Formal and Creative Writing

Formal writing can be in the form of an essay, summary, KWL writing, a book review, a professional correspondence, or a resume. A summary can be broken down into the GRASP procedure. G stands for guiding, R is for reading, A is for and, S is for summarizing, and P is for procedure. Summarizing is broken into four parts. The first is preparing to read. The second is reading to remember. The third is grouping to remember information and the fourth step is to write the summary. KWL+ stands for what does the reader know, what does the reader want to learn, what did they learn, making a map, and summarizing their findings. A variation of this is 5W+H, which is who, what, when, where, why, and personal value. Inquiry charts allow students to engage in forming questions about a topic, organize what you know, and allow the student to develop new questions. Students then have to write a summary for each question and then put it all together into a paper.

Creative writing can be in the form of poetry. The acronym RAFT is helpful in creative writing. R is role, A is audience, F is format, and T is topic. It is often beneficial to start with the topic and work backwards. Cinquains and Diamantes are forms of poetry. Cinquains and Diamantes use nouns, adjectives, gerunds,and phrases. Cinquains end with synonyms and Diamantes end with an antonym. A Cinquain has five lines and a Diamante has seven lines. Sense poems are another type of poem under creative writing. Sense poems require the student to think of their favorite place and write a description using their senses. Students use a sense at the beginning of the line and end the line with how they feel.

I think that as a PE teacher I favor creative writing more than formal. I do not think I have the time in my classroom to teach fitness and help students write a formal paper. I will encourage students to write about topics such as nutrition, fitness, health, and physical activity in other classes if they have the opportunity. I really like sense poems. I think it is a great way to figure out what to teach as a teacher. My sense poem was about being outside. If a student gave me that kind-of poem, then I may plan more activities outside for those students who enjoy being outside. A lot of people in class wrote about certain sports, so as a PE teacher I can develop activities that I know my students will enjoy.

After Reading Activities

After reading activities should integrate students, elaborate on the text, and students should be able to apply what they have read. Integration requires talking and writing about the information and elaboration requires the student to dig deeper and expand upon the text. Writing  is the act of constructing meaning while transacting with text, this is the same as reading. Students should write to make sense of what they are reading. Writing stimulates deep processing and organizes thoughts. It can also prompt insight and develop concepts. Students should grow in their writing proficiency through during reading exercises. Model how you want your students to write. To help students, use a process approach such as pre-writing, drafting, and revising. There are three types of writing. The first is informal. These are quick writes and easy to administer. Some examples are learning logs, admission or exit slips, one-minute quiz, and reflective writing. The second is creative writing. Creating writing allows students to use their imagination. Some examples are sense poems, biopoems, and cinquains. The third type of writing is formal writing. Some examples are KWL and an I-chart. I will probably use all three types of writing in my PE class. I favor informal writing because they are easy to administer and a gym is not a typical classroom setting. Exit slips are great in PE and can easily be implemented at the end of every lesson. Technology is easy to use in all three writing techniques. Online learning logs would be very cool for an upper level PE class. Formal writing can be done on fitness profiles or data based on fitness or nutrition. Creative writing can be used to create poems about a student's favorite sport or one on a famous athlete. I understand the importance of reading and writing in the classroom and will do my best to make that apparent in my PE class.

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are a good during reading activity to help organize the students' thoughts, develop their schema, connect related topics, and help them comprehend information. They allow students to make connections between material, arrange related topics, and create a visual representation. Graphic organizers act as a guide to how information is organized. Some examples may include the title, subtitle, glossary, index, table of contents, graphics, summaries, and side notes. Graphic organizers used for internal text structure are included in four patterns. The first is description or classification. It's great for giving definitions, characteristics, or examples. The second is compare and contracting the description. T charts and Vin diagrams are useful examples. The third is sequence or steps in a process. Examples are a list, timeline, or cycle. The fourth is cause and effect and the problem from the effect. Graphic organizers can be used in PE to help describe different kinds-of sports, body parts, or nutritional information. Time lines of great athletes could be placed on the walls around the gym with pictures attached to them. I can easily create a cycle of what it takes to be a successful athlete. I think graphic organizers are a great interactive tool to use with the class and to get them to create something. I also love the idea of displaying them on the gym walls to make the gym look more bright and fun.

During Reading

A goal of any reading strategy it to ensure that your students are comprehending, or understandinga and applying, the material. To evaluate students' comprehension, the teacher must check for understanding throughout the reading. Continually check students' understanding, especially when reading long works. Students need to construct meaning from all three levels of comprhension. These three levels are literal, interpretive, and applied. A literal level of comprehension is a question formed from something that can be literally found in the text. Literal questions are the easiest to identify and do not require any schema. An interpretive level of comprehension is a question that often requires prior schema about the information in the quesiton. Interpretive questions have the students' read between the lines or make inferences about what they are being asked. Interpretive questions require prior knowledge on the subject of the question. An applied level of comprehension is a question that takes what is literl and what is interpreted and then finding out how to apply it to a situation. Applied questions often ask students to analyze, discover, create, or synthesize an answer. As a teacher, I think it will be important to include all three levels of comprehension. All three levels are important and to apply knowledge students need to know how to interpret literal and interpretive questions. Based on my students schema and reading level will determine how many questions are literal, interpretive, or applied.

