JACKSON LTED601 Literacy Blog

 Reading through other blogs continues to be a pleasure for me as I really get the opportunity to gather different perspectives on topics we're all reading together. This week, I took a closer look at Cassidy Nelson's blog post on riddles , and her frame of mind when it comes to teaching through riddles and the outcomes presented by them.  I was so excited to learn about Cassidy's take on riddles, and how she even decided to include the children she nanny's in the assignment for that week. I absolutely love that she knew how excited a first and third grader would be to come up with riddles, and that she was so thoughtful in hearing what they had to say (which from experience, sometimes these riddles don't turn out to be that great or make sense at all really 😂). Cassidy was able to see first-hand how riddles enhance the development of metalinguistic awareness and vocabulary, and I think that is so special for her as a future educator, and also for someone who clear...

 At this point in my Early Childhood Education career, I fully understand the importance of Vocabulary Development; It correlates directly to developing fluent readers/writers and stems from phonemic awareness for the most part. What I find myself still learning is the "How" side of this topic. How can I, as a teacher of young minds, help develop a growth of vocabulary, while also keeping students interested in what they're ultimately learning? That last part is especially something I'd like to focus on in my teachings.  In this week's article reading, Marcy Zipke touches on motivation being a key factor in how successful a lesson will be. Her theory revolves around using riddles to engage students, and how these lessons subsequently aide in the development of reading comprehension, in addition to vocabulary development.  "Kids everywhere delight in working language. They do this for two reasons: (1) It is fun, and (2) it is how they make discoveries about la...

 I must admit, as I went through many of my classmates previous blog entries, I noticed I had forgotten so quickly my own responses from those weeks. I had to go back and look at the articles we read, (skim them mostly) and refresh my brain as to what we specifically learned about in these topics. Going through Sarah Seymour's posts also helped me to better connect what I did remember, with great ideas I had not even thought about.  Bless First and foremost, her titles for each blog post? GENIUS. They're all so funny! And I know that's not the point of this entry, but I mean, I thought they were great and it needed to be mentioned. Her entry on nurturing oral and written language development in early readers and writers was a specific post that made me really question my own ideas that Tompkins, (2017) Beauchat et al., (2009) and Muhammad (2020) brought to light. Sarah always does a great job in her entries of relating the topics discussed to English language learners, and ...

 As children begin to read and write, they use invented spellings - or unique spellings based on their prior knowledge of phonics. Invented spelling is typically used by students who are just learning to put sounds together to make words, and is something I never really thought of as a positive thing in terms of education. It wasn't necessarily something bad either, but I guess as a student, I was never really thinking about the way I was writing and spelling words and how that related to my own growth.  Stahl et al. discuss invented spellings in the article "Everything you wanted to know about phonics (but were afraid to ask)" stating that one way to develop phonemic awareness, that should be part of a beginning reading program, is to encourage children to use invented spellings. "Tangel and Blachman (1992) found that phonemic awareness training increased children's growth in invented spelling. It would make sense that practice in invented spelling would similar...

 Going through this week's required readings, something that caught my attention most was in the article titled, "Building Preschool Children's Language and Literacy One Storybook at a Time" from Katherine Beauchat, Katrin Blamey, and Sharon Walpole. When reading about the Comprehension Development section of the article, Beuchat et al speak about questions that ask a wide-range of thinking tasks from students.  Firstly, to clarify, Comprehension Development belongs to Innovation Configuration (IC), a tool for teachers to implement in order to help with student understanding as part of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM). To be honest, when first reading through the differences between CBAM and IC and how they related to each other, I was a little confused. Upon further reading, I was able to understand the importance of IC and how I can implement each section to improve my own teaching. More specifically, the Comprehension Development section and the use of CROW...

 Dear Dr. Jones, I would like to start off this letter by saying thank you! Thank you for your support this semester and endless knowledge on a topic I really wasn't sure about when first beginning this class. I'm happy to report that I'm really enjoying my time learning all about literacy, its different meanings, and becoming aware of my own literacy background and habits. I would say the class is not exactly what I thought it would be, but only because I was mildly blind to what literacy entailed, and how the topic could be so vast. I'm pleasantly surprised to be learning as much as I am, and to be honest, a little surprised at how much I actually find myself able to contribute to the conversations we have in class. I have definitely become more aware of my own literacy habits in just the first six weeks of this semester and through this course. I always knew I wasn't a "big reader" growing up; my mom was always reading and still loves it, while I always...