EDUC 435 // Blog 3

October 25, 2018

References to Learning Experiences

     This month, I have really been digging into practice for edTPA. I submitted my practice Tasks 1-3 into Taskstream, and I am so thankful that we had the opportunity to practice this before we do the real thing in just a couple short months! I learned so much, and I already have picked up on a few things that I would/should have done differently that I will now know for the real thing. I have also been spending lots of time in my clinical placement, and have been completing my clinical experience feedback forms. I am absolutely loving my placement! Over Fall Break, I had the awesome opportunity to be trained in Orton-Gillingham Phonics with all of the K-2 teachers at my placement school. My principal got it approved to let me sit in on the training, just in case I was to get a job at this school next year and have to teach this phonics program! I really learned so much, not just about phonics in the training, but about the processes involved in learning and teaching students how to read.

References to Outside Learning/Research

     Since I was trained in Orton-Gillingham phonics this month, I decided to do a little bit of outside background research on the program and report it back here to y'all. Orton-Gillingham is published by a company called IMSE. This is an acronym that stands for Institue for Multisensory Education. This program is targeted phonics instruction for children with different learning styles! This program includes activities like forming letters in sand on a plate or air writing, which is for the tactile-kinesthetic learners. Another major component of this program is decoding words, red (sight) words, and other visuals cues for the visual learners. However, one of the most important components of this program is the auditory component. For some parts of the instruction, the teacher says "The sounds is ___." Students are expected to be able to mimic the sound, and spell it correctly. If the teacher says "The sound is /c/," students are expected to correctly write the letters c and k, because they both make this sound. I think that my placement school will do very well with this program!
     You can click the link in the APA citation below and read the journal of an educator that uses Orton-Gillingham in her classroom.

APA citation: IMSE - Journal. (2018, October 16). Retrieved October 25, 2018, from https://journal.orton-gillingham.com/

Connections to the NCTCS

     This month, I really applied myself to my clinical placement and became trained in the new phonics program that they are adopting in the school. At first, I thought that they were going to try to implement it next year, but my C.E. explained to me that they are actually going to start implementing this program either right away, or right after Christmas Break! This is going to be a brand new phonics program that they are going to be starting when I start Student Teaching! Thank the Lord I will be officially trained in it before Student Teaching starts! This is connected to NCTCS 1d, "Teachers advocate for schools and students," because by going through this training, we advocated for what our school and students needed-- a phonics program! This also relates to NCTCS 3, "Teachers know the content they teach." This one is self-explanatory, because if we are going to start teaching this phonics program either now or right after Christmas break, then we definitely need to know what we are going to be teaching! This only comes through training, as well as practice and a little more experience.

Ms. McDaniel's Future Classroom

     In my future classroom, I will use the knowledge that I obtained in this Orton-Gillingham training in order to help my students become stronger readers. Even if I teach grades 3-5, this information will still be very valuable to me as an educator because I can always get students in these upper elementary grades that either struggle with literacy, or cannot read at all. The training even touched base on how you can use this program for people trying to get their GED, or high schoolers that are struggling in reading! I am thankful for this experience because I really feel like I can use this information I learned in order to help my students in literacy in my future classroom, regardless of what grade I teach.