My focus has been on the attitudes of my students and my hope was to create students with positive attitudes towards reading. Research and experience have taught me that if a student has a positive attitude about something they are more likely to truly engage and therefore learn more and be successful.
As I look through the different data that I have collected over the months one thing has become very clear, each and every one of my students is different. I know that seems like an obvious statement, but it became very apparent to me as I read through one of the most recent surveys. On the survey there were quite a few questions, but two questions that I have come to see as very valuable data were: "What part of Reading Workshop do you enjoy the most?" and "What part of Reading Workshop do you enjoy the least?" I did not intend for these questions to overly important, but as I read through their responses I reazlied that everyone had different feelings towards the choices that they enjoyed the most and the least. It was like an AH-HA moment. Why would I want to "make" someone always Read to Self (as I have in the past during Reading Workshop) if that was something they do not enjoy, clearly they are not going to be engaged in something they do not enjoy. Offering choices allows students to figure out what works best for them, in terms of their enjoyment and their understanding, and the majority of the time if students are doing something they enjoy they are motivated and engaged in what they are doing. The variety of responses that I have about most and least favorite parts of Reading Workshop is DATA, students want and need different things in order to have a positive attitude and therefore be engaged in what they are doing!
I am currently working on some "numbers" data that shows how my students attitudes have changed over the year so far. Not all of that data is showing significant changes, and some are showing changes in the opposite directions of what I would like to see, but I know there are different factors that contribute to that, and I will save that analyzes for an upcoming entry. What I do know is that what I am seeing in the classroom is showing me the power of choice. Today during Reading Workshop I took a moment to stop and look around, and what I saw was 25 students ENGAGED in reading. Some were doing it in pairs, some were listening, some were reading alone, and some were working on patterns in different words, but everyone was truly engaged.
As the implementation of my Action research project begins to wrap up I have decided to try and bring a little bit more of my classroom and what we do each day to this blog. I will try and include a few different peeks at what we do each day in some of my upcoming blogs.
This Peek into Our Classroom shows a student's weekly reading log. Each student has a log that they fill out daily. This first picture shows the log, this tracks what choices the students has completed over the course of a week. On this log the Writing About Reading choice was blocked out as no journals were due, and Friday was blocked out as we were on our Catholic Schools Week field trip to the roller
rink that day! :)
This picture shows the back of the reading log. Each week on the back of the log the students apply some of their learning through our weekly story. On this log students had to fill in Venn Diagram as we had been talking about comparing and contrasting. At the bottom of the log are the week's vocabulary words which students fill in through our discsussions or through the glossary in the back of their reading book.
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