Problem/Solution Document for Master Teacher Project



Problem/Solution Document for Master Teacher Project

Problem:

The majority of my students do not like to read and they are not at grade level. They need to be reading. According to research, they need to be reading and rereading passages for fluency. Even if I told my students it would improve their reading level, they are not going to want to reread anything. They hate rereading a sentence when they mispronounce a word.

Solution:

I took a class about teaching reading at the University of North Florida with Dr. Nile Stanley, and he gave me the solution to my problem—poetry. Every day now, our reading warm-up is a poem. We focus on a poem for one to two weeks. At the end of the time with a poem we video tape the students performing their poem. We have a whole collection of poems. I choose poems that are short. We have done all kinds of poems: serious, funny, brainteasers, classical. Every time we do one the students come up with creative ways to do the poem. They love reading them over and over. They want to practice them so that they look good on the video. A lot of them, they memorize. I catch them even reciting poems to other students and teachers in the hallway. One day we were waiting on the bus, and my student pointed to a tree bending over in the wind. She said, “Hey, that tree is bowing in the wind like the poem we read last week.” Then she proceeded to say the poem and two other students joined her.

Impact:

My students’ reading fluency and comprehension skills have greatly increased. They are trying to read everything with inflection and expression instead of monotone. Even see their speech is improving. They watch themselves on the videos and try to be clearer when they talk. There have been tons of teachable moments to talk about vocabulary, comprehension, analogies, symbolism, and much more. The students are checking out poetry books to find poems for us to study. I have one boy who would never finish a book. Now, he loves reading poetry, because even if he does not finish the book he can tell me all the poems he has finished. It has been very energizing to my classroom. All this can be done in 5-15 minutes of class time.

Cara Wilmot cewilmot@

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