Before Reading Strategies

The purpose for before reading strategies is to engage students' prior knowledge and interests. It builds a common foundation for knowledge, which in turn will result in success. Teaching essential vocabulary before the reading also helps the student when reading. Before students begin reading, engage them. Engagement involves cognitive and affective aspects. Using their cognitive abilities, the student can generate intellectual interest, or schema. An affective aspect is motivating the students by giving praise and by making the reading relevant. Brainstorming activities, commonality or relatability with the reading, movement, discussions, humor, videos, technology, and personal stories can all help engage students. Some engagement strategies are anticipation guides, vocabulary strategies, list, group, label exercises, concept maps, opinionaires, and story or text impressions. In PE I think I would use a lot of relatability strategies or ones that are very hands-on. In PE I want my students to be constantly moving, so if I wanted them to read an article about baseball I may have them play a game before they go home to read the article.

Information for Teaching Vocabulary

When teaching vocabulary, teachers want to use words that are applicable to the students’ lives and that they are going to be able to find interesting. Words need to be conceptually related, or words that deal with the students’ schema. The students need to be able to connect with a word. Vocabulary needs to be taught within context before teaching the actual definition. The word should not be taught in isolation. Students learn more through the context in which the word is used. Words need to be used in high utility, so that students become more familiar with the words. Words that are important to the class need to be used often; however, limit the amount of words you want to teach. Too many words cause an overload. Keep in mind that words require time to be a part of generative vocabulary, which is Stahl’s deep processing theory. Strategies for teaching vocabulary are also very helpful in helping students become familiar with and retain words. I think the key component of helping students retain vocabulary is to engage them in activities. Getting the students as involved as possible is important because it causes effective learning. By engaging students through doing, watching, and making words relevant, they will start to feel more comfortable with the word and use it more frequently. Something I have done when teaching young children basketball terms is to have them associate a long whistle with the phrase triple threat. When a long whistle is blown, everyone has to stop what they are doing and get into triple threat while yelling “triple threat.” After they are all in triple threat, I ask what they can do out of triple threat. Everyone then has to yell, “shoot, pass, dribble.” I have found it very successful because it is repeated over and over again at random times during practice. It is a great way to help them remember a key term and it is also a classroom management tool. It gets them to stop moving and engaged in what I am about to say.

Vocabulary Strategies

There are many different vocabulary strategies that can be implemented into a classroom. It is also important as a teacher to realize the different types of knowledge. Declarative knowledge is a concept explaining what. Procedural knowledge explains how. Conditional knowledge explains where and when. Schema comes into play with conditional knowledge. Volitional knowledge is why this is important for you, as the teacher. Metacognitive knowledge is being aware, monitoring, adjusting, and orchestrating. Some common vocabulary strategies are tossed terms, semantic feature analysis, concept of definition map, VSS, keyword strategy, scavenger hunt, graphic organizer, knowledge rating chart, list-group-label, and CSSR. My personal favorite is scavenger hunt. In scavenger hunt, the teacher has artifacts or definitions that the student must bring to the classroom. The teacher can do it before a lesson because no schema is required. An example of how I might use scavenger hunt is to place vocabulary cards all over the gym floor and categories on the walls. The students must run around and place the vocabulary word under the correct category. I think this would be great for learning diseases, muscles, bones, or nutrition. The words on the vocabulary cards can even come from the students. As a way to extend the lesson outside of the classroom, I could have the students identify at least one word dealing with physical education that they do not understand and then use those words in the game. I think implementing vocabulary lessons into my PE classroom will be difficult because I want to keep my students moving as much as possible, but I do believe I can be creative enough to achieve it.

Vocabulary

When giving students vocabulary it is best to use multiple methods, exposures, and a variety of context. Do not ever start with having students look up definitions. A definition of a word can change based on the context of the word. The context of a word should come before the definition. As a teacher, you want high utility words, or words that can be used often and across all domains. Students should be able to understand the etymology of words, generate vocabulary, and achieve deep processing of words. The etymology of words refers to the Latin or Greek morphemes of a word, also known as morphological analysis. Morphemes are the root, prefix, or suffix of a word. Generative vocabulary is making sentences out of a dictionary definition. Deep processing is giving new meaning to words. A good classroom activity is to give students a vocabulary word to focus on and several sentences containing the word. As a class the student can come to a conclusion about the meaning of the word. This activity gets the class involved and engaged in leaning new words. The new vocabulary word can then be added to a word wall in the classroom, so the students can refer to if often. Understanding vocabulary can go through several stages. Frontier vocabulary is simply the passing with a word. Receptive vocabulary is being able to understand, hear, and read the word. Expressive vocabulary is being able to speak, write, and do the action with the word. Vocabulary can be implemented into any classroom and should be taught often.

