Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Group 3- older literacy students & attitude
Hi group! I teach 4th grade, so I obviously work with older elementary age students. One problem I have found when working with older students who have problems in literacy is that their attitude is often what gets in their way of success. It may be true that the students who are struggling with reading or writing do have some type of learning disability or impairment that could slow them down- however, it’s the adolescent behavior that blocks them from seeking the help that they need. I feel like my biggest struggle when helping lower achieving students is to break through the mentality that they don’t need help because it isn’t cool or breaking through their coping strategies and getting them to try. What do you think? Do you find similar problems if you have worked in older grades? Any suggestions for how to deal with this problem?
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2 comments:
I'm currently working with second graders, and they for the most part are good about trying new strategies. I have noticed, however, that they have trouble revising and editing their papers. This isn't something most second graders are used to doing. They fall in love with their writing, and so getting them to change things other than misspellings or capitals is almost insulting to them. I taught a lesson about two weeks ago on paragraph elements like topic, main idea sentence, supporting sentences, and a wrap-up sentence or conclusion. They struggle with the main idea sentence and the conclusion, so this is why I chose this lesson. I worked with them and in some cases asked them to craft a new sentence so they would have a main idea. Wow. They kept saying, "But I liked the sentence I had . . . I wrote 22 lines, if I erase 2 of them I'll only have 20 . . . what am I going to do with that big space that's leftover?" In all cases, I was able to convince them that this evil revising should be done and they seemed to agree the final product was, in fact, better than the original. However, they did not want to mess up their pretty looking papers with edit marks and insertions. It can be difficult to get students to the point where they respect your advice and want to do whatever it takes to improve. Until they are willing to address the problem areas, it's hard to make improvement. I guess you just have to do the best you can to help them see why they need to use different strategies so their literacy can improve. Sometimes if you make something look entertaining, they don't even know you're helping them with a problem area.
I am also working with fourth graders and they are at that age when it is not cool to be smnart anymore. The only thing that I have seen work is the small groups. When all of the low students are in the same group they dont worry about the other students making them feel stupid and they are not as embarassed to try harder. As long as the other students in the class do not know which is the low group they can not put pressure on the other students making them feel worse.
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