Reflection

This project has taught me a lot about the different types of literacy’s that are out there for students to learn about. I pictured literacy as merely the foundation for reading, writing, and learning from what we read and write. I now know that there a multiple forms of literacy that can come from emotion to politics and everything in-between. The literacy’s project has made me become more aware about the opportunities for learning from everyday items; for instance, you can ask students to express how they feel using emotional descriptive words. I think the single biggest area of growth that I experienced from doing this project was opening my mind to the thousands of opportunities you can have trough out the day to educated your students in the different literacy’s.

In order to have effective literacy instruction I believe you need to have the children experience the literacy’s in their natural environment and than place the label of the literacy to the experience. As a teacher you have to be committed to the idea that you want to teach about the literacy’s and reinforce the students when the display knowledge of a literacy. For instance if a student notices something culturally different between him/her and another individual you should ask the students what kind of literacy that would be and than further discuss the differences and how the apply to class/society. I believe that as a teacher you need to design your lesson around the GLECS that you want to cover but the manner in which you do that is where you can incorporate the different literacy and the different technologies.

In order for the students to have an effective time using technology you need to have commitments form the students that they will do the task involved because it is virtually impossible to monitor computer work if it is being done at home. I have found that the students really enjoy learning about new technology and they enjoy getting out of the typical classroom environment. The students would have to be familiar with a computer or the teacher will have to create a lesson about getting familiar with a computer which in and of itself might not be a bad idea because for some students a computer could be a new technology.

In the end I really enjoyed making a website and using all different forms of environmental literacy for this project. I really enjoy using technology and it often comes really easy to me so I can see myself using a lot of technology inside of my classroom next year.

literacIES

What I have come to realize through working on this project is that there is so much more to literacy learning than I had originally thought. Looking back on one of my first blogs, I wrote that "technically, I think literacy involves the understanding and application of the written and spoken word". I followed this statement by saying that literacy extends to the skills that students can be provided from an understanding of literacy. I read this post now and I realize that my thoughts on literacy were leaving a lot out. I had tried to think of literacy in a new way, but this resulted in still thinking of literacy in one way- in a very general way. Although my idea of what literacy was had grown from just "reading and writing" to also mentioning opportunity and responsibility, I was still only looking at the big picture.

Researching a new literacy, and looking at others' projects helped me to see that I was unaware of the importance of several different types of literacies. I wrote that literacy "opens doors for students", but how does it do this? If I was describing literacy only in terms of "phonetics, comprehension, fluency, etc", than how did I expect literacy to teach students about the world they were living in?

Now I know that literacy is comprised of many parts, and each part is equally important to the success of a student.

I learned from each of you, that as teachers, we need to promote and practice all different types of literacy in our classrooms.

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Using emotion words in our classroom will make our students successful "emotional literacy" learners, but will also help them to identify and manage their feelings- something crucial to their everyday life.

Teaching our students about the environment through writing and text will help them to become "environmentally literate", but will also help them to make decisions that could impact the future of our environment.

Through "cultural literacy", our students will not only strengthen their reading and writing skills, but will also learn about their own and other cultures. This is what makes students the open-minded people of tomorrow.

Using images in our classrooms will help our students understand the visual world that they live in. When our students are "visual literacy learners" they are better equipped to navigate their world, and make connections from what they learn to their lives.

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Put together, knowledge of these literacies make well-rounded, rich learning. Each literacy is important, and each literacy becomes more important when incorporated with another one.

Additionally, the project has allowed me to take my thinking of literacy a step further. I feel that I have a new appreciation for all that literacy is, and am beginning to think of ways that I will promote all of the literacies into my classroom. The projects gave great examples of how to do so, and will be wonderful resources to use when planning to teach literacy in a future classroom.

