Hello Everyone,
Here is the link for the Power Point from today's class. Enjoy and happy researching!!
Angela
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Truth or Myth?
I actually enjoyed reading the articles for this workshop. It was probably because I could relate to them on a personal level. I have found myself often believing some of those literacy myths presented to us in the articles and I have definitely encountered people in my lifetime who believe the myths to be true. Why do these myths exist? Could it be that it is our way of “blaming” one thing or another for our society’s faults-for those students we cannot reach no matter how hard we try? It is almost like we need to pin the blame on something or someone and justify the wrongs in our world. This seems like the easy way out and for all the years that have passed we still cannot get the whole “literacy” thing right. We continuously struggle with the entire “literacy” dilemma and it seems to never get any better.
As teachers we are continuously being inundated with the “latest literacy trend” or the new government initiated program such as “TLCP”-and we all jump on the band wagon-hoping and praying that these will be the answers to our literacy prayers. Yet within a year or so-or even shorter, we jump off that band wagon and hop onto the new one. We allow for the vicious cycle to continue. After reading the articles, I also felt like “literacy” and all of the programs that are offered to us are all about the “bottom dollar” and how rich the publishing companies can become richer. Will it ever be solved?
I especially enjoyed the activity were we had to write down what we were thinking while we read the story “The Discus Thrower”. I did write down at one point “I don’t get it” and was initially afraid to share this with the class. I did eventually build up the courage to share with my peers and was pleased to find out that it was okay not to get something that we read. I want to share this experience with my students so that they too can feel safe to share with me or any other teacher when it is that they “don’t get it”. I will be using this reading strategy in my classroom with my students because I am very interested to see what they would write down while reading.
Overall all of the activities we did on Saturday sparked interest for me personally. Although we did not do much writing-I was in awe with the fact that “oral communication” can lead to a wealth of information. Sometimes we need to refocus our teaching and ask ourselves-are we just trying to find an answer to the literacy myths or do we dare to take on different teaching strategies as we did on Saturday and try reaching our students to the best of our ability.
As teachers we are continuously being inundated with the “latest literacy trend” or the new government initiated program such as “TLCP”-and we all jump on the band wagon-hoping and praying that these will be the answers to our literacy prayers. Yet within a year or so-or even shorter, we jump off that band wagon and hop onto the new one. We allow for the vicious cycle to continue. After reading the articles, I also felt like “literacy” and all of the programs that are offered to us are all about the “bottom dollar” and how rich the publishing companies can become richer. Will it ever be solved?
I especially enjoyed the activity were we had to write down what we were thinking while we read the story “The Discus Thrower”. I did write down at one point “I don’t get it” and was initially afraid to share this with the class. I did eventually build up the courage to share with my peers and was pleased to find out that it was okay not to get something that we read. I want to share this experience with my students so that they too can feel safe to share with me or any other teacher when it is that they “don’t get it”. I will be using this reading strategy in my classroom with my students because I am very interested to see what they would write down while reading.
Overall all of the activities we did on Saturday sparked interest for me personally. Although we did not do much writing-I was in awe with the fact that “oral communication” can lead to a wealth of information. Sometimes we need to refocus our teaching and ask ourselves-are we just trying to find an answer to the literacy myths or do we dare to take on different teaching strategies as we did on Saturday and try reaching our students to the best of our ability.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
What’s Your View?
Both Workshop 7 and 8 had me thinking and re-thinking, and also questioning my own personal ways of how I view “literacy” and “reading” in my teaching practices. This especially became evident when reading the article by Lindfors, on how teachers teach and how children learn. The article clearly showed the different views of different people and what each believed reading was about. It wasn’t until he mentioned the differences between teaching and learning, did those individuals become defensive because he was questioning their “COMFORT ZONE” and “BELIEFS” to what was the right way to teach children to read. We as teachers are often so caught up in the “methods” and “formula’s” to create the perfect readers, that we often ignore the fact that children are reading and it’s not only about the children following our prescribed curriculum.
I found myself giggling aloud when reading Brian Cambourne’s “A Sure-Fire, Never-Fail K-12 Recipe for Producing Dependent A-Literate Learners.” At first, I thought he was going to really provide us with a “sure-fire recipe” and not only until I realized his sarcasm did I find it quite amusing. But that feeling quickly turned to a sense of fear because as I continued to read the article I found myself in some of those circumstances or I found myself thinking of other teachers I know that are following his “recipe” and this terrified me.
How do we as teachers, stop ourselves from following the laid out procedures of how to teach children reading and literacy and allow them to explore, experience and stumble upon literacy as a social construct. Literacy is more than just reading books we choose for children, pronouncing vowels and consonants, and ensuring that spelling and punctuation are impeccable. Literacy should be a means for children to discover, familiarize and falter upon at their own pace and comfort zone. We often frown upon children playing video games or reading graphic books-(since these are not real books) or playing with Yu-Gi-Oh cards because surely these are all a waste of time and their brain power. Being a parent of a thirteen year old myself, I often found myself questioning his love of the Japanese Anime books and his completion of video games in a day as a waste of time. It was not until I saw the “critical learning” in all of these activities that I changed my own tune as a teacher in my classroom. Learning is indeed taking place in all of the above mentioned circumstances and children are in fact developing personal experiences that they can take with them for their entire lives.
In order for us to be teachers of “critical learning and literacy” we need to have an open-mind and allow for a plethora of possibilities. The problem with this is the “teacher’s role” in the learning process, that is the constraints we place on the methods we use to “teach” the students. When we ourselves are uncomfortable with the “unknown” we tend to shut down our own pathway to critical learning and disable rather than enable our students to become “critical learners”.
I found myself giggling aloud when reading Brian Cambourne’s “A Sure-Fire, Never-Fail K-12 Recipe for Producing Dependent A-Literate Learners.” At first, I thought he was going to really provide us with a “sure-fire recipe” and not only until I realized his sarcasm did I find it quite amusing. But that feeling quickly turned to a sense of fear because as I continued to read the article I found myself in some of those circumstances or I found myself thinking of other teachers I know that are following his “recipe” and this terrified me.
How do we as teachers, stop ourselves from following the laid out procedures of how to teach children reading and literacy and allow them to explore, experience and stumble upon literacy as a social construct. Literacy is more than just reading books we choose for children, pronouncing vowels and consonants, and ensuring that spelling and punctuation are impeccable. Literacy should be a means for children to discover, familiarize and falter upon at their own pace and comfort zone. We often frown upon children playing video games or reading graphic books-(since these are not real books) or playing with Yu-Gi-Oh cards because surely these are all a waste of time and their brain power. Being a parent of a thirteen year old myself, I often found myself questioning his love of the Japanese Anime books and his completion of video games in a day as a waste of time. It was not until I saw the “critical learning” in all of these activities that I changed my own tune as a teacher in my classroom. Learning is indeed taking place in all of the above mentioned circumstances and children are in fact developing personal experiences that they can take with them for their entire lives.
In order for us to be teachers of “critical learning and literacy” we need to have an open-mind and allow for a plethora of possibilities. The problem with this is the “teacher’s role” in the learning process, that is the constraints we place on the methods we use to “teach” the students. When we ourselves are uncomfortable with the “unknown” we tend to shut down our own pathway to critical learning and disable rather than enable our students to become “critical learners”.
Monday, June 15, 2009
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