Students will acquire skills to become independent readers, writers, speakers, and listeners.
As a class, we worked towards this learning goal every day, constantly reading and writing in all parts of our day. A large accomplishment that my students were particularly proud of and worked towards with great focus was our reading stamina as a class. Reading stamina is a timed exercise where students try to read to themselves for as long as they can until someone “breaks stamina” meaning they stopped meeting one of the rules for read-to-self (sit in one spot, read the whole time, get started right away, read quietly). At the start of the year, our stamina as an entire class was 3 minutes. By the end of the year, we had made it up to 17 minutes with the goal to get to 30 by June.
I worked some kind of reading and writing activity into almost all of my lesson plans, and the student’s capabilities as readers and writers grew exponentially because of it. Our English Language Arts block was modeled after balanced literacy, incorporating writing into our reading time and pushing students’ comprehension skills. Students engaged in group work often throughout the year, and they participated in turn and talks and class discussions daily, helping them develop as speakers and listeners. The skills made from these exercises will help my students in school and in life.
Students will work collaboratively and independently across all areas of the curriculum.
Students had numerous chances to work independently and collaboratively over the course of the year. Effective collaboration is built on with mutual respect and effort towards a common goal. This is something my students struggled with at the start of this year. As we did more community building, students took more risks in front of one another, strengthening trust. This made group work much more enjoyable and productive towards the spring. We had partner, team, and small group activities, supporting students’ development in working collaboratively in across multiple disciplines.
Likewise, students worked on their independence by completing quality work on their own. Their individual reading and writing stamina increased greatly and they all became better at pushing themselves to do their best, even when working on their own. This ability to stay on task, and continually produce high quality work without needing the teacher to motivate them heavily will help them as they go through elementary school and beyond. Because standardized tests are part of the schooling experience, despite our opposition, students who can stay focused and complete their work individually are rewarded. While we need to have students practice collaboration, it is a reality that they will need to be assessed as individuals often with high stakes.
Students will engage with the curriculum in a meaningful and authentic way.
Over the year, through multiple units, students were immersed in meaningful and powerful learning experiences, which contributed to students’ confidence in the classroom and in their academic abilities. When referring to students as mathematicians, authors, engineers, etc. we were not only growing their confidence in that subject but giving them the experiences and skills needed to be successful in those fields of study. The authenticity of how we approached each subject was helpful for students to see themselves as capable learners in a variety of contexts.
Students will make connections, both personal and across disciplines, to the curriculum.
Almost every day, I saw many students using their connection signs to signal to me their thinking and understanding in any activity. During read alouds, students often made personal connections to shared experiences with the main characters. This was apparent in our history unit on culture and migration as those read alouds were designed to connect to students cultures. Students also showed the connection symbol during sharing time in morning meeting to show the student sharing that they agree or have also experienced something similar. Students made personal connections frequently and felt comfortable showing me their signs as an invitation to share and as an act of solidarity.
Students also used this symbol to connect subjects and activities together. During our engineering project on building bridges, students made connections to previous read literature, to STEM special, to last years classroom’s, and even to Lego blocks. Students often connected texts to one another as well. Within a text set, especially towards the end, students would show connection signs and share about how they think the characters are similar across books or how they were taught similar lessons or if the book had similar illustrations or text features. Students used the connection sign frequently and it was not unnoticed. They made these connections respectfully, quietly, and it was used as an informal assessment. It was a valuable management tool and allowed students to strive and understand the concepts in a cohesive way as well as see themselves in the content.