Chapter 6-10 in Literacy Moves On

In chapter 6, Evans is discussing how Beanie Babies created a whole new culture for marketing, advertisement, the youth market, and so many different things. Beanie Babies fit the consumer market perfectly at the time, and hit the right target market. The lessons in this chapter allowed for children to see that they have control over the market, and that they are societies future consumers. The class also discussed how the Ty market of beanie babies had such great marketing techniques, and money making tactics. This lesson helps children see how they can discuss and respond to important issues that are actually happening. In chapter 7, Evans mentions how there is not one specific way to "do" critical literacy. It is a combination of discussing experiences, problems, languages and history. Through critical literacy, children need to learn how to make the texts that they produce have the desired effects in and on the world. When children are experts of their topic, they are much more efficient in the discussions and tasks at hand. One way to do this is to create "place-based" activities in the literacy curriculum, and this can deal with issues going on around them. Similar activities are discussed in Chapter 8, through Curiosity Kits, which were designed to motivate readers and to encourage wider participation in reading at home. I think this is a great idea, and would be effective in any school system. Parents are always wanting to be involved, and this would be a great way to bring home and school life together. These help them explore meanings in their own individual way. Chapter 9 discussed the role of reading fantasies in the classroom. This gives students freedom to map out their own stories and use their creativity to do whatever they want. Fantasies have many different qualities than other genres, and analyzing fantasies could help develop the readers and writers in your classroom. As teachers, we need to create a exciting environment to welcome our students to reading.

Literacy Moves On Chapters 1-5

There was a lot of material that was covered in these chapters, but the main idea of this text is that there are popular culture, new technologies and critical literacy that we can incorporate into the classroom. Helping our students read critically beyond the images, as well as reading in between the lines, demands the development of vocabulary that students can evaluate the meaning of these ideas. A first step that the teacher needs to take is to investigate things that interest students outside of school, and bring them into the lessons. It is important to discover what children know about the texts they encounter inside and outside school and the many ways they might represent their ideas. It is interesting how literacy can change as technology develops the ways in which we communicate with one another. I learned while reading that media education is vitally important in this society because children have grown up with new technologies every day. As future teachers, we cannot ignore this new switch because it will help us be more effective with the lessons we are trying to teach. If we are incorporating film, editing, music into the classroom, we are also introducing them to careers that are in the future. Use the children's experiences and knowledge as a starting point. Mackey looks at how video games could potentially be beneficial to the students and classroom as a whole. When looking closer at computer games, you notice that the child has to "orchestrate many complex reactions in order to navigate the story." (51) Learning how to make progress in a video game is a form of literacy. I would have never thought of this being beneficial as a teacher, but research shows that video games have no fewer than 36 education principles related to literacy. That just seems incredible to me. I think all in all, teachers need to remember the "power of talk." We are able to facilitate great discussions that can guide students to different views to their original ideas.

Overall, I can clearly see that teachers need to incorporate activities into the classroom that are interesting to students. We need to make school fun, and with new technologies being introduced in the home, we need to update our styles of teaching in the classroom.

MGRP

This project was extremely helpful for a future teacher.  I learned how much work goes into building your units, and figuring out what YOU as a teacher wants to teach.  I think the steps we did this paper in worked well for me, because in order to create genres you had to look at your research, and figure out what you wanted you reader to see.  I would definitely recommend this project to any college student, as well as someone going into education. 

MGRP Chapter 5 & 7

In chapter 5, Allen is discussing how to help students bring subjects alive. One cool idea i thought of was "creating a class character." The teacher had the class answer questions such as, what is the characters age or what does he look like, and when the class comes to a consensus, they have created a class character after answering 34 questions. This helps students realize how much effort goes in to creating a character and their likes and dislikes. This also makes the students experts on their topics, which is what a Multigenre research paper is intended to do.

In chapter 7, Allen is trying to "explore the arts--expanding students thinking." One way she tries to help kids achieve art is to encourage kids to "sketch, paint, and draw to enhance their papers." Artwork is also another way for students to make choices and take risks with their paper. Art is just trying to help us express our emotion towards the topic we have already written about. As a teacher, you cannot grade the students based on their actual artistic ability, but if it makes their paper more meaningful.

