Ask, Explore and Figure Out More with Mrs. Diedrichs

     A s I spoke about in the last entry, the kindergarteners are writing about Narwhals. The teacher read a book to the class that had text more complex than their reading level. She helped liven up the information by having the students act out some of the vocabulary and facts as they learned. The students also had the chance to watch a video about Narwhals.  "For students who are English language learners or those who require differentiation, completed outlines and organizers provide additional support for success (Kopp, 201)." "Regardless of the writing assignment science teachers require of their students, they will, along with their language counterparts, hold students accountable for the Common Core English Language Arts Writing Standards (ibid)."     It is not too early in kindergarten to start learning to encode (spell) words correctly and use basic mechanics when writing about what they learned, so together as a class, the students helped Ms. V p...

     T his week was a short week, but that doesn't mean there was a lot of productive work! We continued with our All About Narwhals book writing. The students listened to Ms. V read the non-fiction text to find information. A fun UDL activity that I witnessed was how Ms. V encouraged the children to act out certain information. One page mentioned that narwhals breathe through a blowhole on top of their head. She asked if that is how we breathe, to which the children explained that we breathe through our noses. Next, she told the children to pretend they were narwhals and to swim around the room. (I wish I'd have taken a photo.) Excitedly, the kids began to crawl around the room. Some kids squealed and giggled, so when she asked if that was how narwhals sounded, the children instantly began making clicking and whistling sounds like they learned that narwhals do. Soon after, she told them to go up to the surface so they could take a breath of fresh air with their blowholes...

     This week , the goal was to learn about incorporating elements of UDL into lessons. You may be wondering what UDL stands for.  The Universal Design for Learning  framework, also referred to as UDL, is a framework that gives teachers ways to help make lessons accessible for all students using different means of delivery. The assumption is that since no person is alike,  just as there are a multitude of learners in a classroom, they each come with their own way of processing and communicating information. Cultural backgrounds, language levels, behavior, and physical or mental needs affect how students learn. Since the UDL is a framework rather than a checklist, it gives teachers strategies to plan to provide the most successful learning experiences for their diverse classes.   According to the UDL, this photo shows one way a teacher could provide a scaffold for the students. As the students were introduced to the term non-fiction, they had a clearly...