How prepared do you feel in effectively teaching your students in reading? Is this one of your strengths? A weakness?
Honestly, I don't know how to teach students to read. I haven't had to focus on this at all. All my students have the basics and I help them add layers with vocabulary. I am good at that. I try to raise their academic language lexicon by restating large words and using them in sentences. I would say this is a weakness.
I was surprised on Friday when not a single student knew the meaning of euphemism. It shocked me. I spent 4 minutes teaching that word/concept.
Have you started to plan to the Common Core Standards? If you have, how is that going? If
you haven’t, why not? What support do you need?I do plan to these standards. We use Beyond Textbooks and the struggle the 7th grade social studies teacher and I have is that BT does not match the garde level standards. Half my content is 7th grade standards and hers is about half 8th grade standards. It is frustrating but it is what the district wants. The standards I have are easy to meet.
Teaching reading is a beast all its own! And unfortunately for our grade levels, if they come to us as low level readers, there isn't much time to help them grow, it is very frustrating! If you took the time they need to get their reading skills up to your textbook level, you wouldn't even get thru chapter 1! At least you're teaching both the 7th and 8th grade standards, so you can go a little slower and focus on the vocabulary.
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