Limitations |
As the School Year Moved On, So Did We
One of the hardest things that occurred during this project was progressing students from a highly successful digital literacy clip project to the reading and interacting with informational text. The animal project that I was tasked with in the classroom was a large project aimed at highlighting growth achieved during the 2nd grade year. To ask 1st graders, who were still developmentally in 1st grade to perform this project to its full extent, was a large task. To assist the 1st graders, I made accommodations as I prepared their one page informational reading passages on their animals instead of asking them to do all of their research off of the main page of Google. Nevertheless, it was hard for them developmentally. This is not to say that I don’t think annotation, informational text, and online research is too much for 1st graders to do – but on a month long timeline, I felt it was the best accommodation possible to allow them to fully participate in the final project.
Phase 1 Involved 11 Students, and Phase 2 Involved the Whole Class
Enormous teacher time and energy was needed to guide students to create a lifelike replica of an animal. The project began with recycled materials and progressed to using papier mâché, paint, and fabric. To accomplish this task, I instructed the entire 1st and 2nd class during Phase 2. This handling of the entire class allowed us the wonderful advantage of having 1st graders partnered with 2nd graders that also served to enhance text comprehension, discussion, and understanding. Also this strategy required that the text that was chosen for close reading needed to be at a level appropriate for both grade levels – which proved difficult in such a broad group. This change in structure also brought out the 1st graders mentoring the 2nd graders during the actual writing and production process, deepening their understanding greatly.
However, changing from small group instruction to whole class definitely diminished one on one time with students, and did make the material considerably harder for the 1st graders in an attempt to not bore the 2nd graders. In retrospect, this could have been handled differently in ways that would be more accessible for all students, potentially even doing instruction on close reading within reading groups with appropriately leveled texts. In reality, this was the solution that best fit with the class, their schedule and routines, and the time we had left
However, changing from small group instruction to whole class definitely diminished one on one time with students, and did make the material considerably harder for the 1st graders in an attempt to not bore the 2nd graders. In retrospect, this could have been handled differently in ways that would be more accessible for all students, potentially even doing instruction on close reading within reading groups with appropriately leveled texts. In reality, this was the solution that best fit with the class, their schedule and routines, and the time we had left
SUMMER!
The last constraint was, of course, summer. As the school year drew to a close and the students’ presentation times of their animal project drew closer, students were pushed from narrative writing to close reading informational text to producing an informational report on an animal. I would have liked to have spent more time on each of these pieces, but particularly on the transition from close reading informational text to note taking to productive informational writing. Note taking was a part of the project, used to inform the writing process, but not something that we really got to dive into. This may have confused students as they wondered why they could write sentence fragments in their research booklets but not for their final presentation.
Overall, this project appeared to dramatically improve their writing ability and gave them the tools of the 5 W’s to use as keys to future writing success.
Overall, this project appeared to dramatically improve their writing ability and gave them the tools of the 5 W’s to use as keys to future writing success.