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FDL: Poetry Lessons for Vocabulary, Comprehension and ... Fluency!

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Fluency Development Lesson In all my years of experience, I have witnessed the importance of development of sentence structure in teaching reading and writing. Students will learn to write sentences in a systematic process. As part of our responses to poetry, I have students draw a picture and write a sentence about their picture, including key vocabulary words from the poem in both their sentence and their pictures. I like to use poetry from the book, When the Moon is Full, by Penny Pollack and illustrated by Mary Azarian ( BookPartners, LLC 2011). Penny has created a poem for each month, so this gives us a chance to talk about the months and the seasons, as we learn new vocabulary words. Sentence Structure Writing and drawing about the poem will reinforce new vocabulary and improve students word choice and sentence structure in their writing. For this month’s poem, a second grade ESL student wrote: “I like the moon behind the branches, because it is like the tree...
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Maui, Hawaiian Super Man

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Maui: Hawaiian Superman Now students are all excited about the Disney movie “Moana.”   Moana means ocean in the Hawaiian language. I do not think there was ever a girl named Moana, not in historical times, nor in legends. The Disney depiction of the character of Maui, a demi-god of the Pacific Islanders, is one I would have never recognized, after years of hearing stories about Maui from Pacific Islander storytellers, mainly Hawaiian and Tongan. I have taught this story for years, and my students have enjoyed it greatly. We have to build a great deal of background knowledge. Most of the students I have told this to have been Native Alaskans in rural areas. Most of them had never seen the Pacific Ocean.   Building Background Knowledge I start asking the students where the Hawaiian Islands are. Alaska has coast on the Pacific Ocean, so we have that starting point. However, there is a great temperature difference between the North Pacific and the middle ...
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Reading Strategies from a Reading Specialist

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Joy. The first word that comes to my mind when I think of teaching reading.   Especially to struggling readers. Over the years, many parents have come to me, asking for help for their child who could not read.   They have tried everything. They asked the school for resources and extra help found they had driven down a dead-end road.   Then someone passes my name or my card on to them. They call me and set up an appointment. We meet. The child colors while we talk. We set up a time for assessment. Thus is the beginning of the end of the parents’ heartbreak, of a child who has not learned to read by second or third grade. I am a Reading Specialist. Many people ask if I am a tutor. No, I am not.   I pour my heart and soul into designing lessons to help struggling readers learn to read. Patience is the number one essential ingredient to teach struggling readers.   I have to have patience in looking for the answers, patience in finding the key to each child,...
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