Course Description:

This literacy education based coarse focuses on the developing literacy skills of students of all grade levels. This course “weave(s) together reading, writing, and children’s literature to provide a balanced literacy approach.” Due to the new standards schools are adopting, this class was designed to include to the International Reading Associations (IRA) Standards for Reading Professionals  and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).  A requirement of this course was a field study component in our preferred field of study. Through this, we analyzed classroom activities with the literacy skills we have learned in class. Unique features of this course include “reading assessment, disciplinary literacy, text complexity, comprehension and unit creating—implementation—and reflection, and the infusion of technology.” Some activities for this course were a strategy notebook documenting important classroom activities, digital storytelling, text complexity analysis, mini- grammar fair, and a parent- teacher conference simulation.

 

 

Course Work:

Example Assignment: Strategy-Notebook

One requirement of this class was to make a Strategy Notebook, which we added to every week for the entirety of the course. I thought this was one of the most useful pieces of work from the class. These strategies do not just pertain to an english but can be used in any subject area. A lot of these strategies include organizational skills, simple formative (quick/ daily) assessments, and ways to incorporate advanced reading and activities into a class.

Examples within the Strategy Notebook:

• Non-fiction Feature Books:
  • While students are reading non-fiction books, they add the words they do not understand to this non-fiction feature book. With this, they had a picture to help them understand what the word means.
• Five Finger Summary:
  • Have students summarize by describing the characters, setting, beginning, middle and end. This can also be done as characters, setting, problems events solutions. There are many different examples of this, so teachers should find the ones that work best for their students.
• List group label:
  • Give students a group of words. Have them group the words in any way they wish. Have students read an articles containing all of the words they were given. Next, have them re- group the words and explain to the class how and why they did this