Choral Reading Entry

For this entry, I decided to write about our group's awesome choral rendition of Chica Chica Boom Boom. In this reading, we met many of the Michigan GLCE's for 8th grade. Because we were speaking, I focused mainly on the speaking GLCE's. The first standard we met during our reading was "Students will use enunciation and stress to emphasize key ideas and concepts when presenting." An example of how we met this standard was how we but the stress on "Chica Chica Boom Boom" whenever it came up in the text. Since this was the most repetitive part of the book, and set the tone for the rest of the story, putting an emphasis on that phrase helps meet this content benchmark. The next content standard that we met was "Students will use tone of voice and pace of speaking to enhance meaning and influence interpretation when presenting." We met this standard by using a group rhythm to our choral effort, and we used this rhythm to create an enhanced meaning to the story we were reading. We also touched on content standards for the speaking discourse portion of the GLCEs. By planning as a group the manner in which we planned to go about our choral reading, we met the standard "Students will plan and deliver an informal presentation." In using these GLCEs, we were supported in our learning community. Evidence of this support can be seen in the readings which we did for last week. In this case, the teacher lead the discussion, by laying out the assignment, and giving some expectations for the completion of that assignment. Next, it was all up to us, the students to have a discussion about how we wanted to approach the assignment. That is saying, that our discussion was more of a discussion as opposed to a recitation, the content, and the flow of the discussion was based solely on the manner in which the students took the discussion. My own reflections on my participation in this assignment helped me think about my role as a teacher in language arts. I realize that giving the students more freedom in discussion, and breaking them up in to smaller groups will help them get more out of the discussion, as they will feel more comfortable participating with a small group, instead of the class as a whole. Doing this will also allow for many different interpretations to be brought up, and when the class meets as a whole, the students will be able to pick up on the interpretations of their peers. With this in mind, I realize that i need to focus on planning language arts discussions in small groups before having the same discussion as a whole class.