Language Arts Standard 1
All teachers must know a broad range of literacy techniques and strategies for every aspect of communication and must be able to develop each student’s ability to read, write, speak, and listen to his or her potential within the demands of the discipline.
Artifacts:
CI 473
SPED 405 Accommodations
My artifacts consist of the class website of CI 473: Literacy in Content Areas, a course that provides secondary education minors with principles and practices of effective language and literacy instruction in their content areas. We mainly worked on using various literary techniques given a topic of study. The second artifact is a 2 day lesson plan on the introduction to logarithms which was an assignment for SPED 405: General Educator's Role in SPED. I was assigned a student who had a reading deficiency and made the appropriate accommodations for that student. For the worksheets, I edited them using differentiation to make the reading level easier for him. I also highlighted various parts of the worksheet so it would not only be easy to identify but to motivate him to do the worksheet as well. I also put definitions of the vocabulary and basic identities at the top of the sheet for him to refer to. Since the student remembered information when it was presented orally and visually, I would make sure to read the problems on his worksheet and have explain his thinking. I also made sure he could pronounce key vocabulary words and identify them with repetition, as well as how they were connected to the math. For assessments, I let him verbally communicate his understanding. Since he loved to write, I constructed a free response question for him to do as if he were explaining a concept to his friend.
The goal of the accommodations assignment was to make the lessons more accessible to the student without losing any of the content. Although the student struggled with reading, I helped him work on it in a mathematical context. This way, he could improve his reading and work on his communication of the mathematics as well. Because the student had difficulty with decoding, I had to make the necessary changes in my lesson to not only help make reading easier, but to improve this student's reading. The essential goal was to keep the content challenging.
In my mathematics classroom, literacy will be very important in working with the math. Students will be required to learn vocabulary, read passages, write responses, and communicate with one an other and with myself. Literary techniques are not only important for reading, writing, and communication but for comprehension, analysis, and interpretation as well. When students are taught literacy, students are also taught how to derive the meaning from what they are reading and writing and synthesize this material. If a student is struggling with reading, writing, and/or communication, I will be flexible in how I present this material to the student and how the student shows his/her understanding.