Course Reflections

As we conclude this course on Emergent Literacy, I had the opportunity to take away a vast amount of knowledge and information about the subject due to the very nature of this course. Exposure to fellow colleagues’ internet blogs offered a wealth of rewarding, stimulating information just by reading all the unique and personal views on the subject as it pertains to the field of education. The diversified library of blogs that became my internet classroom, allowed me to obtain some great ideas and teaching techniques that I might implement in my own classroom. Acquired, useful knowledge came from reading fellow teachers’ posted personal experiences and from the vast variety of professional articles that many posted on their blog page.

In the classroom, we read articles for discussion, and were able to share information on the major areas of Emergent Literacy ranging from such topics as Phonological Awareness, Vocabulary, Word Study, Differentiation, Oral Language, and more with our rich and analytical group discussions. Since my fellow students all work in different schools, and teach different grade levels, we have had many different experiences to bring to the table and share as it relates to this major concept in literacy. Reading articles that focused on the current research and trends in emergent literacy gave me the opportunity to keep abreast on tools and techniques in teaching reading to the elementary student. Initiatives which promote Literacy are imperative to the first grade reading teacher; and the interaction within the graduate program and with the blogs of my fellow peers afforded me the awareness necessary to maintain the highest standards in teaching the young reader.

This course gave me new insights into the world of reading and solidified many of my beliefs and knowledge about teaching reading to children. It made me realize the importance of the little positive stimulants necessary to expose children to as they acquire language. Far too often we take for granted some of the simple ways in which we can allow children to explore their world and develop language. This course exposed me to innovative theorists that I had not learned much about in the past; such as Friedrich Froebel, Marie Clay, John Dewey, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Johann Pestalozzi. It was interesting to learn their philosophies and their contributions to both emergent literacy and education as a whole. As we concluded the last few classes of this program with our lesson Plan presentations, I was fortunate to obtain many new ideas and activities that I can implement in my own classroom with my students to engage them and teach them current emergent literacy concepts.

As teachers, we need to continually evolve with the recommended trends and technology to adequately teach literacy in the classroom. Our continued growth as educators depends on our own drive to keep current with research and findings on the topic. It is important that we maintain access to the many journal articles that are published daily and evaluate what seems to work best and utilize positive techniques when teaching. Success in emergent literacy is determined by the progress and development of the student. All available avenues that bring literacy success to our students are vital to the teacher. The literacy blog created through this graduate program has been a wonderful tool to share positive ideas, post research developments, listen to fellow colleagues in education, and ultimately promote literacy.

Word Study in the Classroom

After reading about word study and discussing word study in the classroom, it allowed me to reflect on my first experience using word study in a classroom setting. Two years after graduating college, I entered a school system that used Word Study as a major component to their phonics and spelling instruction. This is not something I had experienced or learned about prior to this first exposure to word study. I noticed how well the students grasped spelling patterns and became better readers because they had the opportunity to explore words. In my opinion word study is so great for students because they get to discover words in the English language as they manipulate them and compare and contrast what they are seeing and hearing in the different words. This creates a more child-centered learning environment because you are differentiating the learning for them as you use activities and word sorts that are based upon features in spelling that would be in the child's instructional level or Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). We are allowing them to seek out the answers and create an understanding of word patterns instead of simply feeding them information by giving them a list of rules to memorize.

