Tell a child that you SEE them everyday!

“Reaching one’s potential to learn depends so much on the relationships between the people involved, not so much on the content of what is being taught.” (pg 161)

I love this! I need to cross stitch this on a pillow, embroider it on an blanket or paint, frame, and hang it over my desk. Or perhaps Ill write it on my mirror so I can read it every morning!

Any teacher that goes down in my memory as a good one, or one that I have learned a lot from, was a teacher with whom I was safe and connected.  It is not just about giving “warm fuzzies” either.  It is about being intentional and particular about what you are celebrating in a child.  They know when you are being generic and “just like every other adult”.  The art of making a connection with a child is about telling the child that “I SEE YOU”. It is celebrating a child in a way that brings out a strength that is beyond a surface awareness. That you SEE them for who they are, beyond whoever they are putting out in the world. (This is especially useful with kids who are typically in trouble.)  SEEING a kid, I believe, is one of the biggest motivations that a kid can get from an adult.  It can help them rise to being the kid that you SEE inside them, and not the one that they are choosing to show you at the time.

Hale does an excellent job in demonstrating that the art of giving a strength is not just about being positive.  It is about SEEING a child and letting them know that you SEE them!

Beautiful.  Consider me inspired!

Mountain Language Board

At first the Mountain Language Board at the most recent school we visited seemed a creative way to practice and instruct grammar lessons.  But as I sat and watched I became less impressed with the board and more…. well bored.  

Yes it is a great tool to practice and demonstrate a students’ ability to fill in the appropriate blank in a worksheet.  It could be a potentially useful tool for standardized testing if the students are asked to diagram sentences out of context.  It is also a great way to have students utilize “typical” resources: dictionary, grammar wall of terms, textbooks.  However, were any of those questions meaningful? Would they be able to utilize them in their own writing or identify them in the books that they are reading?  Much like in math, if they can do the standard algorithm for an addition problem but don’t understand why it works, is it meaningful and does it support positive critical thinking and learning skills?  Is it a teaching tool that is more meaningful and useful for the teacher than for the students?

I enjoyed Hales perspective on creating meaningful resources.  The Mini Lessons and Try-Its seem a great way for a student to learn a specific grammar point/craft, and then make a personal example that they can then use as a personal resource. I know for myself, if I have written notes in the margins of a book or a personal example, they are often a better source in which I can draw upon to jog my memory then the highlighted sentence I had in a textbook.

  

Much like the rest of the tools that we are given for our classroom, they can all fall flat if not utilized in a meaningful way. The WORD WALL is a great example from Hale.  It CAN be a great tool or it could be meaningless and just something that is on your wall. Or, a science experiment can fall flat if you aren’t asking questions to open the students mind or if you make a statement that crushes their exploration.  It is not just how cool mentos are falling into diet soda, but why is there a reaction? What would happen if….. What makes it do that….. and then follow up with some meaningful work with the cool experiment.

My Questions:

-Does the standardized test ask students to diagram sentences? Are they asked to identify a prepositional phrase?

-Is the Mountain Language board a necessity when dealing with large classes and a lack of time?

-Is there a way to make the Mountain Language Board meaningful?

-Are there positives that I am not seeing?

Hale Ruined Harry Potter.... kind of... ;-)

Hale ruined me for reading… but in a good way!

I used to read books like Harry Potter with ease. I didn’t pay attention to why I enjoyed them, or why they were like candy for my brain? But now, now what am I doing? I am reading them through the lenses that Hale helped create and the books have taken on a new dimension.

Now when I read:

Ron and Hermione came crashing down the stairs behind Harry, wands pointing, like his, at the unknown man now standing with arms raised in the hall below.

I read it in an entirely different light. 

I can see the use of action words that help create A Sense of Sound: Crashing.  Instead of Ron and Hermione followed Harry down the stairs, you can now hear the noise they are creating.

There is also a fantastic use of Commas with Ing Phrases. Rowling is able to give a clear description of Ron and Hermione in comparison to Harry, and as a group, by using commas.

The final part of the sentence “at the unknown man now standing with arms raised in the hall below” helps Show the scene because her description of the man “standing with his arms raised”.