Choosing Instructional Materials

In my opinion, every teacher should have a classroom library. The availability of books in the classroom can be an extreme asset to student's learning. I want to be a PE teacher, but that does not mean I cannot have a section with health-related books, magazines, sports articles, or biographies located in my gym. When choosing what text to use, it is important to choose from a variety of texts, have different reading levels, interests, and genres. I want to accommodate for all my students. It is also important for me to know who my audience is, how reliable the information I am giving them is, and if it is interesting to my students. When analyzing for materials it is important to check for quality and the grade equivalent. The quality of a text is defined by the usability of the text, if students will understand it, and find it appealing. A student should encounter one to two new words per page when reading something to obtain the appropriate vocabulary load. The text should activate the student's schema and keep them thinking after they have finished reading. Check for the main ideas and the details of a text. The text should apply to what is being taught in the class. I also want to analyze what my students will be taking away from the article. I want to know how it has improved their learning.

English Language Learners

To be honest, I did not know much about English Language Learners (ELL) until our lesson. I do not know another language and cannot even imagine moving to another country and not knowing how to communicate or read. I also learned how different academic language can be compared to the social language. Not only do ELLs have to learn the social aspect of the language, but also the academic. It is like they are learning two new languages. A student may be an ELL, but there are also three different types of ELLs. The first is the parallel form schooling. The student received a very good education in his native state. The second is the nonparallel formal schooling. The student is under schooled or behind. The third form is the long-term ELL. The student was born in the United States, but his parents do not speak English at home. A student that has had parallel formal schooling will often understand academic English better or faster than a nonparallel or long-term ELL student. Communication skills or BICS are often developed quickly, but as I stated earlier, academic English or CALPs can take three to five years to develop. To encourage an ELL focus on the meaning of a word, let the student go through silent periods when they simply listen, and do not stress on grammar. The student needs to learn, but also develop a sense of confidence. Keep the ELL's stress low and stay encouraging. By incorporating reading, writing, listening, and speaking into every lesson for forty or more minutes a day can greatly help an ELL learner.

Before, During,and After Lesson Framework

The before, during, and after (BDA) lesson framework helps a student's comprehension in literacy. It allows the student to have a better understanding of the material they are reading and to gain new perspectives and understanding. Before the student starts the teacher needs to activate or engage the student's schema. Basically, get the student thinking. I think of this as a warm-up activity before the big event. Let the student's know your expectations. What does the student need to learn from the reading? Help the students set goals or strategies. Challenge their existing knowledge and help them open their minds to new ideas. During the reading, ask questions to get the students engaged and thinking. Asking questions also helps maintain focus in the classroom. Questions also help add to pre-existing knowledge of the reader. After the reading, talk to students about what they learned and how they have added to previous knowledge. Incorporate the new ideas learned into their pre-reading ideas. BDA allows the students to test their pre-existing schema and then to help it grow.

Schema Theory and Comprehension

Going into our lesson about schema I had no clue what this word meant. I have heard of schema before, but was always a little unsure of its meaning. Schema is what the reader brings to learning or their background knowledge. It is something that the reader already knows or can develop an understanding for from prior knowledge. Schema is also the development of concepts or organized knowledge and structure. Often times we as readers can decipher text based on our prior experiences and readings. Our schema is constantly working when we are reading. Two types of schema exist. The first is accommodation. Accommodation is when the reader changes their world view, so their schema also changes. When a reader stumbles, misunderstands, or needs more knowledge, they are accommodating for what they are reading and their schema adjusts. The second type of schema is assimilation. Assimilation is when the reader adds to their existing framework, in other words, additional knowledge is given to the reader. Schema affects the reader's comprehension, so the more developed our schema is, the more we will understand while reading. As a teacher I need to evaluate my student's schema and help them either develop or grow in their schema.

The Reading Process

I have learned that literacy can be incorporated into every kind of classroom. My goal is to become a physical education teacher and I was unsure how literacy could be applicable to my classroom, but I've come to a more clear understanding. Literacy can be taught through activities, tasks, apprenticeship to students, models, practice,and coaching. I can read an article to my students while they are warming up or I can assign take-home reading that co insides with what we are learning about in class. Exit slips are a great way to measure student's learning. If the lesson pertains to basketball, I can ask students to write down three rules related to offensive play. An answer can be about lane violations, double dribbling, traveling, or fouling among many other rules. Posters lining the wall with quotes, rules, or key words can also help enrich a student's literacy. Hopefully, in my gym I will have a chalk board where I can write a different inspirational quote every day for the students to read. Peer evaluations can also be used for literacy purposes. An example might be that the students have to count how many reps their partner does and then write down the number. Overall, I have learned that it is possible to incorporate literacy into a physical education classroom without much difficulty.