The Teaching of Reading and Writing

Journal Entries

#1

Chapter 2: Teaching the Reading and Writing Processes

            The teaching of the reading and writing processes, I would say is one of the most essential factors that a student has develop in a very young age. As I was reading the chapter, it reminded me of my childhood and hating writing or reading, for this I grew up with very litter knowledge of the important role that reading and writing play in education. I always blame my self for not paying attention to the teachers, my focus was math, nothing related to writing. Now I recognized that I did a lot of harm to myself, due to this, now I am not a very good writer. But I learned my lesson and I been working hard to improve my writing and now that I am part of this class; I need to increase my fluency.

            I was born here in California, but I was raised in Mexico, this is another factor why my writing is not that professional. As a fact, I strongly believe that following the guidelines explained in this chapter will really help. As I teach, I am also learning a language that is foreign to me, and that makes it more interesting. I was five by the time that I moved to Mexico and I lived over there for eleven years coming back at the age of sixteen. When I arrived to California, I started as a junior in high school. As a junior I was place in the lower ESL or ELD class, which was ESL 1-2, but in matter of one month they moved me all the way to ESL 5-6, which is one level below regular English. For me this was very harmful, I did was not given a strong foundation that now has affected my reading and writing skills.

            Reading this chapter opened my eyes to a cruel reality, I have to face students that might be more fluent that what I am that that scares me. But I have to manage the way to be efficient with them. I will apply the ten principals to be an effective teacher of reading. As a starting point I will talk to my master teacher to see what kind of books do they like to read and I will find something fun so all of them will keep the interest and also I am thinking of imitating characters as I read to them. As I was observing my master teacher reading aloud I notice that they kids really pay attention if we fluctuate voice and if we kind of imitate characters. As for the writing part, I do what to make it very fun and interesting for the students, I don’t want them to follow my foot steps and become very efficient in math and not in writing.

Chapter 2 and Chapter 3

            Words their way is a very interesting book to read as a future teacher. As I was reading chapter 2 and 3, I tried to remember how my teacher in kindergarten taught us the alphabet and word compositions, and the only thing that came to my mind was the abc song and that we had to stand up when the first letter of our name was called. About learning how to write words, the only thing that I remember was that she had us write cat and dog 20 times and then I remember she gave us another words to also write for like 20 times, for her, these was the way to do it. And I think it worked, because we did remember how to spell such words when we were tested.

            Words their way starts the second chapter with a striking sentence that goes “Teaching is about understanding students and their learning.”  This in my point of view is very important, especially when we are teaching how to read and write, as it is mention in the book, not all students are native English speakers and for this reason the students that are not native speakier may or are more likely to have problems when learning how to spell words. In essence the Spanish language is one of the commonly used languages closely related to English and for this, students that learn Spanish as their first language tend to write vowels in different order or their sentences appear to be out of order. By understanding these problems, the teacher will be able to focus on those students and make sure that they think in English when they are writing and not in Spanish. I say this, because in my own experience, the first years when I came back from Mexico, I was thinking in Spanish and writing my essays in English. The teachers always told me about this problem, and it is a big problem, because once we know a language, our native language it is hard to replace it with another language.

            The book also mentions that there exits a close relation between reading and spelling, which means that the more the student reads the better his or hers spelling would get. While reading this I understood why my teachers in high school would give me a lot of books to read, and I would always complain, but now I know that their intentions where good but they fail to give me a clear explanation of their purpose.

            With the method address in the book the Spelling inventory, I strongly believe that this will help and is helping a lot of students to improve their word inventory. If they are able to learn at least ten words a week, I would say, that is great. As I been observing in many classrooms, I have came to the conclusion that student can learn more than 10 words a week if they are in what Vygotsky would say understandable input. If the spelling words are written in a sentence or by a picture representing such word, children tend to learn and understand the way they are written faster and efficiently.  

Chapters 6 & 8

                       As I continue doing my observations, I have notice how it is very important to have such words as the 300 used words among 2nd graders. During my observation I became aware of how the students rely on those words and I was thinking that it might not be of that much help. I started thinking that it might help those students that really want to learn how to spell the words, but what about the other students that just want to spell it right but do not pay that close attention. I say this because a lot of kids are not going to be able to spell the words without having the list around them. Most likely studies have shown that this does not happen our else they will not be implementing it.