Tracy Davis' Blog

“Understanding morphology may help students broaden their vocabularies, and vocabulary growth may improve students’ understanding of morphology. This suggests that teaching morphology may work well with other types of context-rich and thoughtful vocabulary instruction to improve students’ reading and language outcomes.”  This article discusses the breaking down of different words and teaching students how to decode words in order to figure out their morphemes.  Once students have a grasp of the different parts of words, their vocabulary will be expanded.  When a child’s vocabulary is expanded, not only will it affect their progress in reading, but it will also effect their progress in all other subjects areas and areas of life.  Understanding morphology will expand your vocabulary, which will then open your horizons to a greater vocabulary where you can expand your morphology knowledge as well.  The two play off of one another. 

I think that I poetry is fun poetry!  Although I find it hard to write about certain aspect of myself, this poem seems easy.  Its a fun way to have children introduce themselves to their fellow classmates.  Its one way in which you can learn about other in a deeper way, with the inclusion of the lines “I hope, I think, I wonder, I feel, I dream”.  Also the fact that this type of poem can be used to write about characters from passage reading is wonderful.  It give students the opportunity to dig deep and find out information about that particular character in order to record the different thoughts for the lines in the poem.  The I poem can also be written in a form where two voices are used, which would be ideal for partner work.  When going through the powerpoint, I loved viewing the examples of students work where they wrote their poems and went back an edited them, adding more information.  This not only shows their work with poetry, but general writing skills.  This is one of my favorite types of poems because I like to see the creativity of applying information about a person or character in poetry form.

It is extremely important to assess student’s reading ability so that you can place them with the best reading materials to fit their needs.  A child’s reading level is important so that they are learning the needed material without becoming frustrated.  That’s one thing that I found interesting about this article, that students from different reading levels can all read the same material, yet on their instructional level.  It’s a great idea to keep your students on the same subject, and when they are reading different material, it gives them all the opportunity to bring something a little different to the discussion.  Students learn well from other students especially when it comes to vocabulary.  Sometimes when they hear a student say a word, they become interested in the word and will add it to their own vocabulary. “Struggling readers need opportunities to read quality children’s literature written at their instructional levels where teacher guidance and teaching, as well as peer collabora­tion, are essential components.”  When a student is at the proper instructional level they will be learning at their best.

I found this article to be very interesting.  In the article it discusses different strategies when participating in shared reading.  One thing is comprehension.  The article talked about breaking the reading into pages or sections and asking questions about each section to establish comprehension throughout the story. Asking review questions about what just happened, or prediction questions about what might happen next, or come next, all are great ways to help students comprehend what they are reading.  In relation to the Pirate article on NationalGeographic, this article is broken up into sections which makes it great to work with for the comprehension level.

Next the article talks about vocabulary and introducing new vocabulary words that appear in the readings to students.  But this is never an opportunity to tell students what the word means, but the perfect opportunity to have them use context clues to figure it out.  This requires thinking and challenges the students.  In the pirate article, there are many terms that will probably be new to students when they are learning about the different aspects of a pirate’s life.  Not only will the students be learning new things about pirates, but they will be expanding their vocabulary. When learning this new vocabulary students will be challenged to use context clues which will help to sharpen their context clue abilities, which is another important part of reading.

Text Structure is that way in which a passage is written.  There are many different forms of text structure and covering them all with students is important.  For the pirate article, I found it to be mostly descriptive as it described Black Beard and the terror that he was.

Finally we have text features.  Each text consist of  many different features and its the students responsibility to know what those features are and where to find them.  Text features including headings, illustrations, bold or italicized words, and any extra features like a glossary or index.  These resources can be very helpful to a reader if they understand what they are.  In the pirate article, there are many illustrations and bolded words to draw the reader’s attention while reading.

