Module 1

Important Concepts

1.      Students come to school with all different backgrounds and it is the teacher’s responsibility to acknowledge these backgrounds and try to get the parents and families involved the best we know how. 

2.      A great idea I read about was to make the audio tapes of classroom and home storybook readings. 

3.  The background of students is often completely different from the background of their teacher’s, however, it is still expected of the teacher to get the students motivated to learn to read.  Teachers must improve the reading performance of students with diverse backgrounds. 

Implementation

In my weekly newsletter that is sent home to inform the parents what we are learning about that week, I plan to include (on the backside of the newsletter) a reading strategy, game or activity that they can use at home.  Hopefully by doing this, the parents will feel a little more knowledgeable about what they can do to help their child’s education.  I want the parents to feel like they are contributing to their child’s education just as much as the teacher is. 

Strategy

During whole group reading in my kindergarten classroom, I used the SQP2RS strategy with my students.  I wrote the strategy on chart paper and as a class, we talked about all of the questions and I wrote down the answers. The students loved thinking of questions and then predicting what the outcome to those questions would be.  Once we read the book, it was neat to go back to the questions and predictions and see how it all compared to what actually happened in the book.