Van Sluys Chapter on Invitations

Invitations help students "raise and pursue questions that are important to them and the world, and they need a supportive learning environment in which they are encouraged to ask about and respond to critical issues." (25) As teachers, we need to make time for invitations in our classroom. Through an invitation, the teacher gives students time to challenge ideas and meanings. Invitations will also help develop your students as literate people. Invitations have 4 common features: an initiating experience, a formally presented invitation, possible questions to pursue, and related resources. This is a great activity for your classroom because the investigation that these students are doing is based on their lives, and experiences. One item we need to remember is to make time for reflections. These reflections should be brief, but they give students a chance to write about their thoughts and reactions. I believe that invitations should definitely be apart of your classroom.

MGRP: Chapter 4 Poetry

This reading opened my eyes to using poetry in my classroom. As a child, I was never introduced to poetry, and this is probably why I was unaware that I could use this in my future classroom. Poetry evokes emotions quickly, and this could benefit you're classroom as a whole. As a teacher, one of your main goals is to create a community in the classroom. When you are introducing poetry, ask your students to share their favorite pieces of poetry. This helps the students sharing their ideas, and emotions to their classmates. This helps students start listening and appreciating others ideas. Most students write with experience, so poetry allows the teacher to have an insight of the experiences or ideas that are going on inside the child's head.

Overall, this reading helped me realize that you can use poetry when writing these large papers, and it helps build a community in your classroom.

The Donut House: Real World Literacy in an Urban Kindergarten Classroom

This journal was very interesting to me, and actually relates to my MGRP topic. This journal was inspiring to me because the teacher did not give up on her students just because of the area they were from. She took the notion of empowerment, and created a community in her classroom. "By combining children's natural world of play with real world events, we were able to embed a number of authentic reading and writing experiences in the literacy instructional program." (250) This project of the Donut house did just that. It helped students realize they are apart of their community, and can actually make a difference. Students were able to use language (verbal or writing) to interact with their classmates and also members of the community. At the end of the project, the students felt a sense of accomplishment.

MGRP Reading Chapters 1-3 & 6

This reading helped me understand the rationale for doing a Multigenre Research Paper. I never thought the idea of this paper was terrible, but this reading gave me motivation to complete this paper and really put effort into the genres I present. I like how Allen focused on how the entire paper's topic and genres were up to the writer. This was interesting to me because I am used to getting a topic and researching information that I am not interested in. The skills that the writer gains through writing a MGRP are incredible. "They need to learn how to think both analytically and divergently in order to reach goals, which they set for themselves." (9) This is neat for me to think about because you are creating your own boundaries while writing this paper. The sky is the limit!

Including the different genres in this project allows the students to write from many points of view. I think this is important because there might be many dimensions to their inquiry problem that can be shown in a number of ways.

Overall, I think this book will be helpful in writing this paper.

Crafting Writers Chapter 10-12

I thought this reading assignment was extremely interesting, and very beneficial to me as a future teacher. These chapters focused on how to set up conferences with your students and how to focus on what you can teach them during the conference and what they can do in the future to work on the for the next conference. A idea Hale mentioned was to create student conference sheets that they can put in their writers notebooks. This will help remind the students of what they know and what they can work on during their in-class writings. Chapter 11 discussed how you can set up your classroom to help the flow of writing in the classroom. To have a writing station will help students take writing more seriously which is what students in the elementary grades need. As teachers we need to remember to not only criticize in these conferences. If we tell the student a few things that we think their doing well, they will most likely pay attention when you are giving them criticism.

Crafting Writers Chapters 7-9

I enjoyed reading these three chapters. I feel like I learned a lot that I personally do not remember doing in Elementary school. Chapter 7: Teaching Craft Lessons was my favorite chapter out of the three. I liked how Hale explained mini lessons on she personally does them in her classroom. This helped me brainstorm ideas of what I would want to do in my classroom. This was extremely helpful to me. I also liked her idea of Live Writing. I loved when my teachers would write on the overhead because I felt that it was more interesting. The children definitely interact more with other students and the teacher when they are all participating to write a paragraph on the overhead. I also like how she focused on conferences. I never remember having conferences with my teachers about my writing, so this is an item I would love to implement in my classroom. Hale gave us some small things that she practices in her classroom, but it wasn't overbearing and telling us what to do.

