I chose to read Whitney Sasser's blog and enjoyed it. She and I are both in Kappa Delta together and like her, I also have a very specific grade in mind that I want to teach. She mentioned the Elizabethtown Project in her blog as well and said she is nervous and excited about working with the students from up north. I am pumped as well to get connected and start CONVERSING back and forth with them. Another blog that I came across was Amber Miller's blog. She has such a kind spirit and her blog definitely comes off very warm and inviting too. Just like her. I love that she mentioned how teaching was a calling because I have felt that way since the age of 12. It was very uplifting to read her blog because she has a true gift with writing that's for sure.
After reading the article by Knipper and Duggan titled "Writing to learn across the curriculum: Tools for comprehension in content area classes" published in The Reading Teacher in February 2001, I had so much more appreciation for teachers who taught literacy to students and for the students because learning to write is not as easy as writing to learn. Teachers are so involved with wanting to help students build comprehension and using a think aloud as was to model how the student should be thinking while they are reading something, but it really surprises me that we are still having huge problems in this area considering the fact that it has always been a major learning factor in a students life at school. In the article it mentions how science and social studies teachers should really consider how to involve reading and writing in their content area because the student can read something in the content area, but still not understand why or what it may be about because they have no background knowledge or may not have built any schema at all about it yet. This is the part where I am very glad I took all of what Dr. Hanna and Dr. Boyce taught us last semester to heart and absorbed as much information as I could because I knew without a doubt that in any subject area it all ends up coming back to literacy in some form or fashion. I really want to teach Mathematics to 6th graders, but if they have no clue about any of the terms or can't break apart and analyze a simple word problem then they will surely have difficulty learning and retaining anything new that they are taught.
Questions about Article:
By giving students rubrics with elaborate jargon terms when describing what is expected of them, how is that better for them than just explaining it in simple laymen's terms that they do understand without confusing them? And if it helps them have guided structure then why would we not show them a standard procedure in how to go about the project in the first place instead of trying to give them more freedom with their writing?
How can we teach students not to just copy down things and to stop and "think for themselves" for a change? When did copying everything off the board become they only way a student could ever learn anything from class? (this was happening in a class I observed this week)
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