Ignite Your Teaching
Ignite Your Teaching
Why Building Relationships Supports Stronger Literacy Skills
In this video, we dive into the essential steps to establish strong relationships with students during the beginning of the school year. Building trust and respect sets the foundation for a positive classroom environment, especially when teaching language arts, where students often share personal thoughts in their writing.
We'll explore strategies for creating a classroom based on mutual respect, emphasizing the importance of showing genuine interest in each student. Discover how activities like heart maps help students express their interests, making it easier for teachers to connect on a personal level. You'll also learn the benefits of a diagnostic approach in writing, encouraging students to explore freely without fear of immediate grading, which helps identify areas for growth.
This video highlights practical ways to foster a safe space where students feel valued and supported, setting them up for a year of creativity, curiosity, and confidence in their literacy journey. Watch to learn how to create a classroom where every student knows they belong and is motivated to take risks in their learning!
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Hey there, welcome to a new series all about how to set up your literacy block. This seems to be quite a topic that many teachers are struggling with, especially in light of changing curriculums across the country. We need to really address how exactly we are supposed to start, structure and get into a routine for our language arts block so that we can feel more confident and like we're not constantly chasing our tail or trying to figure out where everything goes. So we're going to systematically, step by step, go through these series of video lessons over the next couple of weeks, all about how to structure your language arts. Many of the components that you're going to see here are components of our Ignited Literacy program. All right, so let's dig in to our first topic, which is all about starting off and setting up the routines and structures that you need for your literacy program. The very first thing you do, whether you're starting in September or you're starting midway through the year is to establish routines and structures in your classroom that students can follow. Beyond that, it's also really important to establish a relationship with your students. Students will often work harder, take more risks and feel safer in their experiences in your language arts program if they feel as though they have a relationship with you. So all of our lessons at the beginning of our kickoff portion of our literacy program should all be focused on gathering information, gathering diagnostic materials, as well as reinforcing and establishing a culture of support and relationships with your students. This, ultimately, is your number one goal at the beginning of your literacy kickoff is that we need to be able to create relationships and build trust and gather diagnostic information. So one of the first things that we want to establish with our students inside our language classroom is going to be our routine. This routine is going to form the structure of what we do each week. This is very beneficial for our students and for ourselves, because it means that we're creating a formula for success. This is something that we're going to follow each and every week and also is going to allow us to see the system in which we're creating and allow us to simply plug lessons in where they belong into an overall system and routine. It's going to make things feel a little less chaotic, because you are going to have a structure and routine that you're going to follow each and every week and you're simply going to plug lessons into this structure and routine. So let's have a quick look at what this routine can look like.
Speaker 1:If you have 100 minutes of literacy, you can start each and every day with a warm-up activity. This can be your bell work. It could be a center's rotation. It can also be independent reading. You know when you're doing your language arts and what makes the most sense here for you to fill in what your language should look like. Now the next component is going to be your 25 minutes. Now this is going to be a 25 minute lesson. Now the time can change depending on the needs of your students, but ultimately you know that this is the block where your lessons are going to happen.
Speaker 1:In my block I'm going to start prioritizing putting spelling lessons first. They're going to need spelling lessons for their subsequent centers activities, so I want to front load that material at the beginning. It also means that that spelling lesson is going to include things like a shared reading and vocabulary, which is going to be tied into the spelling lesson. So in the spelling lesson I'm going to be teaching them the rule, the sound, the morpheme that we're going to be focusing on for that spelling lesson. And then the second teacher-directed lesson here is going to be a shared reading vocabulary. This shared reading text is going to be directly tied to the spelling lesson, so they're going to be integrated. So not only am I getting spelling vocabulary but I'm also getting some shared reading activities and we can also later on use that shared reading activity for other purposes. So we're going to do this all on that first day.
Speaker 1:It's still falling into the structure where we have our 25-minute lesson, then we have a 15-minute center and then another 25-minute lesson For Monday. Our focus is going to be on spelling, vocabulary and shared reading. Then we're going to move into Tuesday. Now, as previously, I would have suggested doing your read aloud first. I now recommend doing it second, after you've already introduced your spelling and your vocabulary and shared reading texts for the week. So then we're going to choose our read aloud and we're going to focus on what it is we're working on. We have a read aloud where we're monitoring our comprehension, and we'll choose a read aloud specifically that ties in with the reading comprehension strategy that we happen to be working on in class for this time period. And then we're also going to have a teacher lesson that's going to be on grammar.
