Reading Response #4

Last spring, I worked at North Charleston Creative Arts Elementary, teaching creative writing to students in the after school program. I normally work with grades 1 through 5, but at NCCA, I was also assigned to the kindergarteners and pre-k students. It was a challenge to find creative writing activities that they could grasp and still have fun with but one of their favorites was when I read a picture book to them, "Library Mouse", and we did an activity based on the story afterwards.

Shared storybook experiences are a good way to help pre-schoolers and kindergarteners develop their language knowledge in a number of aspects. Phonologically, storybooks help to develop phonemic awareness, as many books for children use rhymes and alliteration to tell the story. Semantically, it helps to expand their vocabulary as they might hear words not often used in their daily lives, but the pictures in the book help to define the meaning for them. On a syntactic level, hearing a storybook read aloud can help them to develop and use more advanced sentence structures. In the realm of morphemic development, being read to helps children learn distinctions between tenses. Many storybooks use clever wordplay and repetition to emphasize the different forms that verbs can take. Pragmatically, simply by hearing the story and knowing that words in the book are used to tell what is happening, they begin to learn that written language can be used to communicate in many contexts.

Reading Response #3

I grew up in southeastern Connecticut, but this dialect quiz from The New York Times placed me in Yonkers, New York City, and Newark, New Jersey. I have never lived in these places, but it makes sense when you consider that my mother grew up in Queens and my father in New Jersey. As stated in Chapter 3, I picked up my parents' dialects because we all learn to speak "within our home and cultural settings" at a very early age.

In the classroom, at any level, formal or academic English is certainly the most appropriate. While it is good to embrace diversity, it is also important to emphasize that within a professional or school setting, Standard American English should be used. My rule of thumb when working with my elementary school students in North Charleston is that if they are simply talking to me, I will let their dialect (typically AAVE) slide. But if we are writing anything, I tend to correct their work to be in an academic register. In this way, I am encouraging them to become linguistically flexible and develop bidialectism.

In Chapter 4, it was interesting to learn just how early in a child's life they begin to process and develop language. Reading that infants as young as 4 days (!!!) seem to prefer hearing their "mother tongue" over other languages is fascinating. The significant strides babies and young children make through the different stages of language development is incredible. From the early phonological stage, where infants will babble and attempt to mimic conversation, to semantic and syntactic, where they begin to use invented words or speak in one-word sentences, up to the final pragmatic stage where they are beginning to use gestures and eye contact when speaking. Toddlers go through the same five stages, this time spurred along by their energy and inquisitiveness about the world around them. All of this occurs in (roughly) the first 3 years of a child's life. That's pretty amazing.

Reading Response #2

I understand that the textbook we are looking at for this class is about literacy development in very young children, and I understand that it is an important area of study, as literacy development does begin at a very early age-- some might argue that it begins almost as soon as one is born. However, as someone who is planning on becoming a middle grades teacher, it was an interesting exercise to try and connect with some of the suggestions about building School-Home Connections made in this chapter of the textbook.

By sixth or seventh grade, very few students have the same eagerness about school as younger children. They aren't proud of their locker's decorations or neatness, they don't want their parents showing up to school where they could embarrass them in front of their friends. The "tween" years are some of the most awkward and difficult years of a person's life, and to many of them, the last thing they want is their parents hanging around.

I still remember a time my mother chaperoned a school dance when I was in sixth grade. A song came on and she screamed "YEEE-HAW!" at the top of her voice. I was mortified. Parent involvement in middle school is a lot trickier than it is when their children are five years old.

One hopes that by the time students reach middle school, they already have had previous teachers who established learning communities through respect and frequent communication. By helping parents to establish good relationships with all their child's teachers early on, it can benefit the type of good relationship they have with middle and high school teachers.

At the middle grades level, the amount of parent involvement is fairly low. There are no opportunities for parents to come eat lunch with their child or read stories to the class. The amount of at-home learning activities goes way down because the parents might not have had as much schooling or might not remember the content from when they were in school. Communication between the teacher and parents, at least from my own memory, is limited to calls (and now emails as well) home when students are misbehaving or failing the class, newsletters about general school events such as field trips or special celebrations, and parent-teacher conferences.

These interactions are just as important at the middle school level as they are in early childhood. I believe that students at this age should still see that their parents are invested in meeting their educational needs. Regardless of whether a student is six years old or in sixth grade, parent involvement must be fostered for the benefit of everyone.