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.
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Hey Amanda!
ReplyDeleteI find your classroom very interesting, not being able to spell is quite the dilemma. It's a shame the students' teacher doesn't take spelling more seriously, but I know that sometimes we can take what a teacher says and does out of context. I worked in a fifth grade resource room last Spring and the teacher didn't care about spelling as much either. The students in my class had several literacy issues, but my teacher always maintained that spelling was the farthest from her mind. She taught students to develop their genres, plot summaries, concepts and ideas, and reading/fluency and such. Although, she still had spelling tests and rewards.
Also, I think it is cool what you were saying about students getting their parents to do hw, can you explain that a little more?
In the article, it said that the teacher had the parents write a letter about their student and that the students' only homework for that weekend was to make sure that their parents did the homework. The teacher said that she got a great response from the parents, the students loved the assignment, and she got to learn a lot about both the students and the parents much earlier on in the year.
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