Entry 1: Philosophy on teaching literacy

Entry 1: Philosophies on teaching literacy

When I spoke with the fourth grade teacher I work with about her thoughts on teaching literacy to the students and her philosophy for teaching literacy she looked at me, and said, "ya know, I have never been asked that so I have never really thought about it much, other than what can I DO for EACH of my students to help improve their literacy."

After talking for a while about her different approaches, she finally said her philosophy would be "what ever it takes to help my kids 'get it' is what I will do." She told me about the ways she teaches her reading lessons: 1) by her reading the story then having the students read the story and discussing as they go along; 2) She reads the story once, over two days (1/2 one day, 1/2 the next) then have the CD read the story to them. She said both ways work, but she likes reading the story then play the CD and have the students read along, she said it build fluency and it helps the struggling readers feel confident to read out loud with their classmates instead of "by themselves" outloud when the class reads. She then introduces the vocabulary words on the very first day of the reading lesson, then goes over the vocab words as they read them in the story, and she has them define it in the story and then has the students define it in the world around them.

She said that she has learned to look in to what EACH child needs, she said sometimes she can't help them individually but will never give up on them and constantly finds things that "might" be able to help the student. For example she had one student who had very poor fluency and just didn't like to read, she tried many different things with him, until one day she let him check out a book from her personal library (one that she felt was too advanced for him), "BONES", she said he never put that book down. So she found more books like that for him and when they did mid-year scantron testing, his reading level had improved the most in the entire class!

I completely agree with her philosophy in that I would do anything I could to help improve a students literacy skills, math skills, or even musical skills!