In my experience with Word Study in the schools, we would assess our students with the Developmental Spelling Analysis (DSA) which determined the stages the students were at currently. They had preliterate, letter name, within word pattern, syllable juncture, and derivational constancy as the five stages. We had spelling lists to determine the child's word knowledge at each stage of development. This allowed us to determine the child's instructional needs so that we could group them based upon skill. Once or twice a week I would see each group of students for a mini-lesson or "Word Walk" to introduce the new set of words. Together we would look at sight and sound patterns, which is both spelling and phonics patterns. We would focus on the meanings of some words. Then I would begin to model the sort for the students and then they were to sort the words on their own, following the same pattern. We discussed the sort and why each group of words was alike or different. As the week progressed the students would do the sorts independently or with a partner. Independently they were given three choices. They could Sort, Alphabetize, & Write (SAW) which is where they would sort the words in the appropriate categories, alphabetize each category of words, and write the sort in their notebook. Second, they could Write & Draw which is where they must use half the words in sentences and draw pictures to represent the meanings of the remaining words in their notebook. Thirdly, they could do Rhyme Time where they could list as many words as they can in their notebook that have the same "rime" as the words being studied. If the students chose to work with a partner they had another series of activities they could complete. First they could do a Speed Sort where they work with a partner to sort words into their appropriate categories as quickly as they can. Second, they can do a Word Hunt where the two students can skim books in the classroom library to find words that fit the patterns being studied. Third, they can do a Blind Sort where they sort the words without looking at them. The partner reads the words aloud one at a time and the other student points to the category where the word fits.

These various exploratory activities that are completed with the guide of a teacher, independently, and with partners or small groups allow the students to really see and understand the spelling and sound patterns of words in our language. This type of exposure allows the students to retain the word patterns better and allows them to feel more confident in their reading and as they use these new words in their writing because they will have gained an ease with spelling these new words.

Print & Book Awareness

After discussing print and book awareness, I began thinking of the many things we do as teachers that promote both of these skills. One excellent way to help students develop print and book awareness is to use Big Books in the classroom. These books are a much larger version of the actual book and they are fabulous models for showing a classroom of students text as you do a read aloud. It allows the teacher to introduce print and book features as well as teach reading strategies or focusing on phonics skills with the entire class. This is an effective way to instruct all your students because they can all see the print with ease. These books allow you to read aloud to the students and show where the cover and the back of the book are located. Big Books allow the teacher to show the students where they can find the author and illustrator of a book. These books create an ease for the teacher in modeling the directionality of the print from left to right and top to bottom. Teachers and students can point out specific letters, capital and lowercase letters, chunks within words, punctuation at the end of sentences, and any other print features that can be taught. Teachers can use highlighter tape to focus on a particular skill or feature in the text so that the students can identify it with ease. These books are great for emergent readers because they see the visual model easily in front of them as they are learning and it gives the students the opportunity to read with you as they become aware of different words. Also students enjoy pointing out all the new things that they become aware of in print as you read to them and Big Books give them the opportunity to do this.

I enjoy the use of Big Books in my classroom because they lend themselves wonderfully to direct instruction of print and book awareness skills. I enjoy using the Big Books as a classroom center once I have read them with the class. The students can then revisit the book and reread the story individually or in pairs. My students love to use the pointers and read from the Big Books in the classroom. I often notice them mimic me and pretend to be the teacher as they are modeling the activities that I did with them. I feel that as they copy my lessons, they are retaining the skills that I taught them and enjoying themselves as they read, both of which are my goals as a teacher.

Technology in the Classroom

In our classrooms teachers are faced with the issue of teaching reading to emergent learners and combining that with teaching reading using technology. As our world has a continued push forward with the advancement of technology, there is an ever growing need for educators to be on the cutting edge and learn how to use and implement technology correctly in the classroom. This is a tall order considering that most educators are not familiar with certain technologies. Those educators that are familiar with these new developments in technology may not be aware of how to use them in their day to day instruction effectively.

I feel that while the workshops are beneficial for educators, they should have a continued outreach effort in the classrooms to help support the use of these new technologies so that teachers can correctly implement them. My co-workers and I have created power point slides to do activities with our Word Wall words and spelling words as well as to teach phonics and grammar skills that coincide with our weekly lessons. The students became so much more engaged when you would do the same type of fill in the blank activity or matching activity when it was projected up on the large screen from our computers. I feel that we have found a way to balance our own instruction with hands on manipulatives and with the new visual component of the computer. However, there are so many other elements that we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of with teaching and implementing technology in our classrooms.

