December 14th makeup meeting

My question at the moment is:

How beneficial are direct phonics lessons in class, along with the use of home spelling notebooks, at increasing the accuracy of my students' spelling in weekly tests?

my question has changed from: What kinds of questions are my bilingual students asking and what skills do they have, that they can give to English only students  in order to greaten their (English only students') self-confidence and performance?

At the beginning of my study, I thought that all of my students that came from bilingual 1st grade were outperforming those students that came from english only but who also spoke another language at home. 

Now I'm thinking that much of their success has to do with, their language usage at home and how exposed they are to English, as well as the involvement their parents have in working with them to practice their words at home. I still do feel that many of them are able to transfer over some of the skills they possess in Spanish to help them with their spelling in English. However, at the same time certain students are struggling with the spelling words because they aren't able to code switch and are spelling the words out as if they are in Spanish.

The data I brought with me tonight is:

• The Core Teaching Reading Sourcebook for K-8 teachers which gives explicit phonics rules and lessons along with ways to help students with their spelling
• A graph of the whole class' pspelling test scores/percentages from the 1st trimester 
• A graph of how students did during a 4 week controlled study
• A graph comparing EO's, IFEP's, EL's that came from bilingual and EL's that came from EO
• Two readings about Bilingual Education

 A question I have about this data (specifically the graphs) is, although this data helps me target which students are struggling, how do I move from there in order to help those students?

After speaking with Claire I feel as if I might know where I want to go next. I'm concerned about 4 students in particular who despite my efforts, still aren't doing well on their tests. I don't want to single these children out and give them extra work to do at home, when clearly the assistance at home they're receiving isn't enough. With Claire's help we came up with 3 strategies I can use in my class to see if hopefully these 4 students can become successful.

 The strategies are: 

1-grouping the students together so that I can work with them on a particular phonics lesson or give extra support

2-Having them self-correct their pretests so that they can see where it is that they went wrong and what mistakes they might have made. I usually correct their pretests but I feel that having them correct their own might help students internalize what they need to do to fix their mistakes.

3-Singing...having students sing/memorize spelling patterns might help. For example I had students sing M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E when their word was mouse, and I went on to explain that house would be the same except for with an 'h' at the beginning

I will now focus on these 4 students and journal about what I'm doing with them and whether or not I see it working. I have 2 semesters (jan-may) in which I can follow their progress and see whether or not my help pays off

Nov 2nd meeting

The data I brought with me is a list of my students’ spelling scores. I color coded them into three groups (proficient/advanced, basic, below/far below basic)

 One thing I have learned by studying this data is that it would be interesting to compare my data/scores of my bilingual program to those who come from English Only classes or who speak no other languages. Looking at the data also has taught me that there are also other variables that aren’t listed here that could be interesting to note ex: This week we had a tricky spelling pattern, this student was sick and missed 2 days etc.

 One thing I’m wondering now is when can I start this 4 week test period so that it flows with my teaching. Although I want to test my students, I don’t want to drill and kill or stress them out either. I want the tests to be normal tests that we would take so that students feel comfortable with the procedure.

Between now and the next meeting I am going to start incorporating more spelling games/activities into the classroom in order to see an improvement in their scores.

My question

Currently my question is: What kinds of questions are my bilingual students asking and what skills do they have, that they can give to English Only students in order to greaten their (English only students') self-confidence and performance?

OR

What kinds of questions are my 2nd grade bilingual students asking and what skills do they have that they can share to greaten the self-confidence and performance of their English Only classmates?

The concern I have that motivated this question is: My English Only students are performing at a level that to me seems unsatisfactory. Because of their prior schooling in English, I would expect them to be reading, writing and speaking in a more academic fashion, yet the students who are mostly doing that are the students that are coming to me from bilingual classrooms.

One idea I have about data to answer this question is: Looking at the questions my bilingual students ask. Also possibly asking bilingual students to share out (either in an interview or in writing) how it is that they code switch and what strategies they use to help them when working in English.