End Of Course Assignment: Poverty And Achievement Gaps

Taylor Newman

Mrs. Laura Welsh

1st Grade

Shawnee Elmwood- Shawnee City Schools

January 29, 2018

End- of Course Assignment

For my end of course project, I decided to work with a group of 5 children who are falling behind in reading. Each child had a slightly different reason for falling behind. For example child one has a slight speech impediment. Child two has dyslexia. One thing I learned was that poverty and achievement gaps are a huge issue in today's education. After knowing this, it came present that there are a few students in my classroom that struggle in school due to poverty and achievement gaps. During seminar, we spoke about,”Children who grow up in low socioeconomic conditions typically have a smaller vocabulary than middle-class

Before each chapter for every chapter, we have them take a pretest that shows what they already know. From this information, each child in my classroom is put into a groups depending on how they did for each chapter. For my project, I focused on the children who struggle with reading. Each week every student would get a new set of flashcards to practice depending on their reading level. For the students I work with, they are extremely behind on learning words. In result, every morning during morning work, I pull each of these selected students individually to my table and go over their personal flashcards to help them them learn the sight words they need to succeed and catch up with the rest of their class and grade. Some of the students I see have trouble with reading fluently and smoothly. For these students they also have papers that have reading selections in them. Children from low-income families hear, on average, 13 million words by age 4. In middle-class families, children hear about 26 million words during that same time period. In upper- income families, they hear a staggering 46 million words by age 4—three times as many as their lower-income counterparts (Hart & Risley, 1995). This is shown a lot during my field placement. This is a main reason why

This causes stress on the teachers and other students because we can’t go further with each lesson when many of the students are behind. This causes the students to not learn more and the teachers to get behind in their lesson plans. The issues, assets, resources, and cultures differ from what I experienced as a high school student are huge. In my high school experience, each students in grades 6 to 12 was given a chromebook or ipad to help learn and improve classroom lessons. From grades K to 5 they also had chromebooks that they could use. Shawnee has classroom laptops that they share between other classes. Another is that shawnee has science as a “special” which they have once a week while we had everyday. As a school professional, I see as my role in addressing these issues by helping each student with the mentioned flashcards and taking time to make sure each child is learning in a way they