I believe

I believe that students need to be in a place that feels safe to learn.  This place needs to be both physical and mental. They have to have food in their bellies, they need to have clothes on their backs, they need to be warm and they need to feel loved.  If they come to me lacking any of these things I believe it is my responsibility to meet these needs. I believe children need developmental appropriate environments in which to learn. They need to move and play and talk.  I believe they need a teacher who inspires them, supports them, and encourages them to be themselves.  I believe they need permission to ask questions and make mistakes and dive into what they are interested in learning.  I believe that with access to education all children can learn.  I believe that it is my job as a teacher to figure the best way to make that access happen.


My project comes from my desire as a Reading Specialist to teach all children to read.  I teach children from varying socio economic groups and varying experience with English. Part of my job is to ensure children have automaticity when reading Teacher's College Sight Words Lists A-H.  This goal is for typically developing English language learners to achieve by the end of first grade.  I teach children in grades K-4.  I have students in every grade level who have yet to achieve this goal.  My question to my self was how do I provide repeated practice of these words for a diverse group of learners?  How do I allow them a sense of ownership over the materials they use?  How do I make the material interesting enough for the children to want to use them?  How to I provide access to families who would like to support their child's learning, but do not have access themselves?  My answer was to use Animoto to create a way for children to develop their own materials to provide repeated practice to learn sight words.  The children will use translanguaging in order to make more meaning of the words. They will write sentences in order to practice the words in context.  They will choose pictures or videos to provide pictorial support for these words.  We will then put together an Animoto video of these words and do a voice over, hopefully with the children's voices, for them to be able to use auditory learning to support their acquisition of these words.

My hope is that not only will these videos be helpful to the students attainment of these words, but that these videos can be used for families to help support their child's learning.