Children CAN Read: Building Relationships through Reading

Children CAN Read:  

Building Relationships Through Reading

by: Ashley Ewert

From the beginning of the school year we, as teachers, build relationships with students using a variety of models and strategies. Have you ever thought how you can build a relationship with a student over a simple book? We encourage parents to read to their children every night, we even assign reading homework to students to encourage reading outside the classroom. Parents who read bedtime storied to their children build relationships and take adventures through the stories they read each night. So, as teachers, let's take that same that same idea and build relationships and take adventures through stories we read to the students in the classroom. Great teaching practice involves encouragement at all levels of reading abilities. Giving students the confidence that they can read at any level will help build positive relationships with the students. Reading can be a powerful way to help build acceptance, understanding and social emotional needs. 

Ways  to Encourage Reading - 

Reading development can be similar to language development. When do children learn to communicate? Is their first form of communication crying or saying words? Reading development is very similar. Some believe that reading begins when children learn to read sentences in a book and others believe that reading begins when children point and read pictures in a book. There are so many modalities of reading that reading development can really begin with at a very young age. I have always encouraged my preschool students that they can read. They can read pictures in a book. They can read words and letters in a book. They can also read by re-telling the story after it has been read to them. Encouraging students that they can read gives them motivation and helps to establish and build relationships in the classroom between students and teachers. 

"A person is a person no matter how small" - Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!

Student & Teacher Reading Connections- 

Reading is often thought of as a self contained act. Meaning that many children read silently alone. This does not have to be the case. Teachers can build connections through reading when reading aloud or pulling a small reading groups. Reading in small groups allows opportunities to meet student's social emotional needs thus allowing teachers to build and make connections with students. I enjoy adding additional reading materials to my Language arts block during the holidays. When I have read holiday books as a whole group read aloud I often place the books in the classroom library for students to choose when they have a library center rotation. During the library center rotation I am sure to provide the students with staff support so they can have the opportunity to read with an adult individually or as a small group. reading can be fun. Reading can be adventurous. Reading can build connections, relationships, acceptance and foster social emotional needs. 

"You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think." - A.A. Milne

"To teach is to touch a life forever." - Anonymous 

Ashley Ewert

Co-Teaching in Action & Building Relationships with Co-Teachers

Co-Teaching in Action 

Building Relationships with Co-Teachers

by Ashley Ewert

Co-Teachers: Mrs, Curry & Mrs. Ewert

 I want to reflect on my co-teaching journey and offer some insight on what has been successful and the challenges we have come across. If you had read my previous blogs on co teaching you will have remembered that my co-teacher and I were approached with the idea of increasing our collaboration and mainstreaming with our students. Here is a link to my previous blogs about co-teaching ( Co-Teaching Part 1, Co-Teaching Part 2). In starting this adventure, my co-teacher and I dedicated ourselves to reading a book, Teaching in Tandem by: Gloria Wilson and Joan Blendnic, before dedicating to the idea of building a co-teaching classroom. From the book, we read over summer, we learned and became fired up about the idea that co-teaching is not only a benefit for adults working together but for all students involved. I'm not going to lie... I was a little ... ok a lot ..nervous about the idea of sharing a classroom with another teacher. 

  

Finding the right match

How co-teachers are paired is very important to the success of the school year. Teachers who volunteer to co-teach with each other often have far better success than those that are assigned by administration or for convenience. Effective co-teachers communicate honestly with each other. My co-teacher and I volunteered to pair together this school year. We seem to make a great team and compliment each other in so many ways. We have open discussions daily about activities and lessons that we have planned, prepared and delivered. We have trust in each other and we are able to model great friendship skills to our students. Effective co-teaching is about professionalism of the co-teaching pair and a commitment to understand how students learn and succeed.  Finding a right match for a co-teacher is important to the success of the co-teaching classroom. 

"Teaching together is much more powerful than teaching alone." - Gloria Wilson &Joan Blendnic

Making it work to overcome the challenges

Among the many successful outcomes of co-teaching there is their fair share of challenges that we have had to overcome. As a special education teacher, I found that the large class size was a challenge at the beginning of the school year. In previous years I have had up to 13 students. With a combination of the students we have on the general education caseload and the special education caseload we total more students than I have ever possibly imagined in one classroom! How do we do it you ask? Well ... It all starts and ends with a great team of staff in the classroom all supporting each and every student. Another challenge that came up during the school year was the task of collaborating with the service providers to take the students to their services. Service providers are very flexible with their times and really try to take students at a time that would least impact their academic education. The challenge is to remember who, where, and when all the students are while managing a classroom full of general education and special education students.  How do we manage this you ask??? Well... we have made a schedule for each student with services and have that readily available for staff in the classroom. I will attach a sample on my Spotlight page as a resource for those that this may help with! 

"When everyone is  included, everyone wins." - Jesse Jackson

"To teach is to touch a life forever." - Anonymous 

Ashley Ewert

Parent Communication and Building Parent Relationships

Parent Communication and Building Parent Relationships By Ashley Ewert

So we have built relationships and made connections with the students… What’s next?

