Final GLT Reflection

Overall I had a wonderful experience when teaching literacy during GLT. My hope was that the students would be engaged in the reading lessons I had planned for them, and I found this to be true for most of my GLT. The first week I read the children mostly Halloween-themed stories. The children were so excited about the topic that I feel they hardly noticed there was extra “learning” happening in these lessons. It was easy for students to be engaged and participate in the different activities I had planned on these days. This goes to show how important it is to make sure what you are teaching is not only relevant to students’ lives, but also of interest to them. It makes teaching other skills and strategies much more simple!

As far as my core practice goes (thinking aloud), I feel that my students have come along way, even in this short amount of time. Students at first seemed unfamiliar with the idea of thinking aloud. Although my MT and I have modeled some of the think aloud strategies in reading lessons prior, this is the first time my students were explicitly taught what each of these strategies looks like and how they can put it to use. I think the fact that I brought back our original anchor chart repeatedly helped students become familiar with and comfortable enough with these strategies to the point where they were able to use them independently. During my last couple lessons of GLT, students were using the “connections” strategy to make both text-to-text and text-to-self connections independently. They were using this strategy where I did not intend for them to, and were using it in the correct way. Students would signal by making the connection sign I had taught them in the beginning of GLT, then I would have them share what there connection was to a particular part of the story. I was really happy with how well students were able to make connections across books and to their own lives. This is a very important reading skill that we can use and expand on throughout the school year.

During my unit, I focused also on initial sounds and rhyming. Mastery of these skills is essential for early readers. Being able to sound out words and find rhyming pairs/produce rhyming words will help students be successful with decoding as well as when writing independently. I found that my students as a whole have a much easier time with rhyming than with initial sounds (my summative assessment and observations demonstrate this). However, students have made some improvement with noticing beginning sounds in words and have put in the effort to try and figure out what letter goes with what sound. I think that my students simply need more exposure to initial sound activities as well as practice with letter-sounds in general. My students really enjoyed playing the Promethean Planet games on initial sounds and rhyming I had planned for them as a review for the summative assessment. In the future, I would like to utilize the Promethean Board more in order to engage students in reading activities that will strengthen the learning of these important pre-reading skills.