale than my targeted group for my implementation plan? So I looked a little deeper at some of the resource I had explored or used briefly before and incorporated one into each small group. The engagement showed in the excitement of their voices and the interaction with text just above their reading levels. The following plan shows the text I used with each group and our learning goal for the week.
Comprehension Goal: As we read, we will identify the main topic and key details.
Group Description
DRA beginning of the year | 1 Below Level 4 students (1 absent this week)
6 - 10 | 2 Below Level 4 students (1 absent this week)
12 - 14 | 3 Grade Level 3 students
18 - 20 | 4&5 Above Level 2 groups of 3 students
24 - 28
| 6 Above level 3 students
34-38 |
Resource
| Epic Books DRA Level 14 Animal Homes
| Epic Books Kid.national geographic.com Pebblego.com Epic Books YouTube (I used my implementation plan with this group.)
| Newsela Lexile level 560 - lowest available for the article | Newsela Lexile level 560 | Newsela Lexile level 800 |
The students loved these resources. I worried that the text level would be too high, but once we got started I realized it was not a worry. I introduced the text on Epic with the read-aloud feature. We used that in our small group and the students also independently listened to the book again before we met in our small group again. Each group that used the Newsela article saw me two times during the week. We read and reread the article, Animal Crossings. All four groups identified the main topic independently. Through discussion group 3 identified the key details, while groups 4,5, and 6 were able to identify key detail by answering the prompt “What did you learn?”. While we read students learned to use a simple touch to open links to learn more or get a closer look by enlarging photos. I also used digital glossaries with photos to familiarize students with words before reading. Some exciting student quotes from the week are: “Oh, look! I just made that bigger.” “If you touch the word it tells you what it means.”, and “I like listening to the story before I try to read it.”.
this is really wonderful! thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete