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A Standards, CPALM, and Newsletter Smorgasbord

For 6th Grade, I am most comfortable with the ELA standard regarding using online resources for definitions and synonyms. I have been using such websites for many years now, and it would not be hard to adapt to more student-friendly ones. The Wordsmyth website gives the part of speech, different definitions, some basic synonyms, and what words it was derived from. This puts everything into one place, unlike Dictionary.com. The standard I am least conformable with is using multimedia aspects to "clarity information". I normally find that adding in a bunch of fluff can actually confuse and distract the student, so the struggle for me will be to use multimedia effectively. The standard suggests using graphics software, audio recorders, and move creators. For some subjects in history, it can be helpful to provide some cultural context in music, art, and video/audio clips, which would fulfill this standard.

One of the resources I have found helpful is the list of standards, which can be found in the grade's files and part of the subject they apply to. As a young teacher, having this long list of standards will be a good reference for lesson plans. The best part, however, is if you click on the standard, the page provides three "access points", or other standards the standard quickly connects to. Eventually, a giant state-approved standards map can be made for the entire subject! The website also offers some professional development courses, and I signed myself up for a "Literacy across the Content Areas" course. I believe that a high level of reading comprehension and writing is vital in all the classrooms, so I am very interested in this course. 

The skills I learned from the Newsletter Design assignment were how to create a newsletter format on my own, what content should be included (some vocabulary, notes to parents, general warnings and suggestions), and that they take a while! I put a lot of time into the design of it, and I was pretty happy with it in the end. I did have a lot of colors in it (I just got too excited, picked a color scheme, and ran with it. I like the idea of color-coding different types of content, so I will stick with that. Since it is a lot of paper and work to print copies for students to loose, I think I will email it out. The format I created doesn't really work for an online newsletter, so I will go with a simpler format. Although a newsletter is a nice alternative to the emails parents receive frequently, it's more work for both the teacher and parent to communicate through a newsletter. An email can be quickly formatted, it is easy to read, and it is easy to respond to. Overall, I enjoyed the assignment, and it has given me the opportunity to think about how I wish to communicate with parents. 



Comments

  1. Lukas's Blog fa19October 1, 2019 at 7:33 AM

    CPALMS is a big library for teachers in Florida. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers are not aware of them.
    BTW, I really have to say that I enjoyed reading your blog every week! Excellent!

    ReplyDelete

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