Literacy in the classroom

     I observe a lot of literacy while I am in the classroom, during the time I am there the students have writers workshop and story time. My CT puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of writing, every assignment the students do has to contain a complete sentence at the end explaining what they did. Right now my CT is trying to get the students to wrote in complete sentences so she has stars all over the room which represent the different parts of a complete sentence. Every day the students have to spend at least 45min writing in the writers journals about a topic of their choice. They also have story time at the end of the day where my CT reads to the whole class, and during independent work the students are encouraged to read on their own. The students in the classroom are 1st and 2nd graders so many of them are beginning readers and writers.
     While reading over our Literacy definitions we all agreed that literacy contains reading and writing but that it is also much more. The majority of us also mentioned things such as vocabulary, phonology, communication, forms of print, etc. I noticed that a lot of us used to terms learned from TE301. I think it is our experiences from that class as well as our other TE classes that influenced our definitions and caused them to be similar.