Literacy project reflection blog

When I walked into this literacy class I thought of literacy as reading and writing. In a classroom I always thought of teachers teaching literacy through reading to a class and having them complete a written response to assess their comprehension. I never thought about teaching literacy through the literacy topics we discussed in class. When I explored my own project on cultural literacy, I learned how I can teach my students about different cultures. I even learned that cultural literacy is more than just cultures like Asian American, Mexican American, African American, etc. Through my project I learned that it is beneficial to teach children about different cultures such as the down syndrome community and autistic community because many students will encounter a student with a disability at least one year in school.
At this point in the year I am thinking like an educator. Whenever we discuss topics in class around the idea of literacy development, I am constantly thinking of ways that I could create a lesson around that idea so my students stay engaged and motivated to learn. Through this course, and conferences I have attended this past semester, I have also learned about many new technologies that I can use in my classroom to provide additional resources in literacy development for students. Through our literacy projects I have learned about websites that allow a person to create scrapblogs, blogs, and even creating your own website. These resources allowed me to think about how I could use these in my classroom one day. Websites would be perfect for communication with students and parents at home and in school hours where you could provide links to websites that are beneficial to student learning. Scrapblogs can be used to present information in a very creative and eye catching way to students and parents. Finally, blogs can be used to communicate with parents in the community, and also with students as another resource for writing practice. There is just so much a teacher can do with literacy instruction. MSU has provided many classes to prepare me to break that just “reading and writing” barrier and incorporate so much more into literacy instruction for my future students.
To provide “effective literacy instruction” to diverse learners means to create a lesson around the GLCES that can be modified for all learners. Since teachers need to perform around the GLCEs they can create many different types of lessons to make sure all students are learning to their full potential. For example, if a teacher needs to teach comprehension, many lessons can be made to center on testing students’ comprehension. Teachers could have students take mini quizzes after reading and fill out charts as they read to test text to text, text to self, text to world comparisons. Teachers could also have students create a visual model to represent their book to appeal to the learners who are more hands on and can show their comprehension through art. In my 3rd grade classroom I have seen my CT use many different ways to teach and assess comprehension and spelling. She always gives her students options on projects/assignments that they can choose from to complete. My CT said that this flexibility allows for her students to choose the learning style that works best for them, but creates a little more work on the teacher. She said that in order to diversify assignments teachers need to be able to bend once in a while to make sure all here students are learning to their full potential.
If students in my 3rd grade were learning to use my technology that I explored through my literacy exploration project they would have to be familiar with using computers and accessing the internet. As a teacher I would have to bring my students to the computer lab many times before sticking them into a situation where they would have to go to a webpage and navigate through the components on the webpage. Also my students would have to be familiar with the vocabulary and words on the page in order to read and comprehend the information presented on the webpage. As a teacher I would have to make sure my students have some information on the topics discussed on the webpage in order to make sure that they can understand the information on a computer screen. Computers are also very distracting to some students so as a teacher you would have to make sure you set ground rules on how to act in computer labs and what is appropriate behavior when working on a computer. I think it would be too difficult to have my 3rd graders create a website on their own. With 30 students in a classroom you would need more than 1 teacher helping the students navigate through the site. Therefore, students could benefit from a website already made, gaining the information directly on the site, and clicking around to see all the tabs and graphics displayed. As a teacher I could do some pre-assessments and provided my students with a good background to what the website I created was about, and then I could provide my students with a worksheet to fill out to keep the students on track and provide a way for assessment.
Using the website Weebly to create my website was very easy and fun! I never knew that creating a professional website could be so simple! I really enjoyed how the Weebly allowed me to organize my information in tabs to create an easy was to navigate through the website. I also liked how the Weebly provided me with set templates where all I had to do was type in my information and it was all set up for me. I also liked that I could insert and delete a text box or picture whenever I needed. I never thought of accessing information on the internet as a form of literacy development. I think I was just stuck in my old way of thinking that literacy is plainly just reading and writing from a text. I really enjoyed how this project challenged us to think of literacy all around us and how we as future educators can come up with creative ways to display information to our students. I think it is very important for student to use technology for literacy instruction. In today’s world, we are all on the internet. It is very important that students learn how to navigate the internet so that teachers can do lessons on website, blogs, etc. The more comfortable students are with using assistive technologies, the more creative teachers can be with there lesson playing and the more engaged students will be in the classroom.

kindergarten comprehenders

It is interesting to write think about my students as comprehenders this week because I just taught my literacy lesson in field. The lesson was based on comprehension, and I was shocked at how well all of the students did. I read the book The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle. The book is based on the life cycle of a plant, and I thought that the fact that students had to understand a brand new science concept might stand in the way of their comprehension of the story. However, every student was called on to answer a comprehension question, and every student was able to retell a part of the story. To me, this was a great accomplishment. At the end, we had students talk about their own experiences with plants. The fact that they were able to share what happened in their own life, and then tell how it was like or unlike an event in the story showed that they were able to understand the meaning of the text. I also really liked that the book was about the life cycle, because it forced us to focus on the events in chronological order. The students able to tell me what happened in the beginning, middle, and end of the text. Most surprisingly, the students made accurate predictions of what would happen next if the story continued. They were able to say that the season would be fall again, and that the seeds from the plant would turn into new plants.
I noticed a few different profiles of comprehension among the students. The majority of the students fit into the minimalist category. That is, most of them gave brief answers and only elaborated if they were pushed to. Even then, they were happier giving simple and quick answers to our questions. Other students got excited to speak, especially during the portion that asked them to reflect on their home experiences. These students went on tangents, and it sparked excitement in other students. Some of these students that volunteered were left-fielders. They got so excited to raise their hand and talk about home that they often brought up unrelated ideas. When asked to relate their experience to the text, they got confused and brought up another unrelated topic.

Struggle City

In my classroom it has been kind of difficult to see how our teacher teaches really anything since she has been out of the classroom all but two weeks. I have seen some of the ways she teaches comprehension but I have never seen her actually conduct or teach it to the students.

