What is the
focus of your inquiry as you are thinking about it now and why does this matter
to you?
As a Transitional Kindergarten teacher this year, I have
thinking a lot about early intervention and the foundation elements that
students need in order to be “Kindergarten Ready.” One significant literacy
building block is oral language fluency. We know from educational research that
oral language skills in early childhood are key predictors of later success in
reading and writing. I have been doing Story Plays with my students for several
years now and I continue to be interested in how this curriculum supports oral
language development.
I have two focal students who I have identified as Tier 2 on
my RTI pyramid, based on early literacy skills like letter identification, but
also based on social and emotional skills and level of family support. These
students do not stand out now as “below benchmark,” academically, and they do
not raise any red flags in terms of behavior, but if I had to predict which of
my current students might end up in Reading Recovery or Academic Intervention
groups in two years, these two students would be high on the list. What I am
trying to figure out is what types of early intervention are most helpful now
to prevent these students from needed more intensive academic intervention in
later years.
Some educators and school administrators believe that
children like this need more academic skills-building, longer days, more intensive academic focus, etc. Coming from a developmental perspective, I believe that intervention
at this age should be more comprehensive, and shouldn't actually be called "intervention" at all, because you cant be behind in skills like letter recognition before you have even started. But what does providing a solid literacy base look like? What is
the role of oral language skills building? What is the role of collaborative
learning experiences? And how does Story Plays support that?
What is the
student learning goal embedded in your inquiry?
What am I thinking now?
I need to take a closer look at the research that has already been done by Gay Su Pinnell and others about oral language skills as a predictor of later literacy skills. In my classroom, I need to look at the conversations that are happening after Story Plays are acted out and take note of
- the questions that I am asking (clarifying who is doing what)
- the questions my "high" students are asking (asking about the gun on the mantle)
- the comments I am making (about elements of stories, dialogue, etc)
- the comments my "high" students are making
so that I can get a clearer sense of what my specific goals are for my focal students in terms of their oral language skills in this particular context.
Then, I need to think about whether and how this Story Play context is actually serving to develop a stronger foundation that may support students so they are less likely to end up in academic intervention groups later on. This is tricky because my larger goals are longer term and hard to measure here.
Side note: I would also like to write a little more about how I have developed this curriculum based on what I am seeing that the children are doing... so in a sense, the children are writing this curriculum. A running theme through my conversations with Dina and Sonya was that what we are seeing the "high" students in our class do serves to set our goals for our focal students.
Closing Thoughts
I am going to look more closely at what questions my students are asking and what comments they are making after they watch their classmates act out Story Plays.
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