Next stop: Kitayama-Yuan Station

Fourth Grade

Michelle Yuan

Professor Kammie Hayashibara

Kitayama - Yuan Station

Classroom Details

Castelar St. Elementary

• Chinatown - Los Angeles, California

4th Grade

• 2 - 1 = 1 IEP/504
• 1 Student with hard of hearing
• 11 ELLs (Russian, Spanish, and Mandarin)

Subject - ELA

• ID Character Traits with Evidence using Character Profile

Classroom Environment

Physical Environment

• Desks arranged in groups of 4
• for Kagan's Cooperative Learning Groups
• Teacher assigns seating
• Student 1: high students
• Student 2: mid-high or emerging ELs
• Student 3: mid-low or emerging ELs
• Student 4: entering ELs

Emotional Environment

• GT daily reminders that he believes that ALL students can succeed in his class and he cares about them.
• No specific time carved out of the day, but students can go to him anytime when they need to communicate their needs
• weekly SEL lessons and games

Instructional Choices

Expectations & Frontloading Tier 3 Vocabularies (x2)

• TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) method
• WBT (Whole Brain Teaching, a.k.a. Power Teaching)

Warm-up Activity

• TPRS & Two teams based off of line order

Demonstration

• Model Character Profile
• Use Index Card & Categorize evidence as Words, Thoughts, Actions, or Feelings

Guided Practice

• Use same Character Profile advance organizer but with different chapter
• Students use Index Cards and place on the class Character Profile

TPRS Expectations

and

Warm-up for Character Profile

“Words, Doing, Thought, Feeling” Warm-up Activity

and

Introduction to Character Profile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwjZVzaeYk8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwjZVzaeYk8

*Warning: Both videos are set private due to LAUSD district policies

Assessment Tool

• Gesture Signs - Informative
• Finger Checks - Informative
• Index Card - Formative

Strategy behind:

• Teacher expectations: All students are responsible for their own learning and distributing power to students that they understand their having the ability to stop or ask for repetition if needed.
• Visual and product of Student’s understanding at the end of the lesson

Unit 2 Questions:

How did you choose the strategies to collect data and what did you hope to learn?

• Character Profile:
• Encourage students to use graphic organizers to note what the characters says, does, thinks, and how they interact with other characters
• Using textual evidence asks students to underline part of the text that give insights into the character’s personality or motivations
• These strategies aim to help students better understand characters by narrowing their focus to types of behaviors and how these behaviors reveal their traits.
• My goal was to determine how well students can construct their reading comprehension and analytical skills by constructing a deeper understanding of the characters in a story with focus of the character’s words, thoughts, actions and feelings. I wanted to see how well students can organize their thoughts in writing, specifically in crafting character profiles that integrate both their own ideas and evidence from the text.

Unit 2 Questions (continue):

To what degree did you learn what you set out to learn from your data, or how will you return to the study and try again?

• Goals for testing: Did students successfully use textual evidence to describe characters? Did they show understanding of the traits?
• What I learned: Students commonly confused thoughts and dialogues and actions. This suggests a gap in higher-order thinking skills like making inference.
• Next Steps: I may need to reteach concepts such as how to infer character traits or provide more scaffolding, like additional examples and modeling.

Unit 2 Questions (continue):

If I were writing an IEP for focus student, what would 3 priority goals be?

1. Improve Reading Comprehension Skill
1. S will improve the ability to identify and describe character traits in grade-level texts by citing specific examples from the text, with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 attempts.
2. Develop Analytical Thinking Skill
• S will practice inferring character traits from indirect characterization (such as actions, dialogue, thoughts, and feelings) in texts and be able to explain their inferences with supporting evidence, completing this task independently in 4 out of 5 attempts.
3. Enhance Writing and Communication Skill
• S will improve their ability to write coherent character profiles or responses, including specific character traits and supporting evidence from the text, with minimal teacher assistance

Problems of Practice

1. Some students have difficulty making inferences based on character’s actions or thoughts when citing evidence from text or fail to explain how a character’s actions or words demonstrate listed character traits
2. Most students struggle with emotional understanding especially when the character’s emotions or motivations are not explicitly stated in text

Thank you for your listening

and

your attention!

Reference

Images:

• https://www.pngegg.com/en/search?q=catbus#google_vignette
• https://www.pngegg.com/en/png-bbpri

Teaching Strategies

• Whole Brain Teaching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBeWEgvGm2Y
• TPRS 2.0 - Workshop 101 and 201 w/ Craig Sheely and Blaine Ray
• TPRS recipe
• LISTEN poster
• 5 Finger Checks