I hope you all have had a good weekend. For those of you who may not know the blog topic for the week, simply follow this link for the prompt. I think we have had very good discussion over the past two weeks or so. Very insightful and informative.
Any midlevel ELA teacher NEEDS to know a few things about decoding and vocabulary instruction.
Here I am going to list a few things all midlevel ELA teachers ought to know:
- All children learn differently. With that said, there is not exactly one PERFECT way to reach out to children. Teachers must accommodate all students abilities. Differentiation is necessary.
- Learning the different parts of a word (the affixes) are essential for vocabulary understanding. By doing this, teachers are making students more and more independent to figure out words themselves.
- Useful resources include graphic organizers, read alouds, sustained silent reading, and the use of context clues.
- Make the learning concepts relevant to children's lives.
- Expose children to new vocabulary everyday. Teachers ought to model learning as well.
I do have one big concern about decoding and vocabulary instruction though. This is a lot of important information. How am I going to effectively teach such essential pieces of curriculum? Will I become overwhelmed? As of now, I am feeling a sense of anxiety towards all of this.
Well that is it for now. Remember to live your life the way you want to.
I think you asked the million dollar question! How do you teach ANYthing effectively? I think this will be answered once we start getting out into the classrooms and experiencing things for ourselves. It's so hard to predict what it'll be like, but I think we're taking all of the right steps, so far, to help us get closer to figuring that out!
ReplyDeleteYour bullet points are very clear and effective at letting us know that the tasks at hand will not be easy. Like you said, each child learns differently. That's the doozy. There are no clear rules as to how to teach each student. We have to figure it out. The rest of your bullet points help to figure it out. Good job
ReplyDeleteTony-
ReplyDeleteI agree with you; our discussions have been very informative. Each class period is loaded with one hot topic after the next. It is rather interesting because each of us are speaking from the outside. None of us have truly experienced being a full time teacher yet; we only have brief practices to base our opinions off of. We depend on multiple resources to give us an insight of the teaching world. Until we have our own classroom, it is very much up to us to gain any possible insight of teaching. So we talk, we question, we wonder, we worry, and we get excited-- together. There are books and websites galore. However, I believe the best resources are those which involve discussion and conversation with others in the field. Sharing "teacher talk" with our peers in education is also very valuable.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts through your blog posts. You make clear, strong points while raising good questions.
The teaching world is at our front door. It is up to us to answer, even if we don't quite yet know everything. We never will. We learn as we go. That's the wonder of education.