DI for the (Mostly) Younger Set

The readings this week offered more direct examples of DI in literacy situations, as well as common literacy problems students have. I thought it was interesting in the Brown and Morris article how some low spellers were able to regurgitate spelling words for the test but “were unable to spell these same patterns even a week later,”(p. 168). That sounds like the classic cramming study behavior of a college student.

I was not surprised to see the classic rule of 3 under Brown and Morris’ organization of spelling instruction. I was also not surprised to read that their reading groups and spelling groups were relatively similar. I liked that this article offered different tangible activities to do in the classroom. I particularly liked the partner game day activities: memory, racetrack, bingo and speed sort. I think this article made a good point about quality intervention, the longer it takes for a teacher to intervene the farther the student will fall behind and “the spelling achievement ‘gap’ will be easiest to close before it starts to widen,”(p. 181).

My favorite article from this week was But They All Read at Different Levels by Laura Robb. I liked that it directly answered real questions about differentiated instruction. I liked the examples of tiered activities. This made the whole idea of tiered activities much simpler. With this as a reminder I can now think back to literacy projects I did in elementary school and how the choices we were given was a method of differentiated instruction. I often chose to make posters for book reports rather than dioramas or do a dramatic monologue about the book. I can see how technology in the classroom now opens even more doors for options for tiered activities such as moviemaking (as Robb mentions), PowerPoint, Prezi, online book talks, book trailers etc. I remember making a terrible video for a book report in the eighth grade in which my group and I acted out a scenario we wrote as the characters of a certain book. But it was made with a VHS camcorder and may as well be considered Stone Age technology now. It will be interesting to see how technology continues to impact literacy instruction. Regarding book trailers I found this great site that is all book trailers for books for third grade and up: http://www.slimekids.com/book-trailers/. This is a great link that spans more grades and gives more insight behind the stories: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/65-book-videos-build-excitement-summer-reading. An example is a trailer for Lily Brown's Paintings by Angela Johnson which I posted just before this post because it was having trouble uploading to this post.

Another thing I appreciated about the articles this week was that they were more focused on younger elementary grades (since that is my focus) rather than upper elementary or middle school. The Tobin and McInnes (2008) article provided great insight into real life differentiation in a primary classroom. Since we spend so much time discussing small group instruction I found this quote important:

“Researchers found small-group instruction (three students) to be just as effective as one-to-one instruction in developing reading skills such as phoneme segmentation, fluency and comprehension, while the former study documents the success of mixed-ability groupings (four to five students) to achieve fluency and comprehension in reading at the primary level,”(p. 4).

I already believed that small group instruction was more effective than whole group, but it is good to know that it is believed to be as effective as one-on-one interaction with the teacher.