Which strategy did you use?
I used Syntax Surgery.
Which subject area/grade level?
I used this strategy with 4th grade in Language Arts.
How effective was it?
I am going to have to be honest- I don't think it was effective at all. After teaching it I feel that I am unsure as to what the objective was- am I teaching them the structure of the English Language, because they don't need that. Or, am I teaching them parts of speech, which they do need. My high learners did just fine, but my low learners tended to just... sit.
Any challenges?
They really had no interest in the coral reading aspect. I'm trying to get them to read fluently, and the more I try it, the more I'm convinced that coral reading does not promote fluent reading.
Another challenge was the amount of time it took to create the small reading strips for the students as well as the teacher cards. Almost 45 minutes. If I had a room mother who could come in consistently I might be able to do this more often, but the time is seriously prohibitive. Maybe as a small group activity it would be better?
Any suggestions to make it a better learning experience for your students?
I'm going to try this again tomorrow with a science concept (the big idea from our science lesson today.) Hopefully they'll be more engaged if they realizing we're doing two things at once.
I'm going to keep the speed up even faster. Pulling sticks will also come into play. My lower learners need to at least take a stab at it.
I used Syntax Surgery.
Which subject area/grade level?
I used this strategy with 4th grade in Language Arts.
How effective was it?
I am going to have to be honest- I don't think it was effective at all. After teaching it I feel that I am unsure as to what the objective was- am I teaching them the structure of the English Language, because they don't need that. Or, am I teaching them parts of speech, which they do need. My high learners did just fine, but my low learners tended to just... sit.
Any challenges?
They really had no interest in the coral reading aspect. I'm trying to get them to read fluently, and the more I try it, the more I'm convinced that coral reading does not promote fluent reading.
Another challenge was the amount of time it took to create the small reading strips for the students as well as the teacher cards. Almost 45 minutes. If I had a room mother who could come in consistently I might be able to do this more often, but the time is seriously prohibitive. Maybe as a small group activity it would be better?
Any suggestions to make it a better learning experience for your students?
I'm going to try this again tomorrow with a science concept (the big idea from our science lesson today.) Hopefully they'll be more engaged if they realizing we're doing two things at once.
I'm going to keep the speed up even faster. Pulling sticks will also come into play. My lower learners need to at least take a stab at it.
Addendum:
I did this again another day using a science concept. The students struggled with putting the sentence together, even though it was one of our content sentences from our science experiment from two days before. There were many unusual conjunctions (the word ‘like’) which threw them off. I found that my students were reading the sentence, but only to themselves so in their head they forced the words to make sense. When I read it back to them I often got, “well, it sounded right…” or “that’s not what… oh….” As they realized that the words they’d sorted are not the words they’d actually read. I’m curious to see if this type of activity will help them to realize they need to slow down.
Katie O’Neill’s RESPONSE to Jamie Jay
ReplyDeleteJamie, I was interested in what you had to say in response to implementing Syntax Surgery in your classroom because this was something I had hoped to incorporate into my classroom in the near future! I can imagine that the time in preparing all the materials would take quite a while and certainly a parent volunteer would be needed! I’m interested in ideas of how to make this activity/strategy more time efficient so that the students remain actively involved and engaged the whole time.
Also, I like how this activity sort of forced your students to slow down and pay close attention to the sentence structure.
Jamie,
ReplyDeleteKatie and I are planning to implement the Syntax Surgery in the near future. (We just ordered the long pocket charts.) The way I am going to address this activity is helping my students to identify the parts of speech for the words within the sentence. But I will let you know of the challenges I have when I implement this activity.