Learning Stategies

The chapter for this week focused mainly on learning strategies instead of on the concepts behind them. In class, I had the opportunity to make modifications to one of the strategies from the chapter so that it would be useful to the age group I hope to be focusing on someday.

The purposes behind learning strategies are to help the learner to become more independent, to scaffold problem solving strategies, and to show students that they can have more successes than failures. Becoming independent will help these students in their future lives. I won't always be their to solve their problems or to remind them how to go about reading an article. These strategies are in place to prepare students for the real world.

In the book, there is a strategy used for writing comprehension. Because I hope to work with children ages 0-4, this strategy wasn't too applicable for me. However, as I met with my group of classmates that also wants to work with this age group, we talked about how this could be modified to asking children reading comprehension questions.

Instead of asking the student to write a response for who the main character is, we decided they could show us a symbol for each of the questions, helping them to remember the purpose behind what they are reading and to increase their reading comprehension.

Main Character: Put a hat on your head
When: Watch on wrist
Where: Hand on forehead
What they are doing: Running
What happened next: Jump the hill with two fingers
Ending:make an X with arms
Feelings:Scared face and hand motions

Most of these questions can now  be answered without verbal responses. The teacher could say, put your hat on your head when you hear me reading about the main character. Or point to your watch when I read about a time of day. Show me with your body what the main character was doing (eating, sitting, running etc.) Show me an X with your arms when we reach the end of the story. How did the main character feel (show expression on face).

These modifications would also be useful for special education classrooms when the CCSS is to know about main characters, setting, plot, etc.

The next time we meet in class, we practiced monitoring ourselves when we participated in the conversation and when we added to what someone was saying by smiling. This made me aware of how often I comment and helped me to back off a little bit so that the other members in my group could have a chance to contribute. My friend shared with me afterwards that this assignment actually made her speak less because it stressed her out. It can be affective for some and defective for other students.