Spring 2014 Update

This is my last semester on campus!  It's so weird to think that I have been here for 4 years and even though I still have a year of student teaching after this, these are my last few months on campus.

This semester is very demanding and, I'm hoping, very beneficial in the long run.

Perhaps my most challenging class right now is my literacy class.  We meet with a 3rd grader and tutor one-on-one twice a week.  Our lessons are encapsulated within the class's thematic unit of the ocean.  My student is specifically focusing on the deep sea so all of our readings have been about that.  It's been a very interesting experience and honestly I feel that I am learning far more than my student!  This class is really wonderful, though, because it is the first time in my college career we have been required to write lesson plans and use them with real students and reflect on them.  This is a huge component of teaching and I am excited to finally be applying what I have been working on in all my other classes, despite the workload.

I am also taking my last bilingual education class.  We have spent the whole semester thus far talking about dual language and the benefits of it.  We have "created" our own dual language schools a number of times, which is interesting because it gives us an opportunity to look at dual language as a whole school program, instead of just a classroom.  I hope we will work more on using bilingual education in the classroom, though, because I think that will be more useful to us.

In addition to the 16 hours of classes per week, I am volunteering to teach Spanish to a nearby preschool once a week, I volunteer to Skype with a student in the Chicago Public School system to encourage him to go to college, and I am the Activities Director for another nonprofit organization on campus.  I also work 10-20 hours a week, so my days are full!

Literacy Reading Response

The focus of a chapter in my literacy textbook was four reading models and how they relate to various literacy theories. I am pretty sure a combination of the whole language model under the psycholinguistics/top-down theory and the skills-based model under the behaviorism/bottom-up theory was used in my elementary classes. There were reading groups that were based on reading levels, and there might have been four or five reading levels in the class. Often, we were in a group with the same people for the year, if I recall correctly. The teacher would choose a book for us to read, and we would discuss it at our conferences. I was in one of the higher reading levels; I enjoyed reading at the time and I still enjoy reading today. I do not know that the leveled reading groups had an impact on my positive reading habits, but I could see a student may be led to dislike reading due to a stigma of being in a lower level reading group, and therefore not enjoy reading as much as others. I think it is great to have interest-based reading groups, like in the whole language, reader response, and four resource and Halliday + models, but I think there is some rationale to having specific levels for reading groups. I think students should read at a level that is both comfortable and challenging for them. I wonder if there is a way I could combine the four resource and Halliday + model with the skills-based model in my future classroom. I think this is something I would like to consider in the future.