And there is also the length to her sentence.  Instead of making two medium length sentences she chooses to create one long sentence.  Which, in my opinion, helps propel the listener forward, much like the characters, as they come “crashing down the stairs”.

Yes, Hale has ruined me for reading without seeing the intentional language that authors use. However, it excites me.  She gave wonderful practical application skills and helped me to develop lenses for reading in a way that will help me teach my students. LOVE IT!

Phonics Torture Flashbacks

Explicit, Systematic Phonics in Early Literacy Contexts…. Ok That subtitle for our reading this week scared me.  I got flashbacks of the “reading van” that I was forced to attend as a child.  The “reading van” was a trailer attached to our school that had a mired of different torture tactics to suck the life out reading and writing.  There were worksheets upon worksheets of phonics skills and piles of erasers to erase any and all mistakes.  There were red markers to highlight all your deficiencies and a giant clock to tick out the remaining minutes of your pathetic little life!!

Do we acquire a language or do we learn a language?  Although I feel that phonics is a part of the learning process I don’t think that it is the, “be all end all” of learning.  Communication, comprehension and the desire to be understood, are some of the driving forces behind the acquisition of a language.  The Cusumano article uplifts me because she states things like:

o   Practices such as these may actually stunt the natural development of writing skills in young children.

o   The learning can progress rapidly if the child discovers and tests out the rules themselves instead of having them imposed from without.

o   Adults need to look for and value the message without insisting on cleaning up conventions at this stage of growth

o   Yet this writer appears to be moving towards conventional spelling under her own steam.

o   Provide praise and encouragement for the ideas without criticizing the errors in conventions.

The chapters in Sound Systems weren’t as bad as I thought they were going to be.  They did talk about making the lessons meaningful and discussed the importance of phonemic awareness and phonic skills.  I also appreciated having a tool to be able to evaluate the progress of a students learning by seeing the percentage of conventional spelling.  However, I am hesitant to make the learning of a language solely around word recognition and the ability to sound out words.  What about learning through meaningful text, exploring different writing possibilities and supporting creativity and the desire to be understood? 

Am I out in left field here?

Literacy Dig

By observation of the pictures pasted on the front windows we can see that the building is a grocery store. Even without the ability to read one can see that lettuce is lettuce and bread is bread.  Whether or not the bread is multigrain or if the lettuce is organic however, depends on our ability to read. Volunteering in an Adult ESL class I have seen the teachers utilizing grocery circulars to help teach food, counting and functional everyday vocabulary. After intentionally observing the literacy found in a grocery store it is easy to see why. 

After traveling in other countries where my language proficiency was limited I look at something as simple as grocery shopping as a potential nightmare. From a cross culture perspective the grocery store can be a confusing and overwhelming experience.  This literacy dig, and the time I have spent abroad, has helped me appreciate my ability to read.  The grocery store where we observed did not account for illiterate people or for people with different cultural backgrounds.

Cultural literacy is key to being able to navigate through a grocery store.  I remember standing in line at a checkout counter in Guatemala only to be turned away because I didn’t realize that I needed to weigh and price my vegetables before I came to the checkout counter.  We know how to order meat, cheese and fish because we have seen our mothers, fathers and friends do it.  There is not a sign indicating to the customer to “order here”.  If you didn’t understand the process how would you know what to do?

Even if we are unable to read or are from a different culture we can utilize universal symbols to understand our surroundings.  We see these on bathroom doors, road signs and post offices. At the Courtesy Center in the grocery store there was a lack of symbols.  There were signs advertising ones ability to buy stamps, a gift certificate, bus tickets and to send a fax but without an ability to read English these words would be meaningless. Throughout the store I only found one sign translated. The signs communicating invitation, customer service or products were only in English.  The sign indicating hostility, “This area is being monitored by surveillance camera”, was the only sign translated into Spanish. This message speaks volumes to potential multicultural customers.  

The exciting thing about literacy is it is everywhere.  There are plenty of ways to practice and make learning meaningful for everyone, no matter how old you are or where you were born.