Week 1 Noteblog

I am looking forward to expanding my knowledge this semester regarding literacy instruction. I feel that in an elementary classroom this is one of the most important subjects for children to master as literacy is involved in nearly every aspect of classroom learning. Competent reading skills become necessary for children to succeed in other subject areas such as math, science, and social studies. Throughout the semester I hope to learn various methods of literacy instruction and practice those methods while in the classroom. Because reading comes so easy to most adults, it can sometimes be difficult to trace the process back in order to describe to children something as simple as sounding out a word but it is my goal to master this teaching process.

I have had some previous experience with teaching children how to read in an urban setting through the program Read to Succeed. For a semester I would go to an after-school program set up in a church in downtown Lansing to tutor children with a focus on literacy instruction. Most of the children that I tutored were in upper elementary and knew how to read fairly well so we focused mostly on comprehension. As far as comprehension went I found that the most important factor to the children's understanding was their interest in the book. I see this factor play a role as well in the first grade classroom I am in now, however the focus is not on comprehension but simply reading and sounding out words. When guiding the literacy center that allows the children to read whichever book they like I typically spend a great deal of time choosing books for children who seem to be struggling with the one they have chosen based on their interests and reading level. The children are learning phonics to aid in their learning, and I would like to be able to reference back to what they are learning in class to help them when they are sounding out words. This is one of my major goals for the semester. I am also looking forward to learning and implementing various methods of literacy instruction.