Basics with Mrs. Brown

Reading Fundamentals and How We Teach Them for EDUC-5333-W1-Digital Storytelling

Hi! I’m Mrs. Brown.

This blog is a work in progress being created for a course in my masters program at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

I originally was going to name it Brown’s Basics to keep it simple. Yet, it’s not always a short and simple road to teaching the basic fundamentals. It’s my goal with this blog to give a framework to help simplify a way to reach students that aren’t reading on grade level.

Another reason I couldn’t name this blog Brown’s Basics is because that infers the info found here are all my ideas, processes and instructional methods for developing strong readers. That’s not the case! What it will become is a compilation earned from a quarter of a century of classroom experience, so many workshops that I’ve lost count, stacks of books I’ve dog eared until they resemble a yard sale discard pile, and late nights searching the web looking for ways to help those kiddos that just need a little something more than your average basal textbooks (which is all students in my opinion).

Reading Fundamentals and How We Teach Them for EDUC-5333-W1-Digital Storytelling

Future Buttons
Another Future Button

A little trip down memory lane in the form of yearbook pics.

Mira De Wilde

Installation Artist

Jonas Richter

Don’t laugh. These were taken around the time most of you were entering kindergarten. Probably. They were in the first tote I pulled from storage and my assignment is due in two days.

TT

Zubair Khan

They will be replaced with actual students and instructional ideas as this blog progresses. One of our articles said to use Photoshop so I did.

Maiko Tanaka

Lambert (2010) gives a lot of pointers for PhotoShop (yes, these are cropped to 4:3 ratio), scanners, video editors, and soundtracks if you’ve never used such programs and need a little help.

My biography:

This was a heading that I didn’t want to delete in case I couldn’t figure out how to get it back on here.

Yep, another requirement of the assignment so here we go…

As blasted across the cover page, I’m Mrs. Brown.

I’m a retired teacher turned property manager on the best river in Oklahoma, Mountain Fork. I’m heading back to college to finish my masters in reading education just in case I ever decide to head back to the classroom and this is my very first course. Plus, I started my masters in 1999 and I figure it’s high time I finished it.

I taught for almost 25 years. I did everything from self contained severe/profound classrooms to high school geometry. If you’ve ever taught in a small school, you get it. You have to go where they need you the most, but my heart always belonged in first grade which is where I spent the majority of my teaching career.

I’m so excited to share the things I saw with my very own eyes that worked in reading instruction. I was really good at it. Honestly.

Hopefully, this blog will help you in some way. I hope it will become a resource for teachers that the lady in those photos above would have loved to have had at her fingertips. I did not even have access to the internet my first go ’round in college and look at me now creating my very own blog!

Can’t wait to fill these buttons with actual important things!

what type of story will I tell?

Digital Story Telling

There are several types of digital storytelling including personal narratives, historical documentaries, and stories that inform or instruct (Kubravi, 2018). I decided to do something to inform and instruct and can maybe turn this into a real resource for colleagues.

At the very least, this blog can help teachers become more cognizant of struggling readers’ level of mastery and start to address and correct those areas.

Is it going to be a one stop shop to teaching reading? Gosh, no! More like a space to turn to and give some insight and resources I wish I had 30 years ago.

References:

Kubravi, S. et al. (2018). Digital Story Telling: The Impact on Student Academic Achievement, Critical Thinking and Learning Motivation.

International Journal of Research in Engineering, Science and Management, 1(12).

Lambert, J. (2010). Digital Storytelling Cookbook. San Francisco, CA. Digital Diner Press

**I know these don’t have a hanging indent, but I spent almost an hour researching how to do a hanging indent and no luck and it kept going back to justified no matter how many times I manually tried to indent. Maybe I can change this in the future to a true APA style.

On a more serious note, I do have things I hope to accomplish with this blog. I hope to give some insights into small groups, the sequential steps of reading readiness skills, understanding and using data from the testing the districts require of us, and creating reading units centered around our favorite children’s books.

Leave your comments, questions, ideas or thoughts here!