Our Learning Lives

In Routman's book Reading Essentials, at the end of chapter two she tells a story of a dear friend who enjoyed life, ending with how her friend reminds her how "important it is to celebrate our learning lives." I want to be constantly celebrating and showing my learning life to my students. Whether we are doing science or art and all the other subjects in between I think it is important for students to see the joy in learning. As a teacher this means, for me, that I will need to know my students, to engage them in things of interest for them and not just do activities of interest for me. In the end students will only be life long learners if they see the joy in learning and are allowed to celebrate it in class and out of class.

Emergent Perspectives

"Even though the way in which children develop literacy strategies are different from adults they are still logical and understandable, ONCE WE TAKE THE CHILDREN'S PERSPECTIVE." This statement just emphasizes that as a teacher I need to keep an open mind and let my students development in literacy be their own. I am only a mentor, an assistant to help them develop in their literacy. It seems I am not the leader as they will naturally start to decode language at a very young age. I found this very fascinating, that just by listening to an adult make a shopping list or a story over and over again helps build literacy in a child. I wonder than how harder or more of a challenge it is for a child to become literate at home if the adults they are around are not literate? Does it affects the child at all?

I also like the idea, that stems from the aboved mention characteristic of literacy in children in my opinion, that we should teach reading and writing to all children no matter the age as literacy is a developmental skill that changes with a child. I can identify with this change in strategy as when I first went to college I became a more active reader, in highlighting, asking questions, and defining words unknown as I read which in the end led I think to better comprhension for myself.

In my main Dyad placement class, for simplification later on I'll call it Room 20, the master teacher read to the students a book and together they marked main idea pages to understand plot summary with an emphasis on just going over main events. But in the afternoon when only spanish is spoken (Room 20 is a dual language classroom), a book was read to the class but new vocabulary and phrases unknown where identified instead of a board plot summary. Though I think (if my spanish isn't too rusty) a summary was discussed a bit through out by asking questions like "what do you think will happen next?" or "Is this a problem or a solution?" These lessons in Room 20 was a specific example how learning literacy needs to fit the development of the student. If the master teacher structured the spanish lesson the same way she structured the english lesson many students may not have enjoyed the story as much due to their level of spanish. Does structuring literacy this way helps both students who are strong in spanish but lower in english or vice versa to develop their literacy skills? Or not? I wonder how she knows one way or the other.