To be honest, I am thrilled about this course but somewhat scared at the same time. I am excited because this is my first language arts course in college and hope to learn a great deal of information about teaching. When I was in grade school, English and language arts were difficult subjects for me. I often struggled. My goal for this class is to learn how to teach students in many different ways instead of one. I want to be able to reach and effectively teach all of my future students. Are there different ways that are more affective for ESL students and learning disabled students? I also want to know how to teach children to read. Is there a specific strategy for this?
I am also extremely interested in other resources that I could use as a future teacher. It is possible that there is technology that I am unaware of that I could benefit from while teaching. Overall, I feel that this course is extremely important. I believe that it will help shape the way that I teach in the future.
3 comments:
I'm thrilled about this course, too! In some ways, you are lucky to have struggled becuase people for whom literacy comes easily have to work a lot harder to be metacognitive about how learning happens. THere are a billion and one strategies for teaching reading- we'll work on getting a core foundation.
Language arts and English were always really difficult subjects for me also! When I look back on how I learned in these subjects in high school, I was only motivated by certain genres. If I read something that I could relate to at that age, then I was more able to think critically about the reading. I think for a lot of students in grade school, language arts seems boring and unrelated to their lives. By offering me the opportunity to explore certain genres, my teacher was able to engage me in class discussions.
Teaching someone to read seems so scary and challenging! Where do you start?! I often become nervous about this too. I think that if students have strong phonemic awareness, sound letter knowledge, and a developed sight word vocabulary, teaching them to read calls for giving them many opportunities to read in the classroom. The more practice a student has at reading, the better they will become. Also, by teaching students comprehension skills like decoding and context cues, students will become more independent readers. This reminds me of chapter three in the Van de wall text. The text talks about how content knowledge builds in math, I think that it is the same for reading. The more connections that the students can make while reading, the better readers they will become. In order to fully comprehend ideas in books, students need the prior knowledge to support these new ideas. I think that the most important thing is to get to know your students as readers and analyze their strengths and weaknesses in reading. By assessing your students individually, you will be able to build off of their strengths as readers.
You asked the question is it different to teach language arts to students with special needs. Well I am a special education major and my placement is currently in a special education classroom. My CT always says that students with learning disabilities are just as capable, or more capable, of learning and retaining the same information that their general Ed peers are. They just need the information given to them at a much slower pace and repeated several times; if you do this they have a much better chance at retaining the information. About half of the students in my classroom are learning their grade level material from the Lansing Pacing Guides, but the information is just given to them much slower and they are quizzed and tested much more often. Obviously it is not going to be that simple with all students who have specific learning disabilities, but once you address those disabilities they have a much greater chance of succeeding.
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