In chapter 8, I liked how she pointed out to find strengths in students writings. Let them share their quick-write in front of the class, use their writing as an example. Make them want to take ownership of their work! Having them interacting with others and their writing is extremely beneficial to the students. If the student is starting to implement a craft that was a weak spot for them, tell them that you notice they are starting to use that craft in their writing. We need to intrinsically motivate these students, especially in their writing. They need to be motivated to share their feelings, thoughts, emotions, etc.

In chapter 9, I liked how it set up items the teacher could talk about with students in future conferences based on prior conferences. You have to be the final one who makes the decision of what to teach, but Hale gave useful hints that can help you plan future conferences/lessons.

Overall, I thought that the majority of this reading was useful to me.

Chapter 4 & 5: Crafting Writers

I learned a lot when reading these two chapters. In the Categories of Specific Craft, this talked about the specific crafts we could do that would help our students access more words through their writing and reading. As teachers, we need to offer support to our students, and help them along the way. In this chapter, they wrote about the 5 themes in teaching the craft writing. These were the 5 senses, show not tell, dialogue, sentence variety, and word choice. The one that I found the most interesting was the 5 senses crafts. I remember trying to write with my senses, and I know that this activity can dramatically change the writing of your students. What I liked about using this craft is that it can help all types of learners. If there are some students that are more advanced, they can work on more advanced crafts that will challenge those students. In Chapter 5, I learned that not only can teachers create workshops about punctuation, but we can explore punctuation through literature. As a teacher, you could give students examples of sentences, and the students can mention why they used the certain punctuation. I think this would be extremely beneficial to many students.

Wilde Reading

I enjoyed reading this article. I think that this article helped me as a future teacher learn about the problems we are having with spelling, and how we can help to fix them. There is a large problem in schools of teaching kids how to spell. I remember having to look up words in the dictionary, and I found it annoying because my teacher knew the answer. Looking back on it now, she was helping me develop my own way to learn how to spell. I definitely want to incorporate these techniques into my future classroom, because I think they would help students.

One part of the article that I thought was interesting was the Placeholder Spelling technique. It is a quick spelling of a word, and the writer knows it is not correct. What is vital about this technique is that it is helping kids sound out words they are hearing. If they are sounding out the same sounds over and over again, they are going to be able to then learn the actual spelling of the word. By the teacher not giving the student the answer right away, it helps the student sound it out, and make them come to their own conclusion.

Overall, I really liked this article, and it was very beneficial to me as a future teacher.

Coffee Shop Literacy Dig

This assignment was an interesting experience for me. I am used to always being on the go, and sitting and just 'observing' for 30 minutes was a tough task for me. When sitting there watching peoples interactions with one another, I noticed that the vocabulary in this Coffee shop was different than in other gathering places. There was one interaction that I found interesting. A english teacher was having his office hours at the Coffee Shop. He was helping his students understand vocabulary in the text, and helping them understand the meanings behind the literature they were reading. Among the many people who were studying alone at tables, enjoying their coffee, there were others who were meeting up with friends. Their vocabulary was much different than those who were discussing items with their teachers. I could tell this due to their body language. The friends were more eager to share stories and talk with one another, but the interaction with the teacher and student was much more formal. The tables in the coffee shop were scattered, mostly individual, but you could move them together if you needed more space. The Coffee Shop was louder at times, but then would quite down and become a more intimate environment. The coffee shop had a very easy going environment, it put me in a relaxed mood while sitting there. Some places can be so harsh with their furniture and decorations, but this shop was definitely the opposite.

"That's online writing, not boring school writing"

After reading this article, I truly believe that computers have broaden the horizons of writing. It may be less personal, but children find writing with computers intriguing. The thought of instantly seeing someone's blog and what they are thinking at that time is extremely cool, especially to younger children. The article explained the students were "hungry for writing." As a teacher you have to be flexible to what works better for their students. If that is by renting the schools computers everyday during writing time, that is what you should do. Computers also allow you to read more literature that we used to. Instead of checking the book out of the library, children can read it online or download it and read it whenever they want. Merging technology and literature is beneficial, especially when teaching how to write.