Contextual Factors

Fifth Grade Students

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The group of fifth of graders that Im teaching consists of a total of 13 students, 4 girls and 9 boys. The graph below depicts the ratio of male to female students among this particular group of fifth grade students.
Figure 1

Student Gender Profile

4 Male 9 Female

All of these students are registered to be of the White race. One student, although White, is a citizen of Great Britain. All of the students speak English as their native language and there are no second languages among them. The student from Great Britain has a heavy accent and can be hard to understand, but his English proficiency, fluency and comprehension is on grade-level.
Figure 2 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 English Spanish Mandarin

Students

Figure 2 is a visual representation showing that among the other languages that are present in the entire schools fifth grade population, our class only represents the English language.

Exceptionalities among these students range from high-ability learners (HAL) to struggling learners. There are two students who have been tested and accepted into the HAL program at the elementary school and one student who is borderline upon acceptance, needing only a 3% higher pass score. For these three students who have general academic strengths, I expect that they go the extra mile and ask questions, think abstractly and motivate/support the other students. By this time of year, all of my students know I expect this of them and know that I am well equipped in my lesson plans to ask leading questions, provoke a discussion and/or suggest an alternative if needed. Extensions to projects and conscious grouping are also things I can provide to accommodate these students. Depending on the lesson, I may have the HAL kids work as a team or as a team leader with others. Assessments for my HAL students are generally modified by having more openended questions rather than multiple choice or short answer. These three students and another of my on-level students particularly love short research projects and so a structured outline has to be turned in to me for this request and if approved, they can use free time to create a project/essay to present to the class and display. Among my students, there is one who receives reading interventions for fluency and comprehension and another student who has an exceptionally hard time staying on task. The student who receives reading interventions twice a week struggles in reading comprehension and writing. He is new to the school this year, but we have seen major improvements in his fluency and comprehension. His writing skills are slowly developing, but scaffolding is being used on a daily basis to help him write cohesive

sentences. He is a reading tutor to a first grade student and is accommodated with sentence starters, asked to read his work aloud before submitting. We also have this student try and avoid worrying about his spelling until he gets his thoughts down on paper. Editing comes after his sentences are written. At the beginning of the year we allowed this student to use bullet points or lists to answer questions, then required simple sentences at least and now he is writing complex sentences for short answer questions, although his conventions are still needing some attention. Although there are not any students on the WIDA scale or who speak any other language, I have been able to, and plan to still use elements from the SIOP model to help in the development of language and reading development. When planning my lessons in consideration of language development, I first determine an appropriate language objective that builds upon previous objectives, hoping to focus on at least one modality, while embedding as many language modalities as possible. This has been good practice for when I have English Language Learners in the future. Having a student from Great Britain requires some sensitivity and multicultural perspective, some subjects more than others (American History). I will ask if theres an alternative tradition, or vocabulary term for what Im teaching versus what he may have been used to in England. For example, when measurement or capacity references arise, this student likes that he can easily convert metric to the U.S. customary measurements easily. I try to bring in the perspective of other cultures or beliefs for opportunities of higher order thinking and discussion. Asking my students to conjecture why someone would choose to act in a particular way and providing activities that require my students to work from someone elses point of view are a couple examples of how I can be

culturally responsive. Although, our classroom may not be the most diverse, it is just one room in a school that has created an environment where ALL the students are a part of a whole. Our school as a whole is rich with diversity and is a Chinese dual immersion school. Many of my fifth graders know and take responsibility for the younger students and this dynamic is a productive reference for enriching the curricula in a multicultural way. I am able to refer to certain races of people, socio-economic statuses, mindsets, etc and draw upon some bit of connection that I know these students have witnessed or know of. The sub-groups that I will be focusing on for my analysis of this science unit are one student from each the female, HAL and students who need reading intervention. I will try to accommodate their needs throughout the six lessons in order for the summative data to show that they have progressed along with my other students.