Sydney's School Stories

GLAD stands for Guided Language Acquisition Design and are strategies to help ELL students and struggling readers. I was first introduced to GLAD when I was getting my MA/credential at UC Irvine. When you think about it- most students are English language learners in the sense that they are learning new academic vocabulary! One GLAD strategy I tried was a Sequence Pattern Chart. This chart helps students recognize parts of speech and use a writing resource. I used this because I wanted to help students create interesting descriptive sentences for a personal narrative we were working on. To make a sequence pattern chart you create 5 categories- adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. As a class we picked one noun we wanted to focus on and then filled in the rest of the chart based on our noun. For our example the class decided they wanted to talk about "porta-potties"- we had a good time making creative stories about aliens using space traveling porta-p...

One literacy strategy that my class & I did this year is an "Informational Text Walk & Notes" activity. For this unit I wanted to address the following standards: (1) CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.1 Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information. (2) CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.1.A Introduce a topic or text clearly, state an opinion, and create an organizational structure in which ideas are logically grouped to support the writer's purpose. (3) CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.1.B Provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details, and (4) CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.1.D Provide a concluding statement or section related to the opinion presented. Introducing the lesson: Use the TIME FOR KIDS website for polls ( http://www.timeforkids.com/news-archive/polls ) to discuss different issues that have "pro" and "con" sides of an argument. As a class discuss different issues that TFK has on their poll webs...