Intellectual Autobiography

Beliefs About Reading and Writing in Elementary Classrooms

Over two years ago, I eagerly accepted a position in a rural, public elementary school in Waynesboro, Georgia. This small town, better known as the “Bird Dog Capital of the World”, appealed to my in eastern North Carolina roots. The beginning of the school year presented a third grade classroom teaming with wonderful individual personalities. However, it quickly became apparent that their poor academic performance was primarily a result of a tremendous reading deficit. One student, Josh, exhibited particularly poor literacy skills and behavior control. Attempts to contact the parent uncovered a mother of eight without transportation or telephone. Our first conference, conducted on a clean wooden porch with Coke crates for chairs, revealed her illiteracy and that an older sibling read my notes to her at night. She understood the importance of her son’s education and most importantly, she knew that school was her son’s only avenue out of poverty. Such experiences helped me realize the life changing implications of education and the fundamental importance of learning to read.

It was not until this experience, that I began to explore the relationship between the social context of my students and their cognitive ability. I began reflecting daily on methods to reach these children who live in a world quite distinct from any I had known. When I was small, my parents read to me and therefore I possessed many skills before entering kindergarten such as the idea of a story, a word and a sentence. I understood from a very young age the letter sound correspondences before ever reading words myself. My childhood included many trips to the library or the bookstore and I saw my parents read and write at home daily. Thus, I began to believe that reading aloud to children daily is of utmost importance. These children needed to hear the sounds form words, words form sentences and sentences create a story although they would not experience this outside of school. All children need to be given the opportunity to listen to a teacher read aloud, but especially these children who could be given the chance to go to a big city, a museum, or back in time through a book. The read aloud allowed me to give these children background information and vocabulary about a variety of topics. A large portion of the reading deficit was directly related to the lack of first-hand experiences and I wanted to begin to fill this gap during the school day. I found the read-aloud to be imperative to my science and social studies lessons especially. I was able to activate the students’ prior knowledge through reading aloud several days before the lesson. Most importantly, it motivated the children to want to read and hopefully become lifelong readers themselves, which is the ultimate goal of any teacher. When we read books for pleasure I hoped to instill a love of reading in my students. I aim to read books of all different levels and genres to encourage my students to want to read various types of literature in the future.

In addition to reading to the students daily, I began to value the prereading stage of a guided reading lesson. Students with limited experiences lack the background necessary to comprehend the text they are asked to read. For example, they are unable to comprehend a story about a beach if they don’t know about sand, salty water or waves. The teacher should build background knowledge before asking a child to read the story and understand its meaning. This critical component insures children learn more about a topic when the teacher has made a connection between what they already know and what they are about to read.

As a teacher, I also have to prepare my students to read a story with word attack skills. I use many methods to achieve these goals. Some of my students respond to short/long vowels and phonics rules while others prefer to look for chunks they recognized from other words. Again, the relationship between what they knew and the new information must be connected in a meaningful way. Using familiar chunks to decode requires a base of words from which to extract the familiar part. I think children need to be taught to sort words using patterns and sounds to help children tackle new words as well as begin to spell them. By using these diverse methods, I came to realize that a teacher must be flexible and willing to employ multiple strategies when teaching children to read.

After reading the story, I would need to continue connecting its meaning through a graphic organizer or a response activity. I found graphic organizers particularly helpful with my learning disabled students who lacked the skills necessary to link parts of the story together. One of the goals of a guided reading program is for students to read and comprehend independently. I found the organizers helped children begin to understand the literature much more clearly and transfer these skills to other stories. This year, I have added the Thinking Maps from Write From the Beginning which includes circle maps, bubble maps, and tree maps. My students are successful with using these maps to organize information across the curriculum. From the graphics, response activities often took the form of writing. I found much success with the Writer’s Workshop approach to writing daily. I believe children need to write each day to become good writers. Also, children need to see the process of organizing thoughts into a logical progression with think alouds and teacher modeling. They also need to learn about the grammar and mechanics of writing in the context of writing, not in isolated sentences. I teach these skills with a piece of writing from one of the students or one I have written in a mini-lesson before I ask the students to write themselves. Other ideas come from the children’s writing based on their level and needs. I believe children write best about their individual experiences and I often let the children choose what they want to write about each day. Children have many more details and less “writer’s block” if they are given the opportunity to choose the topic. They need to write at their own pace and level although I model expected use of punctuation, capitalization and grammar in the mini-lesson. In addition to writing, I think students need to edit their own work for mistakes and make some revision before the teacher evaluates the piece. In my experience, children begin to make less mistakes if they find them in their writing to correct instead of copying the teacher’s revisions repeatedly. Also, the revision piece of the writing process can only be achieved if the children take ownership of the work. The most critical part of the Writer’s Workshop is having children share their writing with others. I always allow children to share and require the peer audience to give feedback. . It is only through this stage that children begin to see themselves as authors and can look beyond the assignment itself.

Although Writer’s Workshop was a part of my undergraduate student teaching, I find myself each year deviating some from my training. I was heavily trained in the Four Blocks method and until I began teaching I knew little about other approaches to literacy. While I use many of the components of the Four Blocks program, I have learned through teaching that teachers must be flexible and open to other ideas about reading and writing. For example, this year my school uses literacy stations during guided reading. I like to use the literacy stations because it allows for small group instruction. The primary reading teacher and I are able to give children more instruction on the students’ various levels. I have also begun to use the Word Study approach to spelling and decoding with my small groups. Children are transferring the pattern sorting into chucks to help them decode and begin to spell new words. This helps to support the lower students, advance the average child and challenge the gifted student. A perfect program does not exist and teachers must be willing to be creative with all the different programs and create one of their own using parts of the various programs available today.

The many programs available for reading and literacy crisis has brought me to

graduate school to learn more about the teaching of reading and writing. Upon

completion of the reading program, I hope to possess the competencies to

become an excellent teacher of reading and writing. My personal experience with

students of illiterate parents stirred within me a curiosity about literacy that I cannot

ignore. I am truly fascinated with the process by which children learn to read. I hope to

continue to expand this interest in the following years through cultivating and integrating

new skills learned in graduate school and in my own classroom.