Video of Ms. Owen

What an amazing video! I was truly inspired by the teacher Ms. Owen, and the way she created a true reading/writing culture in her classroom. Ms. Owen integrated the idea of gradual release of responsibility so well. She starts with reading activities, and writing activities, and slowly leads her students to independence. What I found I learned most from hearing from Ms. Owen is that she says that although sometimes when she reads to the class, or they are being guided to read, some students are not yet able to follow along fully. Yet, she tries to have a discussion with her students, regarding the topic they are reading about. This creates a relevance between the reading the students are doing, and real life. Students feel motivated and connected to reading when they find connection! And this way, as Ms. Owen says, her goal is to get students to love to read! She infuses in her students a willingness and excitement to read and discover, and this is always so much more effective than just having students read or write because now is the time and so on...
Ms. Owen teaches her ELL students through gradual integration. She begins singing the good morning song in Spanish as well as English, which makes the students feel safe to express words in both languages, as well as gives them more vocabulary words in the English language. She also uses visual aid for the ELL students, such as putting red 'A's in on the board in a few words, so that they can clearly see the alphabet in the words. Ms. Owen also does a few reading activities every day, and guides her students to independent learning. Because the students gradually become more independent in their reading, they can learn lots of new vocabulary words along the way, and they get the right amount of scaffolding necessary to guide them to better language.