INSIDE THE CLASSROOM: ENGLISH
Meirelys Ruiz, First Grade teacher, East Harlem Scholars Academy, Manhattan
When you enter my 1stgrade classroom, you immediately know there is a lot of learning taking place. Students are heavily engaged in academic activities — as we like to say, they are busy “growing their brains.”
In our ELA curriculum, 1st graders are exposed to a thought-provoking essential question that they discuss in depth throughout the week -— questions like “How is life different today than it was long ago?” “Where do animals live together?” “How can you find your way around?” “How do animals help each other?”
We teachers select texts for the students to read based on this essential question. We aim to provide them with as much exposure as possible to different types of texts that will help them find the answers to the weekly essential question.
We incorporate all other subjects into this practice so that we can make lessons meaningful to students while offering them an inter-disciplinary approach to the content.
For example, recently we worked on the topic of animals and their habitats. Students took the initiative to choose whatever animal they wanted to research. Then, they completed a graphic organizer that they used to jot down all the important information and key details about where the selected animal lives, what it eats, and the adap- tations that help it survive. They used all this information to write a simple research paper.
My class then had the chance to visit the New York Aquarium and participate in a special program with experts who spoke about some of the animals and their habitats.
To me, experiences like this define true learning: an opportunity to put studies and research into practice. Our visit helped the students connect their many ideas through real-world application.
In my classroom, students address Common Core standards by organizing the information they learn in different ways.
Lately we have been working on how to find key details and main ideas in different texts. The students have learned that the main idea is what the story is mostly about, and that the key details are the specific facts that support the main idea.
For example, students read a text about vultures and then filled in a graphic organizer as they found each of the text’s key details (below.) The exercise made it easier for them to identify the main idea — a great tool to help learning come to life in our classroom.