I had the fortunate opportunity of teaching in a school 5 years ago in Bridgewater, NJ where the students had a Technology special once a week. We had a technology teacher who used to teach a formal lesson in the computer lab and then the students would all go and use the computers individually to practice the new skill or activity that they were taught. The classroom teacher stayed in the room during the entire special, which gave us the opportunity to watch the lesson and assist the students on the computers with the technology teacher. The students were using different applications on the computers and were doing math skills and reading and language arts skills with those applications. This integrated a curriculum and gave them much exposure to the computer in the school. This exposure made it far easier for the classroom teacher, when the teacher would allow the students to use the computers in their own classroom during centers. The students had developed a wealth of knowledge from the direct instruction and practice of how to use the computers and the applications on it and did not need a teacher to stand there and continually assist them. The teacher also had the comfort of knowing that the students were doing academic skills on the computers as well.

Since most schools do not appear to have a Technology special at an elementary level, this model can be taken and used by the classroom teacher. The classroom teacher can sign up weekly for the computer lab and teach a small mini-lesson on a skill and then allow the students to apply that same skill independently on the computer. While, I love this idea it would be up to the classroom teacher to learn the applications and devise the lessons. Although as I have previously mentioned, many teachers do not understand much of technology and do not want to take on this type of role because they do not feel comfortable. Currently I have typically seen many teachers in our own building sign up frequently for the computer lab and let the students use Starfall.com or Mighty Math activities independently with no instruction and leave them to their own devices to play and navigate the computer. I do not believe this is entirely the fault of the teacher, but the lack of education and training that is given to teachers on new technologies. Teachers may be told expectations about the use of the computer lab, but the appropriate use is not being explained or shown. Therefore more staff development or trainings should be added to service this growing need so that teachers can fully educate our students.

Developing Readers from Emergent to Literate

As teachers of reading our ultimate goal is to help our students go from emergent readers to fully developed and literate readers. In class we discussed that readers use two major forms of Information Systems to read and understand text. We learned that a reader uses information that is "outside in" where they bring their previous learned knowledge to the table, such as prior knowledge, connections, cultural perceptions, their overall schema, as well as having phonological awareness and the ability to read with a good vocabulary. They also use information that is "inside out" where they learn how to comprehend text using information in and around the text. They can use context clues, the information that allows the students to make inferences and connections as they read. They can also use text features, which are all the surrounding elements that guide a reader, such as the photographs, captions, bold face words, labels, and charts and graphs.

Literate individuals and readers use all of these components in conjunction with one another to decode and comprehend with ease. As a teacher we are constantly looking for new ways to teach our students to decode and comprehend text, especially considering that every student comes into our classroom with different experiences, different abilities, and different skills. Therefore, as a teacher we need to expose our students to a variety of things using stories and illustrations or photographs. For example, recently in the first grade reading text, the word stadium appeared, and for many of my students, it was an unfamiliar word. Only one student had attended a professional football game and he knew that stadium was the place where a sporting team plays. The other students were not familiar with the term until his experience of attending a Philadelphia Eagles game was described to the class. Other students had been to football and baseball games, but never knew that the place where the game was played was called "stadium." Dylan's prior knowledge or "Outside In" source taught 19 children a new vocabulary word to a concept in which they were already familiar.

A reinforcement of the Information Systems concepts to create a fluent reader is wonderfully described and analyzed in a recent article in the Reading Rockets website. It reviewed seven strategies to teach comprehension. The ultimate goal of instructing students on comprehension strategies is to create "purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension" (Adler, C.R., 2004). The article states that there is a firm scientific basis that each of these seven strategies will improve text comprehension. This article offers a clear, concise understanding of the use of the information systems concept to become literate.

