Taught how to Teach: The Educational Journey of a Pre-Service Teacher

Intentional Lesson Planning: Why it is Important for Educators to Give Students Opportunities to Learn About Other Histories. Elementary educators sometimes struggle to navigate conversations about race and diversity within their classrooms, it can be difficult to summarize and discuss these topics with young learners, seeing as these parts of history involve mature content that their students have usually not been introduced to. I have met many teachers who would like to avoid discussing these topics all together, but that is unacceptable and does a great disservice to the students within those classes. It is our job, as educators, to teach our students about other histories, one’s often not taught in schools, in order to equip them with the knowledge they need to know about, and prepare them for, the world around the (Cultivating Genius, pg 139).  In order to teach any topic, educators need access to quality resources, this is especially true when teaching history, and, unfortuna...

     Shared reading and reading aloud are literacy activities that are used within early childhood and elementary classrooms. Both activities assist in improving students language development, literary knowledge, and book handling skills, but the purpose of these activities are not the same. During a shared reading, teacher and students read aloud a large print book, with lots of engaging illustrations. Students will join in the reading to assist in decoding the print by using clues from the page, and will discuss the text while answering questions the teacher has prepared based on the children's needs (Team, 2017). Shared reading aims to provide students with an enjoyable reading experience, while building their language skills, enhancing their knowledge of vocabulary and phonics, and to “teach children systematically and explicitly how to be readers and writers themselves” (Mooney, 2000). Reading aloud is also a group activity with teacher and students, but unlike share...

Books About the ABC’s: Why Are These Important to Student Success? Alphabetical knowledge, or knowing letter names and later, letter sounds which merge into formal phonics instruction (Savage, 2011), is one of the best predictors of student success when they are learning to read. The ability to look at an individual letter and recognize its sound is a skill that children are taught and must work to develop over ti me (Savage, 2011, pg. 28), they are not born with the ability, so it is our responsibility as educators to teach them these things within our classroom. This can be done through letter charts, alphabetical notecards, or, what I will be discussing in this blog post, ABC books. In this blog post I will highlight the process of how students begin to learn letters, recognize them, and associate the symbols with the sounds they make, while giving you a few examples of great ABC books that can assist in the teaching process. Pulling On Knowledge from the World Around Them: When yo...

  First things first: What is Phonemic Awareness?       In my literacy classes we have been discussing different types of language, language use, and other topics revolving around the subject since this fall semester started. While I was familiar with broad topics, like utilizing inclusive language in the classroom, this past week I learned about a new skill that I was taught, will have to teach, and was not even aware I had. Phonemic awareness, which is the understanding and manipulation of spoken words and syllables that language is made up of ( Foundations of Literacy ). A quick summary of the information I gathered from the text I read and engaged with online is that phonemic awareness is one’s ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in order to form and understand different words. Additionally, the english alphabet only has 26 letters in it, but our language as a whole is made up of 44 sounds that are used to form all of the words in our vocabulary...

  An Introduction to Me