Entry #11: Final Considerations

 For my final considerations as this semester is coming to a close, there have been two topics that I have developed a deep understanding of: young readers and writers, and fluency. Both topics stick out to me because I have of personal connections with the topics. In young readers I have touch upon twice in my blogs as it is something that I have recently and still am living through with my own young children and the students I work with that are working through this stage in their educational journeys, even as their chronological age would suggest otherwise. With fluency, it is a deeper, personal connection because it sticks out to me due to my own struggles throughout my school life and into my adult life with fluency.

In learning about young readers and writers I never equated how much learning they do before formally learning the skills that we work on in school. I knew that reading to children early was very beneficial to kids early reading and eventually writing development and that playing was a kids form of learning with learning how to navigate their environment, but I never realized how much play also benefited their reading and writing skills. In reading Tompkins (2017) I learned more about play centers and how they are not just play centers but are used for learning literacy, "young children use these activities to reenact familiar, everyday activities and to pretend to be someone else. Through these literacy play activities, children use reading and writing for a variety of purposes (p. 116)." When they play in these centers, they are allowed to write out signs that allow them to "string scribbles, letters, and letterlike forms together... a natural, early expression of the alphabet and other written language concepts (Tompkins, 2017, p. 167)."  These were eye opening insight for me, that not only are they learning to interact with their environments and communicating with others, but they are also learning why literacy is important in their lives. They start to figure out how literacy impacts their learning on how to navigate their worlds and that the use of reading and writing impacts our everyday activities. I understand that this is not the level that I would like to be teaching, however this learning is a tool to understand where students might be coming from or what they could have missed. This will help me better to better serve my students and will help me be able to fill holes in my students learning that might come up.

A second thing that came up in the readings that I thought I knew enough about and is something that sticks out to me because my struggles with it, is fluency. I have been a struggling reader my entire life, and so reading about fluency helped me to understand myself a little better. I knew that being able to read words and at speed were parts of being a fluent reader. I never understood the prosody, being able to "read sentences expressively, with appropriate phrasing and intonation (Tompkins, 2017, p. 186)."  I struggle(d) with my ability to read words that I never developed appropriate speed in my reading and never developed my prosody, so even now when I read aloud, I read in a very flat tone with no real inflections to my voice. I say struggle(d) because even though I am better with my reading I still struggle over words that most adults my age would just be able to quickly figure out. This has gotten better over the last few years because I have found books that interest me to actually read for enjoyment, autobiographies and memoirs of entertainers that I find interesting, and some of the Harry Potter series, I can't bring myself to read The Order of the Phoenix yet. Even with this newfound enjoyment of reading I still struggle with my voice, my prosody. So, this helps me want to really make sure that I do all in my power as a teacher of young readers to be fluent readers so they can have a voice in their reading and enjoy what they read.

In keeping this blog this semester, I have gained a greater understanding of specific parts of the topics we read and discussed in class. I have a better understanding of what it takes to teach literacy; that it's more than just reading but our writing and communication skills too. It also gave me plenty of ideas on how to teach literacy, but I know that once I get my own classroom, even an idea that seems great and should work, that I could get a class where that idea is ineffective. But I have a ton of new ways in my toolbox and a reference to help me find new and different ways to teach these concepts. Ideas that will help me differentiate my instruction to make sure that I can help as many students as I can.

Tompkins, G. (2017). Literacy for the 21st Century A Balanced Approach: Seventh Edition. Pearson