Welcome to my virtual classroom. This may not be as fancy as you're used to seeing, but this is about as fancy as I get. Each of these pictures represents a different aspect of my classroom or expectations. Often, I find myself changing things up a bit, but this is a current view of what my students see every day. I've included the picture above to show how my students gain motivation to read and write on a daily basis. Obviously there's a direct correlation between reading and writing and the students I serve struggle to do either. There is definitely a lack of confidence in the literacy skills my students have, and so there is a definite need to motivate them to continue polishing the skills to a point where they feel comfortable utilizing them on a daily basis. We are an Accelerated Reader school, and I motivate my students by keeping track as a class, how many books we can read in a given quarter or semester. Currently, we have about 44 books. The idea was to get to 50 by the time we hit Christmas break. They came so close, even if it was only a few students motivated to participate. They had to pass an AR test with 60% or higher on each book. Much to my surprise, none of my students that have made an attempt have passed with a score lower than 70%.
In the middle of that bulletin board are strategies that students can utilize to gain fluency or comprehension of the passage and books they read. To the right, students have displayed book reviews in which they've discussed aspects of the books they've read that they enjoyed or could identify with. Upon completing the written portion, I allowed students to google a picture that best represented the book or their feelings about the book to add to their review. Students seem to enjoy this process.
At the bottom of that picture, you'll see my attempts to help students organize their thoughts for paragraph structure, ultimately leading to organizing information in a written passage. Post-its seem to work best for my students who struggle with fine motor skills that don't want to constantly write or rewrite to reorganize their writing.
Desks are arranged facing forward, with a small table in the front of the room for direct instruction and small group work. Being a special education teacher, my students benefit greatly from the direct-instruction approach and a structured, routine-oriented class. Luckily, I have a classroom that's fully equipped with technology such as surround-sound speakers, overhead projections compatible with my computer and television and an Elmo that helps greatly with modeling everything from fine motor skills to substitution for math equations.
Vocabulary is a large portion of our day, as ELL often need substantial work regarding everyday sight words and not-so-common test taking vocabulary. Other content vocabulary joins the wall as we introduce new topics. There were a few words we started with at the beginning of the year, and began dictionary and definition usage to better familiarize ourselves with the language around us. We add a word or two per week, depending upon what I'm finding to be common errors or misrepresentations within student writing.
Student expectations and routines are laid out on the board every day. My classroom is "color-coated" in the sense that my language arts expectations are always in blue, and my math expectations are always in green. At the time of this photograph, my caseload also included a homeroom amongst the various language arts and math classes I taught. Journaling and free-reading are about the only two "free time" choices my students have in every subject I teach. More often than not, students choose to read than journal. I'm hoping that with further instruction on how to instruct writing, I'll be more comfortable with suggesting written expression, so they'll be more comfortable with it, too.
Student work is all over my room, as well as "wise words" or quotes from famous people. My hope is to encourage students to write what they think, as what they say can be pretty profound at times. When students find a quote they particularly feel they've connected with, they're allowed to put it up, or take it with them. I want students connected to text in whatever way they can.
School-wide, we follow this poster as a means of motivation to provide quality written work. The poster pushes primarily for grammatical and syntactical correctness, but hopefully, with more instruction, they'll incorporate the need for meaningful and memorable writing so as to better connect the readier with what they've written.
I hope you've enjoyed my short version of my virtual tour.
Brie
