Sunday, February 15, 2009

chapter 3 blog

The reading and writing process is crucial to students excelling. These are skills that students use everyday as a child and as an adult. Readers read for different purposes and the way they approach the reading process according to the purpose. Almost everybody calls for a balance between pleasure and informative reading. There are several features of the writing process. I myself find that I go through most of these stages. Stage 1 is pre-reading, this is where you build background knowledge for the book-you just don't jump in and start reading it, you get a feel for how the book is. Stage 2 is reading, it can be shared, guided, independent, buddy or read aloud reading. This is where you actually read the book. Stage 3 is responding to the book. This can be where you ask questions, write in a journal, have a big conversation, or do an activity. Stage 4 is exploring. This can be where you re read certain sections of the book, focus on new vocabulary words, or do a little mini-lesson. The final stage is applying. This can be research, projects or handouts. The writing process consist of pre-writing, which is where you brainstorm on what your going to write about. Next is drafting, this is the part where you do a rough draft, but you don't really concentrate on the mechanics, but on the content. Revising is next, and you reread the paper or have another person read it. Editing is the 2nd to the last stage and it is the final editing part. This is where you search for mechanical errors and make all the final changes you want. Finally it's publishing, this is where everybody can read what you wrote.
Throughout all my years of school up until now, I have always gone through this process, especially in high school and in my college English classes this is the process that all the teachers followed. I remember my senior English class, we concentrated on this book for about 9 weeks. He gave us the background information on Beowulf we talked about what we thought it would be about, and how hard of a book it is to read. Then we read the book very slow so we could all get what was going on and stopped in the hard parts so we could really understand what was going on. Then once we were done reading it, we did a really weird project on it. Then we re-read the hard parts and did activities on those parts also. Finally after I was so tired of this book we had to do this really big research project-really big! Little did I know that he was taking us through a process that will help us understand this book and remember what it is about.
For the writing process, I still follow that. And it proved to be very helpful when I did my my research project for the book Beowulf. Let's just say reading that book and doing all the activities took a really really long time.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Chapter 4 blog

Emergent literacy is how children learn to read and write. As future teachers we have to make learning and reading fun, by incorporating interactive writing and educational activities. Children are constantly emerging and learning new stuff everyday.
One of the major points in this chapter is that both reading and writing have 3 stages: Emergent, beginning, and fluent. In emergent reading children gain an understanding of the communicative purpose of print, another words they recognize that words in a book are just words they actually mean something. Also, in this stage children can predict all or most of a book after they have memorized the pattern. When I taught the pre-k class at my daycare for a week while their teacher was out, I was real surprised that the children knew what was going to happen before I even turned the page. I later came to the realization that their normal teacher reads this book to them everyday. A way to incorporate this in the classroom is to find books that can be easily memorized with repeated sentences, rhymes. They help children learn sequence and predictability. In the beginning stage, the foundation that they have made in the emergent stage is applied in this stage. Children learn phoneme-grapheme correspondences and begin to decode words. In the fluent stage, children have learned to read, they recognize words automatically and decode words they don't know quickly. Most students should reach this stage by third grade.
The Language Experience Approach is based on children's language and experiences. Children dictate words and sentences about their experiences, and the teacher takes down the dictation for them and the text they develop becomes the reading material. I can see how this can help a child and also see where it can discourage a child. It helps the child put their thoughts on paper and be able to see it and not just think it and on the other hand by the teacher doing the writing the child may not want to do their own writing because the teacher's writing is per say "perfect" as opposed to their"kid writing" or since the teacher is doing the writing the child may get use her doing it and not want to do their own writing themselves. Also practice makes perfect so if the child keeps practicing writing they will continue to get better. You can incorporate this into the classroom is by asking the child about a certain experience, write down the experience and read it aloud as the child becomes familiar with the text and can read it themselves. My personal experience with this approach is again when I taught my class at daycare, they got so used to me writing for them they didn't want to do it themselves.