Reading Rockets: Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension

Language Development

As teachers we continually strive to find ways to meet all the learners in our classroom. As a first grade teacher I am faced with the challenge to teach all my students to become successful readers that are both fluent and have a high level of comprehension. These students are also expected to become experienced writers that can use the appropriate writing conventions and use good grammar. This appears to be a huge undertaking considering the variety of learners that enter your classroom each year with many different experience levels, not to mention the young immature nature of a child. The English language is already a hard language to teach because there are so many exceptions to the rule and inconsistencies. Many of my students will often ask why does that letter make that sound in this word and a different sound in another. While all the origins of the words in the English language can be explained with knowledge of their etymology, a first grader really doesn't have the capacity to fully understand even though you can explain it in layman's terms. Therefore, I feel that the best way to learn language and develop it would be simply through the constant use and experience of the language. I feel Vygotsky's theory is valid because he believes that a child needs an adult or more competent peer to assist them with learning new vocabulary for concepts. As is the example with a sponge. If a child knows what a sponge is, they may only have a limited range of words to describe it, but the child can expand their vocabulary with an adult's help. The adult can give them the vocabulary for the sponge, such as "that sponge is squishy or wet". Vygotsky believed that while we have the capability to learn things on our own, we still benefit from the influence of others.

I had the experience of working in a school district that used Morning Meetings as part of a Responsive Classroom program. The Response Classroom initiative is based around creating a community of learners. The goal is to promote social, emotional, and academic growth in all students. Therefore the activities and lessons are used to develop the child both as a person and as a learner. In the mornings, we spent twenty minutes following a Morning Meeting that consisted of four parts. One part of our Morning Meetings was a message written by the teacher. The class would read the message aloud together and this message contained consistent language, such as the date and our daily specials for the class. This message was used to teach reading, vocabulary, writing, and spelling. It introduced sight words, gave students opportunities to sound out new words, and gave the students the chance to make corrections to sentences that dealt with writing conventions and grammar. This message gave students the ability to develop their reading and writing skills in language. Another part of the Morning Meeting was the greeting. We began with a greeting that included saying hello in different languages or using a variety of handshakes to say hello. This gave students the opportunity to say hello and good morning to each other in different ways, to hear a variety of greetings expanding their vocabulary. Another part of the morning meeting was the sharing section. Students were able to tell something about themselves, such as a hobby or an interest. The students could also bring in some small trinket or picture to give their classmates a visual representation as they shared. This gave students the opportunity to express themselves through spoken language. It also gave their peers a question time frame where they could ask questions to find out further information about their classmates. Each day about four students shared so that by the end of the week every student had the opportunity to share once. This gave each student an opportunity to share once a week and express themselves verbally to their peers as we begin to learn more and more about our classmates. I thought this was such a successful component to our school day. It really created a very close knit group of students and it helped develop both their spoken and written language abilities in the process.

Objective

The measurement of success in teaching reading is subjective. All too often theories are put into practice inside the classroom with the expectation that children will easily grasp the written word and progress according to plan. Reading methods have come and gone, been re-visited time and time again, changed, updated, removed entirely and renamed. Sometimes a teacher will find that the oldest methods still work fine, but with progress and change new methods must be implemented even when the instructor believes otherwise. My experience with teaching first and third grade have taught me that there is nothing more important than teaching reading to my students. No two students learn at the same pace. There are endless hindrances, diversions, and social and hereditary thwarts that make the job of teaching the young reader a continual challenge. Educators of young readers should be equipped with a wealth of knowledge to make them excellent teachers. They should amass a diversified portfolio of reading methods, techniques, and practices to reach every type of student that sits before them in their classroom. This is no easy task. There are endless reading methods tried and true, but there are endless reading and learning obstacles that make many reading methods virtually useless. This is why I am taking this course. I want to learn all reading methods, if possible. I want to be able to meet each student's challenge and offer the best possible method or technique to make every student that sits before me a successful reader. It is my objective to reach every child and make them enjoy reading and develop a love for the written word. I know this is possible, but only if the teacher learns what works and what does not work for the individual student. Yes, reading is fundamental. It is the basis for all successful learning. I trust that this class will allow me the opportunity of finding what makes each individual a successful reader. I want to emerge from this course with a wealth of knowledge in reading literacy so that I might be able to select the most appropriate technique and customize it to fit nearly perfectly into each student's reading profile.