Authenticity

My favorite thing about this year so far (which, coincidentally, was my least favorite thing about the beginning of last year) is the vast range of abilities in our little classroom. This is particularly challenging in math, for the only way to really approach instruction is to have 4 simultaneously running curriculums (not to mention a grades 3-6 "crash course" special for my English learning lady to catch her up as much as we can). But even that I have learned to love. Right now, for example, I get to teach two digit addition and pre-algebra. Oh yeah baby.

Reading is a bit different, since students don't necessarily fall into "grade levels". Right now my littlest second grade lady is a more fluent reader at least three children who fall in higher grades. So instruction is pretty individualized. But I give strategy lessons to the whole group. Last year, my readers weren't nearly as proficient as the group is now, so I have really had to shake things up a bit.

The other day I was giving a lesson on using context clues to understand new, unfamiliar words that we come across when reading. I usually choose a picture book from our library to model this strategy. As I was getting ready for the day, I realized that my "Oh dear. I don't know what this word means (but really I know what it means and I am just faking so you can learn how to do this)" approach was not going to cut it for this crew. I could just envision the "I'm not buying this garbo" look from the majority of them. So I decided to get a bit more authentic.

I grabbed my copy of Wuthering Heights and opened the passage that I had just read that morning while I ate my breakfast. If I was going to teach them how to work through a new word, I might as well show them how I did it myself!

I read a passage to the children. We read from chapter 12 when Catherine is sick in bed. And Mr. Linton is "among his books" while she is on the brink of the grave!! We moaned and groaned about the relentlessness of Mrs. Catherine Linton's drama. They fell in love with her antics. We came to the part when she is "fasting pertinaciously" waiting for her husband to come sit by her side and respond to her every need. Whoa baby. That is at least a $20 word.

So we worked through it. We predicted what it might be about. We thought of other words that would make sense there. We looked it up. And how we use it quite regularly in casual conversation to someone's stubbornness or fierce zeal.

And it made the word wall. Obviously.