 |
Tracy Caron, an ESL teacher at Garden City Elementary in Osseo, Minnesota
Tracy Caron, an ESL teacher at Garden City Elementary in Osseo, Minnesota, reflects on her teaching based on her reading of Ladybugs, Tornadoes, and Swirling Galaxies: English Language Learners Discover their World through Inquiry by B. Buhrow & A. Upczak Garcia, published by Stenhouse, in 2006. From this book I gleaned numerous good ideas I’d like to implement in the classroom, but it also got me thinking about the time factor teachers always talk and think about. On page 30 of the book the authors write, “We need to take time to sit with them [students] so that we can base our instruction on their needs. If we don’t know where they are in terms of their thinking and second-language development, we won’t be able to meet their needs.” These few sentences struck me for a few reasons. Reason one is that so many teachers (here, I’m mainly speaking of classroom teachers) feel that they must plow through district chosen curriculum in a fast paced way. Why, why, why? If a student doesn’t understand one concept of language, moving on quickly to the next topic isn’t going to assist the student in learning that language concept. I’m not against using district chosen curriculum, but plowing through the whole book seems silly to me. Choose the aspects of it that interest your students and you. Look at the curriculum and pull from it what your students need. Another reason the passage on page 30 interested me was that it got me thinking about my pace and how I try to figure out my student’s needs. This year we started using the DRA reading assessment as a formative tool to gauge our students’ reading abilities. I really enjoyed this, because it gave me a 30-minute block to focus on each student and really see his/her strengths and weaknesses as a reader. I feel this tool helps me to know my students’ needs. As a relatively new teacher, I am still searching for those tools which help me to understand my students’ levels. I feel that I have come so far since year one, yet still have much to work on. That same passage also tied in with an idea on page 35. The authors wrote, “Classroom conversations matter and are key to the development of language and thinking.” Conversations take time and are sometimes viewed as a luxury in public schools. But when I think about myself processing new ideas, I do like to talk it over, and ask questions. This is a good reminder to me, to remember to take time to let students talk, especially talk to each other in an academic way. If we don’t give our students opportunities to practice new language forms, teaching them the information is all for nothing. Another idea that was interesting to me from this book was the section on “Art as Literacy” on page 46. As I was reading this, I was reminded when some emergent readers and I were reading about camels a few months back. We were studying the desert and during guided reading one day my most struggling readers and I read a short book on camels. The book taught the students about the camel’s body and about what a camel’s life is like. As an extension activity I had them create a picture of a camel and label its body parts. I only anticipated them taking about 20 minutes on this, but the students really got interested in the assignment and I extended the assignment into the next day. I think this is a nice example of art as literacy, because these students struggle to read and write, but with art they can show so much more. We eventually decided to hang these in the hallways for all to see. I caught lots of students staring up at the camels, looking at what their body parts were called. In reading this section and thinking back to that experience, I know now that I must include more art into my everyday lessons. Leave a Reply |
 |
