I teach learning support for kindergarten through third grade students. Although I support all content areas, the main focus of my instruction is reading, language arts (writing), and mathematics. The majority of my day is spent with small groups of students delivering interventions and differentiated lessons to meet the needs of diverse learners. I am also in charge of overseeing a paraprofessional who does extra practice and review with my students when I am not with them, along with four teaching assistants who are paired 1:1 with a particular student due to significant challenges.
Since I work with a very young population of students who are still learning how to read and write, I aim to use my blog to communicate with parents of students and support staff. Each post would focus on a specific lesson or strategy that I am teaching that support staff and/or parents could go on to see exactly how I am teaching the skill and reinforce/practice the skill with students in the same manner. This consistency is key with learning support students and when I find a way that works for them, I want to share it with everyone so they can utilize it with students as well.
This idea was inspired by a recent unit on double digit addition and subtraction (first without regrouping, and then with regrouping). In order to make this abstract concept a little more concrete, we spent a lot of time using manipulatives (base-ten blocks) so my students could learn the reasoning behind their mathematics. However, when they were given homework, they were not able to take base-10 blocks home.
After a few days introducing the skill, I pulled up virtual manipulatives (http://www.glencoe.com/sites/common_assets/mathematics/ebook_assets/vmf/VMF-Interface.html) on my interactive whiteboard and had students who really "got it" start leading problems with the base-10 blocks at the board. Then I got to thinking, "This would be a great idea to let students do at home!" They were so motivated by the interactive base-ten blocks and it made grouping and regrouping even easier than the actual blocks. I would include a brief screencast of how to use the tool to help with the problems that come home for homework (or for my support staff, the extra practice in school).
It would take a lot of time to start up until I got all of the lessons and strategies going, but by adding one at a time parent would then be able to go back and search for a specific skill their child is struggling with and have immediate resources to refer to for help.
Kara, Allowing students to lead is a great idea. I also like how you would include a screen-shot of the problem. I wonder how often you would do this, and how you would find the time to make sure students had this on the same day you covered it in the classroom? Would you include the screen-shot for help on your website? This seems to be the most effective way to get the information to all parents quickly, unless you had some parents with no computers at home.
ReplyDeleteI would try to do a few of these for each unit to start (to cover the big concepts). It would be difficult to include students in the post the same day, so I would probably do a series on each post-- first day, my post and presentation of the topic (which could even be shown to students in class so they know it is accessible at home) and then after that I could add students solving sample problems afterwards.
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