Kate Says

Reading Comprehension Survey

Kate Olson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:53:52 +0000

I need your help!!!!

I’m working on my Reading licensure at University of Wisconsin - Stout as part of my MSEd right now and for my Developmental Reading course I need to interview teachers about reading comprehension. I would SO appreciate it if you could help me out! I thought this (and my Facebook posting) would be a good way to do this so I can get a broad range of answers :-)

Here are the questions:

1) What grade/subject do you teach?
2) What is the paramount reason your students DO comprehend what they read?
3) What is the paramount reason your students DO NOT comprehend what they read?
4) Describe one comprehension strategy you use to help students comprehend text

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide and pass this on! This is the 3rd interview I’m supposed to be doing between my 2 grad courses right now and time is seriously crunched :-(

Incentive

Kate Olson — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:52:37 +0000

I’m an LL Bean kind of girl, it’s just who I am - you may do Prada, I do fleece.

Anyway, here’s the challenge for me at this very moment:

One of my professors has generously extended the deadline for all of our enormous projects from July 21 to “whenever we feel we can get them done” - she’ll just change our grade once we get everything in. Super generous, but for me, super dangerous. The original deadline is July 21, which is so close that I sweat in fear just thinking about it. However, my other course’s deadline is August 15 and I have 2 huge family things going on between those 2 dates. Therefore, adding more work to my plate between July 21 and August 15 won’t necessarily be a good thing.

I’ve decided some extrinsic motivation is needed, so here’s my gift to myself if I get in all of my Administration work by the original July 21 deadline………

LL Bean Wind Challenger Fleece, Hooded Jacket

Yup, I’m the kid that needed the sticker chart and the prize bucket………

Early Kindergarten?

Kate Olson — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:19:38 +0000

As I’ve been doing research for my analysis of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, I dug into the topic of age-cutoffs for sports teams and entrance into kindergarten. Due to the fact that the book analysis is still incomplete and the deadline is fast approaching, I can’t take the time to into much detail here, but………

I beg anyone even CONSIDERING sending their child to kindergarten early to read the article “The Peristence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects” by Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey (full citation below). If this research doesn’t convince you to wait, I don’t know what will. The research is amazingly compelling and disturbing to me as both a parent and an educator and has sparked my desire to dig even deeper into this area.

References

Bedard, K., & Dhuey, E. (2006, November). THE PERSISTENCE OF EARLY CHILDHOOD MATURITY: INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE OF LONG-RUN AGE EFFECTS. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(4), 1437-1472. Retrieved July 6, 2009, from Business Source Premier database.

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

***If you are unable to locate the article because of access issues (I have full access to EBSCOhost through my grad program at UW-Stout), there is a very detailed description of the research in Outliers.

Autism Resources - Finally!

Kate Olson — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:24:42 +0000

Well, it’s only taken me about 2 weeks to finally get this list posted, but better late than never! This is a list of books and resources I took note of during the Autism Spectrum Disorders Certificate Program I attended last month. I’ll be adding to the list as I go, but this grouping of 20-some things is a good start. I haven’t read many of the books, but they were highly recommended or mentioned during training, so my curiousity was piqued.

If you have any books or resources to share, PLEASE add them in the comments section or share them with me via delicious!

I chose delicious for the delivery method because I figured it was the most easily-updated and accessible. Without further babble, I present to you:

kolson29’s autism_books links on delicious

On another note, we’re 3 sessions into our Asperger’s Support Play/Social Skills group for younger kiddos and I absolutely LOVE it! I can’t share much anecdotal stuff, but I’m going to work on compiling some teaching sucesses/failures from the experience to share here………..

One of Those Days

Kate Olson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:49:53 +0000

Oh. My. Gosh.

I got yelled at by my 3 year old for using the other G word today, as well I should have. Nothing like a preschooler to shape up my language, right?

I had one of those completely-new-situation after completely-new-situation days where I was always brand new at every thing I did and NEVER felt like I could confidently read a situation or make the right decision. I try to make myself feel better by telling myself that I’m brave for constantly taking risks and putting myself in learning situations, but it’s exhausting and extremely anxiety-inducing for me. I’m looking back at at least one situation I was in and thinking, “I was THAT person! Oh no oh no oh no oh no, I can’t believe I was THAT person!” I learned from it and didn’t even think much of the situation while it was happening, but now I want to crawl under a rock at how I dealt with it. Ugh. Trying to shove it into the better-left-alone corner of my brain for a more distanced-analysis at a later date, but it keeps resurfacing.

