Teacher Interview Paper

Finally, I interviewed a teacher who implements the language arts curriculum in
3rd grade (see Appendix C). I learned that Flower uses the Wonders reading curriculum for language arts instruction. Flower explained in the interview that she uses Wonders as a guide and pulls in supplement materials to meet all the standards for 3rd grade. When talking about the strengths and weaknesses of this program Flower stated, “there are games that go along with our curriculum online, that’s a positive to our curriculum but a negative is that there is too many topics covered in a week, we don’t have enough time to cover all of the topics”. When talking about the contents of the curriculum Flower stated. “within the curriculum we do not touch upon that (social
justice issues) at all. We will have a little bit of discussion when students bring it up but I don’t dig too much into it. It’s a time thing; if we had more time to get into that it would be nice.”. When talking about social justice in the classroom Flower admitted that she doesn’t feel very comfortable talking about the issues due to an event that happened in the past. Flower does however talk about these issues when students bring them up in class. Furthermore, within the classroom Flower does use digital and media literacy. Her students use technology a lot for typing and writing. The students also play games aligned with the curriculum on the classroom Chromebooks for language arts instruction. The students participate in media literacy by completing assignments in class including posters, book reports, and brochures. Flower admitted to not using global literacy often in the classroom, mostly because the curriculum is not aligned with it and there is not enough time to fit it in the schedule.

Problem. Based on the data that I collected from the three sources described above I concluded that most of the students in this class are on/above grade level except for 3 students. These 3 students struggle with phonics and phonemic skills which is causing them to fall behind in many other areas in the language arts class. There is nowhere within the curriculum that addresses phonics instruction, and these students need this instruction.

Research Question. For this project, I focused on the research question: what are the strengths and weakness of the language arts curriculum? More specifically, my refocused research question was: how can I incorporate research based phonics and phonemic awareness strategies into these student's instruction?

Analysis

While I was conducting research, I found 4 strategies and programs to implement with the 3 students. As I began instruction with Words Their Way I found the students responding positively with this program and since I only had 75 minutes a week with these students I choose to continue with just the Words Their Way program for this project.
Table 2.A presents a summary of the steps I took to address the problem that I identified.
I first assessed the students using the school’s curriculum screening assessment (see Appendix G), as directed to by school staff. Then, based on the recommendations made by Roberts and Meiring (2006) I had the students complete a writing assignment so I could assess their writing Roberts and Meiring suggested evaluating an authentic writing assignment. I told the students to write a short story about anything they wanted to write about. I then analyzed students writing samples (see Appendix H). I discovered that the students all misspelled words that should be in their existing schema, such as sight words and high frequency words. The students also showed that they had little knowledge of spelling patterns including CVC and CVCe. To address this, I completed research to find what strategies have worked for spelling patterns for other students. I then stumbled upon Singleton’s article and found that Words Their Way worked in her classroom for students that showed data like the 3 3rd graders I was working with (2013). I then researched Words Their Way to get more information on the book and Templeton (N.D.) listed all the positives of this book’s strategies and why it should be used. I found that Templeton suggested using Words Their Way for intervention with students that cannot apply basic spelling patterns. After I found this correlating information I went and rented the Words Their
Way 5th edition book from the library. After reading through the book I found that the strategies within the book may help the 3 students I was working with. I then administered the Words Their Way spelling inventory assessment (see Appendix I) found in the book to see what the students knew. This was very helpful because I could compare the student’s answers (see Appendix J) to the chart found in the book to see what patterns I needed to instruct with the students. Students 1 and 2 showed they needed to be instructed at the very basics starting with long and short vowels whereas student 3 scored perfect on the long and short vowel words so I started instruction with student 3 at blend patterns (see Appendix K). After 2 months of instruction I completed another Words Their Way assessment found in Singleton’s research study that assessed the same spelling patterns with different words (see Appendix L). I found that all 3 students made progress, all three of the students scored 6/6 on the long and short vowel pattern words. I am going to continue with this project using the Words Their Way book strategies since the students are showing great improvement.