Reading the article about the pirate lesson made me really excited about beginning it.  The idea of combining different genres of books about a particular subject is a great way for students to learn about that topic. This way they are exposed to all aspect and points of view about the subject.  This lesson plan also includes a notebook to encourage students to write.  The pull out section has the entire lesson broken down into different parts which is great for teachers.  By breaking it apart into different sections, students have the opportunity to spend time exploring one aspect of the lesson.  When they are focused on only one part, then tend to learn more.

This is a picture of my sun cathcer.  It is extremely special to me because it was made from the flowers that were placed on my papaw’s grave.  My papaw passed away last year, a few days after my 21st birthday.  He had lung cancer and had struggled for months.  On the back there is a paper inside the glass that says “In loving memory of Dean Davis”.  When I see this I think about him, and the vibrant colors of the flowers helps me to remember all the good times.

This is my personal cook book!  I love to cook! When I was preparing to come to college, my Grandma decided to make me my own cook book full of all my favorite recipes and a few others.  This is special to me because I know how large my Grandma’s recipe collection is and she went through all of it and hand wrote this book for me.  Not only did she include the recipes, but she also included some cartoon drawings and funny quotes.  Because it is a notebook, she left room in the back where I could add recipes, and I have.  It is now full and I will be moving to a new notebook.

“Love that Dog” was an interesting book. I really like the way that the author wrote it in a journal style.  The main character Jack started out hating poetry and claimed to not be able to write it, but by the end of the book, he loved poetry and was the best poet anonymous poet in the class.

In “Brown Angels” I like that the author included all the pictures that he loved to collect and look at.  I think that it added to the poems.  There was a variety of different poems with different feelings behind them.  Some were joyful, some were humorous, and some were more sorrowful.

In “all the small poems and fourteen more”, there were a numerous poems about animals.  I love animals, so these drew my attention.  There were also poems about nature and then there were poems about random objects.  All of these poems were unique in their own way.

I enjoyed this section of Notebook Know-How for many reasons.  Going on what I said earlier, I really like the way this book is written.  I like how Buckner adds specific examples from the children’s notebooks when she is explaining her meaning.  This helps me to understand the reasoning behind her methods better. 

In this section she discusses how she tries to get her students to write more about certain topics.  She also talks about how she tries to get students to expand on their ideas and to do some research on topics that they are writing about.  She was trying to get them to add more detail to their writing to make it more interesting.

I did a name project when I was in eleventh grade, and just like then, there isn’t much information about my name.  Tracy is short for Teresa and Davis was derived from David.  I did find it interesting that there are 1,502 people in the United States that have the same name as I do.  I also thought that it was interesting how the name Tracy is the 154th most popular name in the US.  Even though it is both masculine and feminine, 80% of people with the name are female. I was surprised to see that Davis is the 7th most popular surname in the US because I didn’t realize it was so popular.

To my parents, my name wasn’t anything special.  They were hoping that I was a boy, so they only had a named picked for a boy, Andy Dean.  When it turned out that I was a girl, they didn’t have anything in mind.  My mom named my older sister, so to make things fair, my dad came up with my name.  Neither one of them knew another Tracy at the time, so they agreed on the name.

I really enjoyed the first two chapters of this book especially because it was written by a teacher.  The book itself was easier to read and understand because it wasn’t full of statistics and facts but just useful information from a fellow teacher.  Someone who is working in the classroom, tried an activity and decided to share her adventure with other teachers.  I love that she included things that worked for her and things that didn’t.  She wasn’t afraid to admit to her downfalls, which really to me shows her strength and passion for what she’s doing. 

This book also reminded me of the movie Freedom Writers.

Hot Blogging was a good informative article about how to incorporate technology into your classroom assignments.  In order to do so you have to be aware of the different resources available to you as a teacher to use.  It’s a great idea to ask your students what they would like to use a blog for and to allow some flexibility when it comes to the blog.  Your overall goal is to stimulate HOT skills, and there are many ways in which you can do this.  One way is to create an open discussion about certain topics where every student can freely express their opinion and comment on other students ideas.  By doing so, it will cause the students to have to think critically about statements made before they can comment.