I enjoy the opportunity to read about and view classrooms that are rich in good discussion. It is such a different dynamic from a lot of the classroom I remember as a young learner. I know that this blog is for 3rd grade but it turns out my placement is a second grade classroom. (As a side note: I still overall want to teach third graders once I am out in the real world) My CT has done a great job establishing a classroom rich in dialogue between teacher and student and also between peers. The other day was a great example of that. The CT read the class the book Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting. He then told them that they would be revisiting this book the next day and asked if there were any questions that we can try to answer after reading it a second time. I was so impressed with how many hands shot up and how involved they became in the story. The CT wrote every question down on the whiteboard. As one question would be written down it would lead another student to think of a new question. After everyone had their questions recorded he reminded them that these are all questions that we are going to try to answer next reading period. I’m excited to see where the discussion is going to go during the answer section. It appears that he has a well established norm in his classroom regarding classroom discussion. He did not have to offer many reminders to stay on task and the kids seemed to know what their expected roles were.

I looked through the syllabus to try to get an idea about what my goals will be for this course and I admit I was a little overwhelmed. There is so much information about literacy to cover and so little time in the semester. The first thing that came to mind was I hope that I can gain the insight on how to create balance between various learning styles in a classroom. There is a constant worry for me that there will be learners that I will leave out. I also worry that because as a learner I was able to be successful in a "traditional" style of learning ,I will easily fall into uninspiring habits. I also want to become confident in my abilities to support ELLs and other diverse learners through my lesson plans and also with proper school and community resources. I read the course pack readings before posting this so there was another goal I wanted to add. I hope to have a better understanding of effective strategies dealing with codeswitching. I wonder what impact this will have on other subject areas. I also hope that we touch on some strategies for challenging gifted students as well.

Week 2 Post-Classroom Talk

I have been witnessing a lot of different 'classroom talk' within my third grade classroom. Last week in class our CT told the students they couldn't use certain words in their writings, because he considered them "dull" and knew the students could challenge their use of vocabulary. Every week he eliminates more and more words the students can't use, forcing them to pull out their thesaurus' and explore. He eliminates words like big, small, said, etc. This week when I went to field the students were reading their chapter books as a class related to their social studies lesson on the civil rights movement and when asked to describe a character from the book one child actually raised her hand and described the character as "obstinate". I could tell she was picking up a wider vocabulary and our CT praised her on this immediately!

By setting some ground rules in the classroom, our CT has developed a greater level of learning to take place within his classroom. Our CT has students writing books every two weeks that they spend much time creating, editing, illustrating, and then presenting to the class. He has students read chapter books allowed to one another as well as read to by himself every day. They students have come to accept reading time and writing as a privileged, something fun to do! This shared sense of passion for reading and writing leads to students learning a more varied and diverse 'classroom talk'. 

I think above all in order to scaffold students to encourage them to share, you need to show them that they can have fun in an accepting and self-expressive, care-free environment. They students of my third grade classroom have built a safe community together and enjoy sharing. Although there are some students more reluctant to share than others, this reluctance in combatted by an unwavering sense of acceptance and praise.

Week 1 Post-My Goals

My goals for this course are undetermined for now, I feel as though I have just dipped my feet in the water and I am not even sure where this course will take me. I think throughout more time spent in the class I will be able to develop goals for this course and the direction I want my learning to take place in. Most of all I think I am just excited to be back with such an amazing group of people, our class really worked well and challenged one another last semester so I am excited to be working together again. I hope above all, from this course, that I learn to integrate Language Arts effectively and learn to encourage students to enjoy Language Arts.

week 2 post

I am really excited to have this literacy course this semester because my third grade class that I am in this year is basically illiterate. They cannot read words such as, "is" and "her" (nor can they spell them), and they use words and phrases such as, "ain't" and "I don't got". I spoke to the teacher about her thoughts on her students' lack of spelling skills (but I did not put it that harshly) and she said that she does not really care about her students' spelling. I found this to be terrible. These kids are nine years old and they cannot even spell the word "is"! I am really excited to learn new ways to teach my students how to spell and how to sound out words (they were never taught how to do this until I came around), and I want to learn new ways about how to get them excited to learn how to spell and read. Another thing that scares me about these students is that, the way that their school works, is that they will only be in elementary school for one more year and then they go off to junior high. That means that, unless they have an awesome fourth grade teacher who really cares about their students spelling skills, they will go into junior high not knowing how to spell anything!

With a lot of the reading that I did about ELLs, it made me think about a lot of the information that I have learned about how to teach special education students. The main thing about teaching both of these groups of people, and technically, ELLs are considered special education students, the key is individulization and variation.

I did really like, though, how in one of the articles that the teacher had the parents write letters about their children and all that the children had to do for homework was to make sure that their parents did their homework. I think that I would like to do something like this with my students in the future.

After reading through the syllabus, my goal for this course is to become more familiar with the Language Arts curriculum in Michigan, and to gain practice assessing learners of various writing and reading levels. I am looking forward to learning about different teaching styles that can be used in language arts so that I can accommodate all of my students in the future. Throughout grade school in language arts classes, our curriculum would consist of reading a book and reflecting on it. I'm interested to learn how to teach a more engaging language arts class while covering the necessary standards.

Chapter 1 of the Gibbons text reminded me of one of the students in my field placement, Kelly*. She was born in the U.S. but her parents speak nothing but Spanish at home. Kelly* speaks fluent English and Spanish, but she has a difficult time with reading and writing. Her parents are illiterate in English so Kelly* doesn't have any support at home for reading and writing. I worked with her last semester because I took TE 301 and 401 concurrently, so I am going to continue working with her this semester to assess and scaffold her learning and progress.