Resource Blog #5

For this week’s resource blog, I found a paper on different strategies to use for reading science content. The paper is called Strategies for Teaching Science Content Reading by Patrick E. Croner. In this paper, he gives about fifteen different strategies that are all useful and easy to apply into the classroom. One of the strategies he talks about is the “Click or Clunk” strategy. 

 This is useful when having to read in the science textbooks and the point of it is get students to ask themselves if the content is “clicking,” meaning they understand what they’re reading, or if they’re “clunking,” meaning they don’t understand. If the student is “clunking” then they need to ask themselves what they aren’t understanding and find a way to help them understand what they’re reading. I liked this strategy because I think that self-monitoring during reading can be really hard to do, so this is something I would like to implement into my future classrooms. 

Here's the link to the paper: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1058676.pdf 

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Synthesis Blog - Content Differentiation Video

 

I thought that Ms. Maronpot is a really good teacher, and I liked how she didn’t want to settle for just good and tries to improve on the areas she’s not doing as well.

 One thing that stuck with me was when Dr. Royce talked to her about asking more application questions. I think a lot of times in school, especially in science and math classes, we focus on knowing what something is versus how can we use it. It can be tough sometimes because figuring out the application calls for a lot of brainstorming and thinking outside of the box. Having students collaborate in groups can help a lot with this. Ms. Maronpot implements application questions to her students in that way, she gave each group puzzle pieces with questions and each student had a puzzle piece with their name on it and had to answer the question on it to their group. She also used differentiation with the puzzle pieces by purposefully giving each student a puzzle piece with a question that would challenge them enough. I like that she did this because not every student in the class is going to have the same ability level so to be able to give harder things to the students who understand the concepts better and easier things to the students who are struggling to understand. (226)

Resource Blog #4

When it comes to learning math, I think that many students believe that they’ll just be dealing with numbers, but that’s very much not the case. Math has a lot of very content specific vocabulary, especially in geometry. Parallelogram, trapezoids, the different kinds of angles, and even shapes they knew about before, they need to define and redefine in math terms. The strategy I found this week was the Frayer Model. 

 It’s a graphic organizer that’s meant to build vocabulary. In the middle, students write the key word, then write the definition, facts and characteristics, examples, and non-examples in the boxes around the middle. I found it interesting that the Frayer Model included a section for non-examples, but that could end up being really helpful because two things can be really similar but have slight differences and it would be good to note that in a non-example. For example, parallelogram and rhombuses are very similar but the slight difference is that a rhombus is always equilateral. (166)