One of the methods she uses for comprehension is through monthly book reports. The students get to pick a book that is at their reading level or above and they have to have a one on one conference with her about the main elements of the book, plot, setting, characters, ect and anything else that interests them about the book. This activity is really hit or miss with my class either the students really enjoy doing the book reports or they do not even attempt to read a book for their reports. For the students who do read their books this is a good tool for building comprehension because it has the student recall specific points from the book.

Our substitute teacher has been teaching lessons on how to go about making flow charts that follow the progression of whatever story they happen to be reading for that week. This helps the students focus the ideas of the story and it still kind of shocks me how much students can struggle finding out the meaning of a story.

I would say that my students are mostly authors and left fielders. The majority of my classroom does not get out of a story its intended meaning rather they try to apply one or two of the story lines to their life. We have one student that if he see’s any type of sports ball he will only talk about basketball and how he wants to be a basketball player for the rest of class.

Comprehension

In my classroom comprehension is taught in many different ways. I am placed in a 3rd grade class and my teacher still uses lots of scaffolding to help her students really understand the texts they read. My teacher explained to me that she likes to use lots of variation. She does not want to bore her students with the same worksheet after they read everyday, and she also does not want to make them fill out a KWL every time they read. I really like this about my teacher because her students really never seem bored during literacy. A couple weeks ago my teacher was working on a poetry unit with her students and instead of just reading the poetry aloud as a group she created poetry groups. She split the students up into groups of 3 or four and provided them with many different techniques on how they can read poetry together as a group. She showed them how to use sticky notes to write down questions they have while they read or words that were challenging to them. She also encouraged them to create mental pictures in their minds when they read the poetry and share what the poems reminded them of in their own lives. The students loved reading Shell Silverstein because the poetry can really relate to the students’. My CT chose many authors whose poetry could relate with her third graders.

My teacher has also talked to me about how she scaffolds her students through their comprehension skills. Everyday the students have silent reading time after lunch where they pick any book in the classroom to read. I always wondered if the students were actually using their time productively because I noticed many of them reading “Where’s Waldo” books. However, today my teacher began tracking their comprehension in what they are reading everyday. My CT has her students pick from a list of different ways where they can make a T-chart or a thinking web, make text to text, text to self, text to world connections, create questions, and make mental pictures. All these techniques allow the students to follow a guide to help them monitor their own comprehension. My CT then sits with different students’ everyday to make sure they understand what there are reading and that they are using their time productively. I think that the comprehension menu that my teacher provided is a great idea for students to be able to choose what they want to focus on without forcing them to relate with something that they do not understand. I think it is also good that this menu showed the students that while you read, you can think about your own life and create pictures in your mind to test your comprehension, rather than just answering questions after reading a text.

My students are becoming better at comprehending what they are reading at this point in the year. My CT has really challenged them to stretch beyond just answering questions after they read and allowing them to be creative with their comprehending techniques. They are a lot better at comprehending when they are reading with a partner because they keep each other on task and ask each other questions. My CT is really focusing now on the independent work time where they can ask themselves their own comprehension questions. In Applegate’s text she talked about different types of learners. Many of my students are Fuzzy Thinkers and Quiz Contestants. Some of them do not report very clear observations to allow the teacher to question if they actually comprehend what they are learning. Other students are Quiz Contestants in the way that they come up with logically correct answers but they really do not make sense to what they were reading so it is hard to tell them that they are wrong. I really enjoyed Applegate’s text because I could probably relate every student in my classroom to a category she listed in her article.

Out in Left Field

My CT does a lot of think-alouds and modeling for the students in order to encourage comprehension. In addition, as she reads stories, she often makes connections to other parts of the texts or even other texts so that students can begin seeing and understanding the kind of thinking necessary for comprehension. Throughout different texts, she is always asking questions and encouraging students to become engaged in the story we are reading. My CT does not necessarily tell the students that these ways of thinking improve comprehension (at least she has never said anything about it while we are there) but I have seen some of the kids pick up on it and a few are able to make text to self and text to text connections.

Since I am in a first grade classroom and most of my students are struggling readers, I feel that the students do better with comprehension when it is a text that is either 1) read together or 2) read to the students. This way they can focus more on meaning of the text rather than on the phonological processes necessary to decode the text. However, even in our group read-alouds I was able to identify many of the different profiles that Applegate (2006) discusses in her article. Reading her article and having the discussion in class kind of brought me to an “aha” moment as I began to think about the students in my own classroom. I also found it very helpful that Applegate did not just present the different profiles but also ways to help those different students with their comprehension skills.

For the most part, I would say many of my students are left-fielders and so listening to some of the comments my classmates made about how their CT’s deal with this (i.e. making sure before you allow a student to speak that their comment/question is on topic and also giving students time right after lunch to share whatever story they want) was really helpful. I know I have always struggled with wanting to let the children share but also recognizing that their stories, while important to them, were very off-topic and were probably confusing to their classmates. Hearing ideas both from the Applegate article and from my classmates will definitely help me the next time I feel that I am struggling with keeping my students focused on the text at hand.