A few somewhat-unrelated reflections:

1. I never quite realized how negatively people react to someone very different from them when out in public. I have to be extremely vague here, but since I’ve always fit right in pretty much everywhere I’ve gone in my little world, it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized that all the stares, cringes, and wide-berth-walks were pointed in MY direction today! Granted, it wasn’t actually about ME, but I considered myself an extension of the target in this case. Nothing like an eye-opener like this to get me enraged! People used to fall over themselves to help me out when I was having a hard time in public with one of my babies or now toddlers, but if the person in question is not so little anymore? Let’s just say no one tripped coming to my aid.

2. Watching experienced people handle a crisis situation is the best way to learn. Period. You could make me read 500 books on the topic, but observing experts model the appropriate reaction/behavior/teaching in a real, spontaneous situation with me as a participant brought me the clarity I needed. I still feel like I could have done my part in a million better ways, but what I took away from the other staff is so valuable I can’t really put it into words.

I’m still decompressing after my day, but writing this helped. I apologize for having to be so vague, but I believe so strongly in confidentiality and don’t want to compromise that even a tiny bit - I’m sure you understand.

How Did THIS Happen?

Kate Olson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:18:50 +0000

A nice person emailed me this morning to let me know that I’m on this list of “100 Helpful Websites for New Teachers” - all I could think of was how funny that is now that I’m doing NO promotion of my site!

Anyway, I have no knowledge of the site which posted this other than my initial view while I took a glance at the list, but the list itself does appear to have a lot of useful sites. Might be worth checking out!

Homework Show & Tell

Kate Olson — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:02:03 +0000

Yet again I’m sharing my homework……….yawn.

This assignment is a list of about 45 terms used in reading instruction (examples provided by yours truly) and is for my Developmental Reading grad course at UW-Stout as part of my MSEd program as well as my reading licensure program.

Why do you care?

Well, maybe you’re interested in reading instruction……..or maybe you have a better way of assessing students’ knowledge in this area and want to share it with me…………..or maybe you just want to see if I did a good job. Regardless of your motivation, it’s here for your reading pleasure :-)

Reading Instruction Terms - Kate’s Homework

And maybe some lucky person in the course next semester will come across this and have an example to follow for their assignment!

Autism Program - Day 2: Links of Interest

Kate Olson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:37:49 +0000

A few links mentioned in the program today that some of you might find helpful - I haven’t been able to explore them yet, but plan to as soon as I get 5 free minutes!

AutismInspiration
TasksGalore
Tinsnips

And then one I’m throwing in because I kept forgetting to post about it before:

AutismSpeaks Ning

I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to list the oodles of books I have written down that were mentioned in the last few days - I’ll try to get that up soon!

Autism Program - Day 1: Learning With Parents

Kate Olson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:52:02 +0000

I’m over-my-head busy this week with 2 grad classes and my full days of attending the Autism Spectrum Disorders Certificate Program (I’m too busy to link it - if you’re interested, read my last post!). However, I’ve gotten so much great information and my to-read list from the speakers is becoming more than one page, so I just can’t stop myself from sharing a tiny bit of my experience so far this week.

The group of people in the program is SO diverse - it ranges from a freshman college student to a teacher from Bulgaria to occupational therapists to speech and language therapists to day treatment case managers to……..well, you get the picture. I was expecting mostly teachers - silly of me, but there’s that self-focused filter in action! Anyway, here’s the group I did NOT expect and am incredibly excited about learning with: parents of children with autism. As an educator, I’ve never actually learned about kids WITH the parents of the population present. It may seem not all that strange to you, but think back to any meeting, inservice, class you’ve taken and think about how people talk about students and children. It’s often in a clinical tone, sometimes irreverent - at least that’s my experience. It’s so refreshing to be on the same side of the table as these parents and get the opportunity to learn with them.

I’m tripping over words here and not sure if I’m expressing this the way I want to, so I’ll leave it there………

A Little Light Reading

Kate Olson — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:52:19 +0000

Currently on top of my “must read now because someone is expecting a book report by July” pile are the following books:

Freaks, Geeks & Asperger Syndrome: A User Guide to Adolescence by Luke Jackson tops the list as I’m attending an Autism Spectrum Disorders Certificate Program next week (full days Mon-Thurs) and had to choose a book from an approved-book-list to read……….and report on next Thursday, of course. I’m excited about the program and about the book, so it’s not a chore by any means to dig into this!

Outliers: The Story of Success: Malcolm Gladwell

This one’s for my Administration grad course - my task was to choose a book on leadership, and this one popped up on the “hey, you can choose one of these recommended ones!” list provided by the professor. Another one I really wanted to read anyway, so having to read some Gladwell (and do a 10 page paper on it) won’t do me any lasting damage. It might take away from my cozy-mystery-with-a-happy-ending reading pile, but that’s the peril associated with LEARNING. It will definitely take me back to my wanna-be-MBA-reading-Tipping-Point days, too……….