Readings

I really enjoyed the Leland article, "Out of the Box". It is a good article to think about when approaching the issue of reading books on tough social issues with young children. I feel like many people make assumptions about younger children. The Leland article focused on a classroom of first graders. Their responses to literature on social issues was surprising to me. For my placement I am in a kindergarten class and I might not think to introduce something a book like "Out of the Box" to them so young, but this article showed me that children are more capable of understanding than I might think. This article made me realize how important it is to think about the culture of your classroom and the culture of each individual student. Depending on those factors, these types of text may need to be approached differently. In the classroom in the article, reading books about social issues really stuck with the students. They went from being competitive in the food drive to realizing the purpose behind it and the good deed they were doing. This exposure to a different culture through reading not only changed the students' attitudes, but it changed how the students interacted with each other, the quality of their writing, and how they responded to books. Reading culturally diverse books changed the students' view of books in general; they went from seeing books as a source of entertainment to looking at them critically by looking for the author's meaning and the book's intertextually. This article showed me how exposing children to culturally diverse literature and having them look at it critically impacts their reading, writing, and analyzing skills on top of changing their viewpoints which will make for more literate students. I have been in classrooms with varying diversity and dynamics. I feel that this type of critical reading and exposure to culturally diverse literature would be extremely beneficial in some cases.

I found the Cambourne article very useful. I never thought about it but Cambourne brought up in interesting point when he said that he noticed some children have a hard time learning the simplest concepts associated with reading, writing, spelling, or math but they were able to learn much more complex knowledge and skills in their everyday lives. This brought up a good point that students are more apt to learn if they are interested, motivated, believe they can learn, believe the content has value, and are not anxious. This will be very useful to me in my placement, next year, and in my future as a teacher. It is important for me to give the students a reason to learn so they realize how important it is. Also, especially for struggling students, I need to make them confident in what they do. Positively reinforce them and intermix difficult material with material the student might be good at so they do not get discouraged. It is crucial to remember how students best engage to ensure that they are learning to the best of their ability.

The Tompkins article made me realize how complex learning is. It is not all about the student or teacher and there is not one moment learning occurs. Learning is a process that involves parents, classmates, and teachers. There are many factors that must be taken into consideration when teaching to each student, such as their background knowledge, culture, parental involvement, and relationships with teachers and peers. One thing from the article that I will surely take in to my own classrooms in the future is making my classroom a community, establishing relationships and having everyone work together as a team. I liked how the article talked about combining instruction, guided practice, collaborative learning, and independent reading and writing in a balanced way to maximize learning. Varying these teaching and learning styles will help students learn to work together and independently, and also help the teacher reach different sets of students based on their learning styles. I found the eight principles of effective teaching extremely useful and they are something I will consider when making lessons and teaching in the future.