A student's journey of learning begins the moment they are born. Their first teachers are their parents and families. Learning does not just happen in the classroom but also at home. Many parents are the best models for a child. The importance of active parent involvement in their child’s education promotes a positive impact on academic and social performance of a child. Parent involvement in education included communication between parent and teacher, and the relationship between parent and teacher. Parent teacher communication can be challenging at times due to working parents and language barriers. I have found a way to help keep a strong, positive and open communication system with the families of my students. Students show greater success in the classroom when teachers and parents are on the same page and parent and teachers respect each other’s environment. I always make it a priority to build relationships with the families from the beginning of the school year. As a teacher, knowing the environments students are coming from helps a great deal in making connections and building relationships, as I discussed in my August 2019 blog (Building Relationships and Making connections)

Effective Parent Communication

Families have busy lives; communicating with their children's teachers just adds one more thing to their plate. Technology has helped this barrier. Ever heard of the saying "there's an app for that." well let me tell you there are apps out there that promote parent teacher communication. I want to share with you one of my favorites.

ClassDojo is a communication app that connects parents, families and teachers to things going on in the classroom. ClassDojo has many features but for the sake of this blog let's focus solely focus on the communication aspect between the parents and the teacher. This app offers effective communication with parents and teachers. It allows the teacher to be in charge of when he/she will receive messages. The teacher may also post pictures of activities going on in the classroom so families have conservation starters they can use at home. The best thing about this app is that it will translate into most any language the parent sets up their profile to. The parents and message and comment in their native language and the teacher can see a translated version of the message or comment. What better way to start success in the classroom than building that effective parent communication through an app that promotes connecting families and teachers. 

Building Parent Relationships

Parent and teacher relationships have an advantage on student success. Parents spend a lot of time teaching and teachers spend a lot of time parenting. so lets face it there tends to be a lot of overlap. When teachers and parents are on the same page students achieve better in both settings. When teachers and parents build positive and strong relationship being on the same page tends to be more achievable. Here are three simple ideas to help build healthy parent and teacher relationships:

1. Communicate Regularly: Open communication is essential on both sides. Email and classroom communication apps (ClassDojo) is a great way to maintain an open connection. Even students struggle with life situations (like a parent’s or sibling’s illness, pending divorce, parental stress) at home. Communicating with families will help to understand why students are performing in the way they are.  Students who are unhappy and kids who are excited are often distracted from school work.
2.  Lead With Good and Positive News: Give positive praise first when calling parents or meeting with them to discuss a concern. Every student has something good about them. Find it. Share it. Then share your concern. Adhere strictly to this rule.
3. Smile When You See Parents: Greet them with intention. Most parents only occasionally interact with teachers so be sure that encounters with them are positive, warm, and friendly. The impressions last a long time especially first impressions. :-)

"To teach is to touch a life forever." -Anonymous

Ashley Ewert

Let's Talk About... Math Standards!

Let’s Talk About Math Standards!

You have your Eureka TE, your district pacing guide, and your boxes of student materials- you’re ready to teach math!  But, are you ready to meet your students where they are at mathematically? 

Unless you’ve taught consecutive grade levels in the last few years since we adopted the Common Core Standards, or really studied the mathematics progressions, you may not know exactly what your students are supposed to be coming to you with.  We assume that our curriculum starts where the previous grade levels’ curriculum left off, and it does.  But can we say the same of our students’ learning?

Each year I feel like I start teaching a math concept, and when students are staring at me with blank faces, I start questioning.  “Remember last year when you learned…”  “Wait, did you learn this last year?”  (To myself, “Were they supposed to learn this last year or am I thinking of what I taught last year?”)  How do you know what they were supposed to be taught?  Enter, Achieve the Core written by Student Achievement Partners.  They are a nonprofit group whose mission it is to help teachers implement college- and career-ready standards, including the Common Core.  They have all kinds of curriculum resources for ELA and Math, but the Coherence Map is AMAZING!

First, watch

THIS VIDEO where I will walk you through some of the great things about it!  Then visit the Achieve the Core Coherence Map HERE and explore your grade level.  Remember to bookmark it, you’ll come back again and again!

The standards boxes are helpful in many ways, but I'd like to highlight two of them.  The first is that I can see what exactly my students are supposed to learn this year, and how critical that standard is to my overall year.  Secondly, if my students are struggling with a standard, I can use my Nancy Drew sleuthing skills to trace it back and see what the underlying concepts are, and where exactly the breakdown is happening. Mystery solved!

I hope you get a chance to really explore this resource, and I hope you fall as deeply in love with it as I am!  Please check it out and leave a comment below with your thoughts.  Need help?  My email is below.  Want to see math in person? Come in for a Spotlight Visit!  I’d love to meet you. 

Mathematically yours,

Sabrina Blake