Reading Levels

Science articles, textbooks, journal articles are very difficult to read. And many students struggle with them; I even struggle with them as well. So I have started reading Science Journal Articles with my Chemistry students. They have a difficult time at the beginning but it seems to get easier and easier as they keep progressing. I am coming to a road block, since I don’t teach reading I am having a difficult time teaching it. Journal articles are tough, have large words, and most words I might not even know what they mean.
I am having the students go thru sentence by sentence trying to figure out what is happening, then what is the general idea of the paragraph, etc. Is there a better way to teach this? My first article of the year is about methane gas turning into a product we can use instead of petroleum. The students understand this because they have heard this in the news for many years. So far in the article they have understood what the authors want to accomplish, a little of the history, and what they want to do for the future. Since the article was written in 1998 a lot has been done since then.
So I am trying to teach my science students how to read a more advanced writing, does anyone have any input to how I can accomplish it? I think I have been doing a good job so far, but with it being so technical, and advanced I would like some help.

Tardies

We had a staff meeting the other day regarding tardies in the classroom. Many students are tardy continuously to my 1st hour class. They all have passes from the office, but I don’t know what to do regarding them. Today I even saw one student in the lunch room eating breakfast, and then he showed up late with a pass from the office. So I knew he was here in time to eat breakfast but he still was late to class. I just don’t get how students think.
I understand if there ride is late, or had a doctor’s appointment. But I get the excuse that they had to walk to school (just leave earlier), or that they overslept (make sure a parent wakes them up). I am starting to get sick of the excuses.
I give out detention for the students who are tardy 3 times, but the problem is they don’t show up to detention. And as a teacher I don’t know if they showed up or not, so I start over on their 3 tardies once again.
There has to be a better system. Some teachers make the students stand for the remainder of the class period (or for a great length of it), and some assign detention with the teacher themselves. I have started to lock the door when the bell rings. So the student has to stay in the hallway till I am ready for them to come into the classroom. The main problem I have with this is that today alone I had 6 students tardy, and coming to class at all different times of the hour. There has to be a better system. Most of my classes are great, just my first hour has been puzzling me. Maybe it is because it is an Applied class, but then I feel sorry for the students who actually come to class on time and keep getting distracted and disrupted with the students coming in tardy.
Any ideas on how to fix / solve this problem?? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

(August) JigSaw 102,010 years of Bead History

The snow is covering the ground and it's long overdue for my first official blog post. It's not that I haven't been working on my professional goal - I have - and I continue to work on it every week and it's always in the back of my mind and always in my reflection notes from my lesson plans. However, with all the preps this year, I'm focusing on stellar lesson preparation which eats up most of the hours in which I'm awake and leaves very little time for typing up those notes I wrote down in the first place. So here it goes and welcome to reading!

My professional goal for this year is to focus on incorporating literacy strategies in my classroom (trying at least one for a new unit/month). This year I'll be working with the ladies in my department at the JH to integrate reading strategies into our FACS curriculum. (On a side note: I am utterly disappointed in the amount of resources FACS teacher have at their disposal. There are speciality books (SIOP, reading strategies, lesson plan ideas, etc.) for almost every discipline expect for the Career & Technical Education folks. It's like book publishers don't think we do anything but sew and cook! Yes, all of the standard books are applicable but it's disappointing to see resource books for ALL but our content area out there).

My first goal: to help my student better understand the history and meaning of beads throughout the world. Throughout history and for thousands (more correctly, HUNDREDS of thousands) of years, beads have served various purposes to people. In search of an encyclopedia of bead history, I went to the public library seeking just that - any and all books that would not only educate me better on the topic but be useful to my students. I wanted to find something that wasn't too long in length but was descriptive and rich in history. Well, out of the 10+ books I checked out, I found one that definitely did the job. Only problem - it was 396 pages, an amount that was a bit much for a semester course. It is called "The History of Beads: from 100,000 BC to present". I read much of the book and since it wasn't my book, marked it up with many post-its of essential information to our course - trying to figure out what was most important. After reading other materials, I decided that I would settle on 7 areas of the world that students would investigate to help them better understand the role beads served in societies around the world. I labored through color coded each country keeping in mind I have a few EL's in my class and a handful of students with lower reading scores. At this point, it might be helpful to know that I seat students according to their reading scores in my classroom, Low(L), Low-Medium(LM), Medium-High(MH), High(H) - Kagen Strategies. I do not seat Low's next to High's because I want the opportunity to say "turn to your shoulder partner and...." and the ability levels between L and H is just too great and might provide frustration. Depending on a student's reading level, I gave them an appropriate section from the book. Those who were lower reading levels, received a more brief section (3 or 4 paragraphs v. 5 or 7) which I purused for difficult language.

• I introduced the materials and reviewed the Content and Language objectives with the students. I handed out the readings according to their reading levels. I told them they could write questions or highlight the sheets as they needed but they needed to come up with the 3 main points of their section.
• I got them into their same colored paper groups and had them come up with as a group, the top three points and see if they had any questions as a group.
• Rather than having students, go back into smaller groups - I have one student in the group report back to the classroom by writing their main points on the board and then explaining them to the class.
• After each group had gone, I then went through my notes of what I thought were the key points in each section. Many of the students mirrored my own summary of the information.

I think this was a useful strategy in this particular case. When we don't have an endless amount of time in the classroom to cover 102,000+years of history, we've got to adapt. Jigsaw is perfect for that. However, I feel like I can always do more. I'm rarely satisfied with anything unless it's gone through a few different renditions. Maybe next time, for review, I could have students play pictionary in small groups or something more hands-on to piggy back off the literacy strategies.