Speaker 1:Again, we're front loading spelling and grammar at the beginning of our week so that students can complete independent activities. These are going to be quick wins. They're easy tasks for students to complete independently, so we'll front load them, teach them what they need to know and then the latter half of the week they will apply. What they need in my week is where I'm going to be focusing and finishing up some text analysis, some comprehension, some whole group reading. We're going to be reusing that shared reading text if needed to talk about text analysis and we're really going to be looking at this whole group reading activity that will complete after our read aloud is complete. It also means it'll be focusing my lessons on writing. So, whereas Monday and Tuesday are going to be focused on shared reading and grammar, Wednesday through Friday are going to be focusing on writing form and style when we're talking about our writing lessons.
Speaker 1:Here we really want to move away from these standard units on specific forms and we really want to focus on the writing process. So, whereas the beginning of the year, our big focus here is going to be on teaching students how to brainstorm and generate ideas for a variety of different writing forms, Moving into the second, the middle half of the year, we're really going to focus on drafting and deepening and making more complex texts and, whereas the end of the year we may focus a little bit more on editing and revising, we can cycle through that process two times a year and do it each term, or we can also take a longer time and focus on that over a longer period of time, really digging into that process. Throughout this entire time we asking students to write a paragraph, asking students to write a story. They might not have all of the pieces of a story, they might not have a strong idea of what a plot is, but we're not focused on assessing them on that component yet. We're really just focusing on assessing them on their ability to generate ideas, brainstorm and plan and organize that content. So we're focusing on specific skills of the writing process and of different writing forms and text analysis here in this piece. But we're not necessarily doing concrete units.
Speaker 1:We also in our schedule have two sections where we have 15 minutes of student independent work time. They will be completing one of four tasks during this time. We'll teach them the components, not of the content of this lesson, but we're going to focus in this kickoff period of teaching them the strategies to run through the routine so they might not have all of the skills necessary right yet to be successful. Remember, this is the first 20 days of implementing your literacy. It's unreasonable to expect that they're going to have all of the skills. We'll get there. It's going to take time, but our goal in this kickoff period is really to get them used to the schedule.
Speaker 1:Remember that during this kickoff period, the goal of this schedule is to teach students the routines of the schedule. The content that is being introduced is going to be introduced slowly and methodically and getting students used to the idea of building up their independent work skills, building their skill set, getting them to understand what the routine looks like so it can feel familiar, so that they understand it. Your job is going to be through this routine, establishing the criteria of what it is you're expecting for your language block, what the behaviors you're looking for, what the community feels like when you're going through your literacy block. You're going to do some diagnostic assessment, knowing full well that a lot of the tasks that you might ask students to complete during this kickoff period they might not be so strong at. That's okay, because this is going to provide you a lot of valuable information that you can use for the remainder of your year, as this is diagnostic gathering, so you might ask them to write a story. They might have no idea how to write a story. That's okay, because that's great diagnostic material. They might not be ready to write a report. They might not have a clue of what a paragraph is.
Speaker 1:The whole point of this portion, this kickoff, is that diagnostic gathering, data, building relationships, building rapport with your students and establishing routines and schedules. The important thing here is to build a schedule that works for your students. This schedule may work in my classroom, but you may need to modify it or change it to meet the students' needs in your room. Sometimes you may not have 100 minutes and you may need to modify the ideal schedule to fit what you have going on in your classroom and fit the needs of your students. That is perfectly okay.
Speaker 1:The goal here is not to have a perfect schedule. The goal here is to have a repeatable schedule, something that you can repeat and function with each and every day, each and every week. When you have a repeatable schedule, you're better able to plug in activities that you need to create into this schedule. It makes you feel more organized, more efficient and more on top of what it is you're doing. Sometimes I'm only given 80 minutes for my language block.
Speaker 1:In the event that I'm only given 80 minutes of my language block, here is what I do I take this student center activity that normally is at the end and I drop off the 10 minutes of consolidation and the 10 minutes of warm-up and instead I move this final center's activity into my bell work task, which means we start each day with a center's activity, then I move into a lesson, then I move into another student center activity, followed up by a lesson.
Speaker 1:What my students need has allowed me to adapt it so it fits what I have in my classroom, while also still maintaining the goal here of having a static schedule. We want to have a schedule that is, a routine that we can follow each and every week. How you structure your schedule and whether or not it looks exactly like mine is less important than making sure that you have a schedule that you can follow each and every day, each and every week. Doing that is where you will find the efficiencies of how to plug in lessons so that you feel more efficient, more organized and more on top of your language arts.
