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.