As I began to reflect on my capstone project, I found myself focusing on both the growth of my students as well as the growth I made as a teacher.  I realized that not only did we all grow in the area of curriculum, but we were also able to gain insight on best practices advocated by the district, 21st century skills, and the five core propositions.              

        My district's mission statement emphasizes the collaboration between families and educators to create a challenging and enriching learning environment to help students become responsible citizens and lifelong learners.  To meet the goal of challenging learners, I chose to enrich the district provided reading curriculum in a way that challenged student learning.  Students were encouraged to think beyond the text and begin to analyze the stories they were hearing. Higher level thinking was required in order to create an illustration to depict the story elements being studied each week.     

        While analyzing the data, I first saw that students were able to identify the studied story elements at the end of each week; however, the skills did not necessarily transfer from week to week.  For example, when retelling the story “Abuela,” all students were able to identify the setting because we had studied setting during the week.  The next week, however, not all students identified the setting of the story during their retelling.  I saw this again while studying character and cause and effect.  At the end of each week students were able to identify the focus element but not others.  

        Secondly, I saw a correlation between the genre of the weekly story and student success.  After reading fiction stories, students’ average retelling were higher than the scores after reading fiction stories.  The exception to this correlation is the book “Abuela.”  Even though this is a fiction story, each page included Spanish vocabulary which was new to the students.  This correlation also showed me that story elements were much easier for the students to identify in fiction stories.

        Another reflective thought I had while evaluating my data was that my evaluation techniques may not have all be the most effective.  The research suggested that a beneficial way to evaluate retelling proficiency was by creating story clause checklists.  These lists include each individual clause from all of the stories we read and I checked each clause off as the student retold that part of the story.  The idea behind the checklist is that students were not provided questions that could help them come up with an answer.  The story clause checklist gave me an idea of what my students were retaining; however, it did not seem very developmentally appropriate for the kindergarten level.  My students were able to recall a low percentage of the clauses from each story.  I feel I would have gotten more insight from asking questions about each story element.

        While implementing this project, I also became aware of the many 21st century skills my students were developing. Many of these skills involved the students learning to create together.  In order to analyze the weekly stories and search for story elements, students had to think critically. The students then had to work to communicate these ideas in the form of a text map. In addition to demonstrating their knowledge with text maps, the students also had to communicate key ideas and story elements to me as they retold the story at the end of the week.  Each retelling showed me many of my students were able to retain the focus element from the week.  The text maps helped to move students from a shallow knowledge of the text to a deeper understanding.  This helped students with unfamiliar terminology such as the words character and setting.

        While implementing this project, I have seen growth in my students as well as myself.  As I’ve reflected on the work I have done and its relation to the five core propositions, I noticed an undeniable connection.  I feel I now have a much better understanding of what my responsibilities as they relate to my students and their daily learning.  I spent time exploring the curriculum, and I was able to understand it deeper than I had before.  By doing this, I saw my reading instruction change for the better.  I knew what was being asked of me as a teacher and what I should be expecting from my students.  It has encouraged me to take the time to really study all provided curriculum to ensure my instruction is the best it can be.

        In addition to learning what kindergarten reading expectations are from the district curriculum, I also learned what to realistically expect from closely monitoring my students learning.  While reflecting on my students weekly station work, I realized when I challenged my students to create their own text map they were able to show me fantastic examples they created on their own.  The weeks when students were not given a teacher sample of the text map were the weeks I saw my students begin conversations with one another about the story elements and create images of their own.  On the weeks when students were given a teacher example from the same story, I often saw exact replicas of what I had already created.  By monitoring my students work I was able to see that they could perform at a higher level when given less direct modeling of the weekly activity.  Without monitoring their work, I would have continued to show example after example assuming they would create a piece on their own that was different than the piece I had already created.

        Overall, I saw many areas of growth in my students as well as myself.  Although the end results of the study were not what I anticipated, I saw my students begin to gain familiarity with story elements and develop new comprehension strategies.   I also grew as a reflective teacher.  I was able to experience the importance of gaining familiarity with the curriculum as well as challenging my students and helping them reach their fullest potential.

        After implementing this research I see several changes I can make to my classroom in upcoming years.  I do not feel it is necessary to create a station dedicated to the story of the week and the story element associated with it.  While the students had fun listening to the audiotape version of each weeks story, I would have liked to have done the comprehension activities as a whole group.  I feel this would have lead to further discussion and explanation of the skills.

        Additionally, I would have liked to implement this project throughout the whole year and be more selective and purposeful about the stories I use to teach each story element.  After looking at the data and seeing how my students scored higher on fiction texts, I would like to use only fiction texts when doing the text mapping.  I feel this would help my students better understand what each story element means because they have a better overall understanding of the story.