The readings for week three discuss different groups of children that at some point throughout our teaching careers we will all be teaching. The article I would like to discuss is called Strategies for Developing Literacy in an Urban Setting. The group of children discussed in this article are from urban schools that come from low socio-economic homes. I found this article particularly interesting because they discuss the challenges and strategies that are necessary to successfully teach reading to students in urban schools. I relate to this article because I have volunteered in several Lansing public schools, which is an urban district. This semester I am in a kindergarten classroom in Lansing public schools where my students are learning how to read, so I can relate to several topics discussed in this article.
The first topic is the impact of poverty on teaching and learning. This is very relevant in my kindergarten class because one of my students is homeless and several students get their food for the weekend from a program that was set up by the school. This program sends home a backpack full of non-perishable food items, so the students have food to eat for two days. The students that qualify for this program are the students who also receive free school lunches. If I would have not experienced some of these situations in my kindergarten classroom I would have been blindsided as a first year teacher. My coordinating teacher says it is important to try and give kids what they need because for some students school is where they get a roof over their head and their only meal. My teacher looks in the lost and found and good will for coats, snow pants, boots, sweatshirts, etc. for students who can’t afford these item, so they can still play outside in the snow. One quote of the article that caught my eye was, “…balance--how one attempts to address children’s physical and emotional needs while also getting to the task of teaching and learning.” I think this is important to think about for any teacher because we have to take into account the students home life and incorporate this into how we teach these students.
Another issue that this article discusses is the lack of resources in urban schools. The article suggests that many teachers spend a lot of their own money on their classroom and that new teachers should expect to do this frequently throughout their career, especially in schools that have limited resources. My coordinating teacher has also commented on how she spends a lot of money on her classroom. She buys books, crayons, stickers, notebooks, blocks, etc. Her philosophy is that if she thinks it will be beneficial to her student’s learning then she does not mind buying it. The article gives good advice when it suggests that beginning teachers put money away for their first classroom because they will end up spending a lot of their own money.
The last aspect discussed in the article was a situation where teachers are working with students who are at variety of literacy levels. This scenario puzzled me and has opened my eyes to the variety of teaching strategies I still need to learn in order to teach readers of different levels. The article warns beginning teachers of the range of students that they will encounter in their classrooms. My teacher splits up her students into five different reading groups and does reading centers at least once a day, so she works with each group at least once a week. The article discusses how urban schools have a lack of resources for struggling or special education students. This is frustrating to me because I think all schools should have the resources to help students who are struggling the most instead of pushing the to the back. This article has opened my eyes about how lucky I am to have an experience in an urban school, so I have the background knowledge to teach students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
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