Inquiry 3, Part A, Step 3 (Ashley)

               During my Guided Lead Teaching, I was expected to follow the Reading Street curriculum each day as it was written in the teacher's guide. However, there were times when I had the students discuss a question with their think-pair-share partner instead of asking the whole class. This allowed the students to interact with one another and have a break from hearing only my voice. Reading Street is very structured and challenges the students to develop higher level thinking skills, yet students do not always seem to understand the new concepts they are being introduced to. Therefore, I found it to be beneficial to supplement the teacher's guide with activities that reinforce the concepts being taught. Through different games and visual aides (i.e. graphic organizers), the students were able to act instead of just listen, which helped them to make connections with the material that they could draw upon in the future, namely when taking their weekly Reading Street test. 

                Each day, we read a new text that pertained to the topic for that week, Antarctica, and I provided the students with a different graphic organizer to help them organize their thoughts. The first day the organizer was a hamburger, the second an ice cream cone, the third a fish, etc. The student's excitement as to what the next organizer was going to look like helped them to not feel discouraged about the fact that they were being asked to complete another one. I do feel that the repetition of completing these organizers helped them to master determining the main idea and supporting details, as they have been able to successfully extract the information in the weeks since they first learned this skill.

              At the beginning of the week, it was challenging for the students to determine the main idea and key details. The students were suggesting main ideas that were too broad and more topical, as opposed to the specificity of a main idea. I decided to read the text to them one paragraph at a time and stop to model how to determine the main idea and choose the key details that were supportive of it. After the repetition of examples, more students were able to offer their own main ideas and supporting details during our whole-group discussions. As the week progressed and the assignments got more challenging, the students demonstrated their ability to extract the main idea and key details from increasingly difficult texts.

            I believe that my literacy unit was successful due to a great deal of thought and planning ahead of time. I took my students' range of abilities, interests, hobbies, and prior knowledge into account to determine the activities and texts that I chose to supplement the Reading Street curriculum with. I believe that the students appreciated the break from the every day routine that they were being exposed to for that last six weeks, which enabled them to become more immersed in what we were doing.

            When working within the Reading Street curriculum, much of the work is fill-in-the-blank. When challenging the students with more difficult material that originated outside of the Reading Street curriculum, I was surprised to find that the students were able to demonstrate significantly more complete understandings of what was expected of them. My biggest “aha” moment came when I realized that my students are very capable when being challenged in a way that they find genuinely interesting. For example, I created a task where the students had to look at a snapshot to use as a "story sparker" and create their own story based on the image. Writing is not part of the curriculum that they students partake in on a regular basis, but the stories they produced were truly creative and impressive.

            One positive aspect of the Reading Street curriculum is that it is constantly spiraling the key aspects of literacy for 3^rd grade. Since the students began learning this concept, the Read and Comprehend section of Reading Street has continued to ask the students what the main idea and supporting details are to keep the strategy fresh in their minds. In the coming week, my core practice will be the main focus strategy yet again, and I have created more tasks for the students to engage in that will promote their learning on finding the main idea and supporting details. The students will choose three out of five short articles to read and then be responsible for writing down a supporting detail/fact about each article on a sticky note. There will be five corresponding charts with the main idea that match each article and the students have to find the main idea that their supporting details matches.

              While some teachers may feel comfortable teaching literacy from a basal reading program, I find it to be rather challenging. The scripted structure takes the creativity out of planning truly authentic activities that are more meaningful for the students. Developing my core practice within these means proved to be more of a challenge because I had to teach Reading Street first before I was able to integrate my activities. Teaching math and literacy with fidelity is very important at my school which makes implementing all of the great resources I have learned about during my career as an Education student rather problematic. Literacy instruction should be a time where teachers can use their students' interests to create a curriculum that is best suited for that particular group; not assuming that what is best for one group of students in an academic year will be exactly what suits another group of students the following year. However, if and when a basal program is handed to me to use in the future, I need to continue to learn how to hybridize and adapt the curriculum in a way that will meet the needs of each of my students.