Tuesday, January 15, 2008
My goals for this class...
I have several goals for myself upon the completion of this class, TE402 language arts. I learned a lot about teaching during TE401, but not as much as I would have liked. I hope this class gives me more ideas and fun activities that can be implemented in an elementary classroom, specifically ones for children with special needs. I realize the difficulties many of these students have with reading and writing, and these skills are the basis for almost any other subject in school. It is very important the students know the basics of language arts so they can succeed in their other classes and subjects. I would like to learn some ways that can get students engaged in reading, because from personal experience in elementary school I absolutely despised reading. Looking back on my elementary school years, I realized several reasons why I did not like to read. First, every book I was assigned to read was picked out by a teacher, they were of no interest to me and were often written before my parents were even born. I never had the opportunity to pick my own book to do a report on, it was always the teachers choice. Second, I thought of reading as a chore, not something that could be done for pleasure. I would like to know how to get students engaged in reading, and make them realize that reading can be entertaining and fun. I’m sure they’re many different activities and ways to create a positive learning environment that encourages students to read and write, but I am only familiar with a few. It will be interesting to hear the ideas of the other people in my class throughout the semester because other people often have new ideas for engaging students that I have never thought about. These are just a few of the things I hope to take out of this course.
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3 comments:
We will have several examples of activities that you can use in the classroom, but more importantly, we will give you the theoretical bases of these activities so that you have the tools to come up with more and adapt them to whatever teaching context you find yourself in. It looks like you have already done some thinking about engagement and have some ideas of what might get in the way- an EXCELLENT first step. Keep that up- look at what works and doesn't work in your field placement and ask yourself, your CT, and the kids why.
I completely know what you are talking about when you said that you thought of reading as a chore. I often thought of language arts as irrelevant to my life and my goals. I did not see the importance or significance in language arts. I remember having the idea that language arts was for the smart students. I did not feel that what I had to say was smart enough, or that I had a wide enough vocabulary to write a really good paper. I would love to know how to engage students in reading also. I think that allowing students to read genres that are interesting to them is extremely important to their motivation and enagement in language arts. Im sure your personal experience in language arts will help to make you a strong teacher because you will see the relevance in the diversity of genres.
Tina, I agree that I would have liked to learn a bit more in TE401, especially in science. I feel that the language arts TE402 is extremely critical. I also believe that it is important to have special education students highly engaged in literacy. I read week 3’s readings for language arts and I realized that that it is extremely important that students express their own personal connections during book talks. This could help engage special education students in your future classroom. Some special education students may not feel comfortable because they do not know how to read and may want to express their opinion and thoughts in class but are scared to. By including them and encouraging them to express their personal connections in class it could help them build more confidence.
I have a learning disability and sometimes the reading was difficult for me to comprehend in grade school. I often found ways to get around reading the novels that were assigned by watching the video instead. I wish that my classroom teachers in grade school would have helped encourage me to read more of the assigned books. It may have helped me if there were fun activities that centered around the book.
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