[LIT] building background knowledge...and Caroline

[FineArt11 at aol.com]

hi,
for those of you who have the warm-ups and daily journaling, how do you  find 
the time to grade them or look at all of them?  i teach reading only  in high 
school and last year, i had over 170 students.  i had to stop the  journaling 
because i could not read all of it with the other workload i already  had.  i 
never grade a journal, but i like to read them and comment so the  students 
know someone is paying attention.  i think writing is so important  in a 
reading classroom, so we do a lot of it and that takes up a lot of my  time.  if you 
become a good writer, than you will better understand other  writers.  
 
caroline, i am stuck at home because i just had surgery, so i am working on  
next year's curriculum as well.  believe it or not, we do not have one  right 
now, so another teacher and i were give permission to write one.   please feel 
free to email me and keep in touch.  i am sure we can help each  other.  :)
 
oh, and i am not surely exactly what you referred to regarding the  5-minute 
lessons, but i saw tim rasinski at a conference where we both presented  our 
research.  he talked about 10 minutes a day for fluency.  i  thought it was too 
much to take away from my 60 minute block, but i did  it.  i taught 9th 
graders last year; they scored the lowest in my school on  our state-mandated FCAT 
test.  their fluency rates flew through the roof in  a few weeks time and more 
than 90% of my students' scores went up.  more  than 50% scored over the 
minimum that the county required...which was  significantly higher than what they 
scored the year before (both of these  percentages are significantly higher 
than most of the county and the state  scores this year; many counties' scores 
went down).  fluency was not the  only thing i worked on with them, but i think 
it helped a lot.
 
*\l/**\l/**\l/*Lynn*\l/**\l/**\l/*
Doctorate Student, Florida Atlantic University


Please visit my READING website! :o)  
http://cyberedtech.fau.edu/domino/default.htm 



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