Luddite No Longer

What is guided reading? Very simply, guided reading is small group literacy instruction. It's purpose it to provided  guided  instruction to students at their level with a focus on their specific needs. Like other centers, grouping is done based on an individual students needs at the moment, meaning groupings are fluid and constantly changing. The students I work with in my Blue Group on Fiction may not be in the same group when I switch to Nonfiction. How do you decide who is it what group? A variety of strategies can be used to determine who goes in what group. Primarily, I use the F&P levels as determined by the Benchmark Assessment (BAS) to determine my students reading levels. Next I think about other specific strengths and weaknesses: who reads independently, who works well together, what skills do we need to improve, what tools and strategies are missing in their toolboxes. I then use those strengths and weaknesses to build my centers for the week. What c...

It's a Small Small World: Not My Image Part of my job as an English Language Teacher (ELT) is to make language and content more accessible. Honestly it's the most important (read: satisfying) parts of my job. Students arrive at school not knowing English, not understanding American culture, or the American school system. They walk in overwhelmed and confused. It's my responsibility to make them feel welcome, comfortable, understood, and hopefully a little less confused.  Fortunately, since we live in 2017 there are many resources at our fingertips. This week I spent time exploring Twitter and how it can help me bridge the gap between home and school; to make connections. To start my exploration I went to one of my favorite educational websites: Edutopia . (if you aren't familiar, you should be, it's like Wikipedia for teachers!) I searched Edutopia for Twitter and found two great articles:  Making Connections through Twitter  and 100 Twitter Tips for Teachers ...

Oh Twitter, how long has it been? 3 years? 4? It has been awhile since a spent way too much time scrolling through your feeds and overusing hashtags. I'm back now and better then before because now I can waste time on Twitter and call it professional development. (If only I got CTLE credits for it!) Did you know you can use Twitter for PD? You can! This week I explored live chats on Twitter. Look at this crazy mess of Twitter PD!!! While I saw some really interesting and neat ideas, quotes, and resources, I was disappointed with the scheduling of these chats. My schedule this past week was crazy! Monday: Holiday= I am outside not sitting at a computer Tuesday: Meeting after school, home at 9pm Wednesday: Attempt #ELTchat but I was too late, stuck in traffic till 6pm Thursday: Attempt #langchat, it's every other week, not this week. I did briefly follow #games4ed but it was a little over my head Friday: Who wants to PD chat on a Friday night after working all w...