Entry 11: My Last Blog- Final Thoughts

 At the beginning of this semester I thought I knew what literacy was.

I thought that reading was reading and writing was writing and there wasn't much more to it. I thought that reading was only learned in school- where as when I look at it through the lens that we have used throughout this class, literacy is everywhere- and we need it greatly in order to survive. All of the factors that contribute to a literate person, including but not limited to phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, early childhood literacy learning, reading and writing processes and other topics are all of these factors contribute to what I now understand as literacy and what it means to be literate. My literacy status is always growing I believe, because there is always room for improvement when it comes to your own literacy; there is always room for growth and learning even as an adult. 

Overall I believe that I have a better understanding of literacy as a whole. I understand now that literacy starts from a very young age in your early childhood development, and you create new skills such as reading and writing, and you build on those skills throughout your childhood and adolescence to become a literate person. One of the thing that I learned the importance of that I thought I had a good grasp on before this class was the importance of diverse learning materials. An example being, for teaching the alphabet Tompkins made a chart (figure 4-2 on page 117) to teach the alphabet to young students. These examples included everything from alphabet books to magnetic letters to letter books and posters and many other examples of how to just differentiate teaching the alphabet. Tompkins gives many tables and charts throughout the text book that are helpful to teachers in differentiating and understand what they need to be able to teach and what the students need to understand. 

I was also taught this semester that literacy knowledge has a sequence to it, and its all about building future and present knowledge off of past literacy knowledge. As discussed in the Deeper Dive of Matt and I on phonics and phonemic awareness, literacy has a base which is phonics and phonemic awareness, and we keep building off of that base to be able to spell, and that leads us to be able to read and write. I learned that phonics isn't as terrifying as it once was to me- that I learned phonics through activities and as I have experienced- without knowing that I am learning phonics. 

This blog throughout the semester has helped me keep track of my thoughts on the topics throughout the semester as I learned about the different topics that involved and created literacy. The blog throughout the semester also helped me think in an organized way where I could record how I would teach different topics of literacy to my future students and I am able to look back to those thoughts on this blog. I am thankful for this class and everything that it has taught me so that I can teach literacy to students better and I now have a better understanding of what literacy is.

Entry 10: Bless Address and/or Press

This week I will be addressing Meaghan Jackson's blog post on vocabulary development; Vocabulary Development Can be Fun?. First of all the blog post by Meaghan was great and I appreciated the way that she incorporated Zipke and her personal experiences into her blog post. Meaghan and I share common views on how education should be viewed and how we want to teach! We have the same ideology that teaching should be both educational and enjoyable for the students in order to get the best results. I enjoyed when Meaghan stated: 

"If children are engaged in what they are reading, find joy in it, and excited to learn about new vocabulary words they may come across because of that joy, I think that is success. Reading is essential in vocabulary growth, especially in the younger grades, therefore, the more time children spend reading (and enjoying what they are reading), the more successful they will be in reading comprehension and beyond" (Jackson). 

This quotation above from Meaghan also reminds me of Tompkins and Tompkins thoughts on having a child read more. "Vocabulary knowledge and reading achievement are closely related: Students with larger vocabularies are more capable readers, and they know more strategies for figuring out the meanings of unfamiliar words than less capable readers do (Graves, 2006). One reason why capable readers have larger vocabularies is that they do more reading" (Tompkins, 220). Students that are more inclined to read have a better success rate than students that don't, vocabulary knowledge is linked to reading achievement, and one way that we can create reading achievement is to help the students that we have in our classroom find reading materials that they enjoy. 

My question to you is how can we relate this to Muhammad's sense of joy in the classroom? Can we use this joy that we want to create in our classrooms to help implement to HRL framework into the classroom? How can we use Muhammad to help create vocabulary growth through all grades? 

As we look to what we should use in the classroom and what how we should teach, this quote is closely related to Muhammad's HRL framework and connecting joy to educational growth. Using texts that can have an interpersonal relation to the student can create the growth that needs to be seen in the classroom. Muhammad references a text by Geneva Gay in her text, "Gay (2010) suggests that students' interest and engagement in learning increase when educators use pedagogies connected to their experiences. Additionally, teachers using this approach see curriculum as a tool of power and a disruption of marginalization" (Muhammad, 45). This in turn shows that students that receive this type of education create better growth through care for the students and the material that they are being taught. 

Muhammad's HRL framework can also help build vocabulary and comprehension through differentiated texts that the students can identify with and her thoughts of criticality and intellect through the framework. Reading layered texts that are in the students interest area, have the students develop opinions about the texts that they are reading and having the students analyze texts are just a few examples that I can think of that would help incorporate the HRL framework into the classroom. 

Vocabulary Building is FUN!

     Throughout this semester I have learned various reasons about the importance of reading and writing for children as they make their way through childhood. This week we were set to uncover why vocabulary building is important for children. I found that learning vocabulary didn't have to be dull or boring, that we can use different activities and methods to help students unlock the meaning of words and the multiple meanings in situational text. My question I pose in this blog post then is- with all of this information given in these two texts, how can I as a teacher create ways to make learning vocabulary engaging to all of my students?

    In Tompkins text there were multiple examples of instructional differentiated learning techniques such as creating word walls, having mini-lessons on the new vocabulary words that will be introduced in a text, word posters, word maps, having the students write possible sentences that the new vocabulary word will be found in and many more activities! Having these differentiated learning styles creates a way that I can create a lesson or activity that all students can enjoy as a class. For example, the students could create word posters for the vocabulary unit that we are covering, they would write the word down and then draw what the word means. This would create meaning for the child, creating a way to view what the word means in both the English vocabulary and a picture could help them better understand the word. 

    In the article Teaching Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension With Riddles by Marcy Zipke explains that riddles are an excellent way to teach children vocabulary. "Riddles offer especially engaging instructional content for teaching language manipulation for many reasons: Most children are familiar and comfortable with riddles. They have heard riddles before, whether r not they understood the ambiguity in them. In addition, riddles are especially suited for young readers because they are whole texts" (Zipke 2008). This quote furthers my thought process on how I can teach children reading and writing comprehension in text without making it a boring task. Creating a way that students can learn with riddles I also believe can create joy in the classroom. 

This can relate to Muhammads text and the standard of joy in the classroom. We can use the differentiated learning from both Tompkins and Zipke to create a foundation of learning that includes all students. We can use texts and rhymes from different cultures and backgrounds to help students establish their identity, become complex thinkers, create skills, and their overall intellectual development. "...a great deal of research has found that students have the potential for success when they see themselves in the curriculum and when their cultural, gender, and racial identities are affirmed" (Muhammad, pg. 69).  Creating a classroom bookshelf that holds books and rhymes/riddles from different backgrounds and cultures can expose children to a whole new world of information, helping them understand not only themselves, but also help them understand the people that surround them.