Stages of Spelling, Writing Process, Personal Writing

Over the years, I have definitely had a lot of experience with writing in which I am very grateful for. I had excellent teachers in Elementary School who taught me the basics and prepared me, I had fairly good Language Arts teachers in middle school, and I had one English teacher in High School in particular who was absolutely amazing and inspired me to want to write and learn as much as I could. Personal writing has always been my favorite because I can write about what I want and how I'm feeling and that is much easier for me than to write about something I am not very interested in or I have a hard time with. While that does prepare me educationally, I would much rather write about personal things in my life. It has been pretty nice having this blog, because I have been able to practice more writing (which always can use more practicing) in a pretty easy way. I have always preferred writing over reading, but it is definitely becoming more clear to me that both of them are very important to achieve either one.

At first, I had no idea what I wanted to write about for my book project. But after thinking for awhile, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. My book is going to be about my experience in the marching band in high school. The beginning will discuss about how I was unsure about joining, the middle will describe how much I hated it at first and I was convinced I would be dropping out, and the end will talk about how much my feelings about it changed and how I ended up doing it for all 4 years and how much I took out of the experience...

Social Skills and Language Arts

When children have special needs especially reading and writing skills, it makes it difficult for them to express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings with others and it may hinder their social life. But in other cases, children may have very normal social lives. I truly think it depends on the child and how much encouragement they are receiving and how much help they are getting with their disability.

My younger brother has a learning disability and especially when he was younger; it was obvious that he was having trouble keeping up in class and that the bigger environment was not helping him improve his reading and writing skills. When my mom pulled him out and put him in a private school, he was in much smaller classes so he had more one-on-one help, which in turn made his social skills stronger. It is important that parents and teachers work with the specific child for their individual needs.

As a future teacher, I think that the most important thing is meeting the needs of every individual child. When a child has special needs, it is the teacher’s role to do everything they can to help the child reach their full potential and achieve goals that are developmentally appropriate for them.

Reading Wars

When I was little, I learned language in a variety of ways. I believe that the number one way to learn language as a child is to simply pick it up from adults and by interacting and hearing other people. When I babysit and observe young children, it is amazing to me to see how much they can easily pick up just by listening. They expand their vocabulary each and every day just by hearing new words. I also learned language because my parents always kept our house filled with books and I can remember my parents reading to me every night before bed. This not only helped me expand my language, but it also helped me to learn how to read as well. I don’t think learning language ever stops because I am constantly learning new words through classes, books, and every day conversation. Language is one of those tools that anyone can always improve on.

I think that as time goes along and children learn how to read, they do end up creating sight words. Because sight words are some of the most frequently used words in the English language, children pick up on these words more easily. I think it is a great idea to have “word walls” in the classroom especially for the younger grades, because it gives them a reference of some common words. A teacher that I observe has one of these and the students do use it when they are writing in their journals. I also think it is a great idea to pick one or two sight words per week to focus on because it helps the students to better understand these commonly used words.

I believe that symbols are one of the most important tools to impact literacy learning because children are able to connect words through pictures. I always loved looking at picture books when I was younger because it gave me a sense of the word was and for visual learners, symbols are a great tool. I think that this reinforces new words and old words for children who are beginning to read and it will help them remember it easier. I have seen in various classrooms, specifically preschool classrooms, teachers will label things around the classroom, so the children are learning the words and symbols at the same time. Everyone learns literacy in different ways, but I think that using symbols is very effective.

Writing

Writing is one of the most efficient tools of communication that we use in our society. People are able to express their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and a variety of other things to the world. I think that by reading people's personal thoughts, you can feel a connection to that person and have a better understanding of that person.

As a future teacher, I find writing very important and I am always learning new ways to incorporate writing into my future classroom for my students. I want my students to know that their writing matters, and I think it would be a great idea to just have creative writing some days where the students can write about whatever they want. When I was in elementary school, I always enjoyed when the teacher let us write about whatever we wanted to because it allowed for free expression and I could write about what was on my mind or simply something I wanted to share.

I believe that anyone can learn from reading other people's writing. Even now, I will read something that my roomate or a friend has written, and it helps me to better understand them. I have always been better at expressing my feelings through writing rather than talking, so I definitely feel that writing is worth reading.