For this week, we specifically looked into levelling books, matching right books to the readers and also looking at guided reading and shared reading lessons in class.

This week was quite heavy with information.

In levelling books, there are three main factors that we had to look for: Format, language structure and the content in the books. Looking at these allows us to determine the complexity of the books and be able to level them accordingly.

Guided reading and shared readings were touched on a little bit in the earlier part of the course so it seemed a little redundant, but the differentiation and the information of how they work differently and their different uses in the classroom is something that is definitely helpful.

This week was covering on how we could invite authors to the classroom and the process of how we can do this in our practicum as well.

I think this could be a good experience for students when they are doing a specific book as a whole class, but not when they do not have a context. I think this will only be possible if they all have read a book from the same author.

This could be however, a good project to plan ahead while planning a unit. Thus, author visits has to be arranged ahead of time for the author to schedule their time and come to visit the school. It is something to consider for maybe upper grades as they start to read short novels or books from a specific author.

This week’s main content was on digital platforms to help teachers in their classroom and running records practice.

One of the digital platforms that the presenter came in and introduced to us was Freshgrade, which is a digital platform that allows the teacher and the students to use and create their digital portfolio as the semester progresses. This allows constant recording of data and the progress that the students have throughout the year and could be used as a good both formative and summative assessment tool.

The running record practice was quite difficult. It was a very thorough process of recording a student’s reading skills by carefully recording every details of mistakes, repeats and completion of sentences. I don’t know if it would come in handy during my practicum experiences, but it was good to know that this particular practice exists.

This week was our class after coming back from our 2 week practicum.

We mainly shared our experiences during our practicum placements.

During my 2 week practicum, I was able to lead a guided reading lesson for group of students who were in need of extra help. It was very difficult, but the lesson planning templates and practices that we have done in class helped out a lot with my lesson.

It was very helpful in organizing what I should be looking for in the lesson and how I should go about it with the students. Some of the key moments were when the students were able to make their own connections with the story during the guided reading time.

It was great to be back and listen to other people’s experiences during their practicum.

This weeks main discussion was around early childhood literacy.

We learned that young children learn about books, print and writing long before they can read and write or going to school. This particular phenomena was defined as emergent literacy. This particular idea tells us that children develop gradually and that it does not happen in a day. It all starts from scribble to small words and later into sentences.

There are many indicators of emergent literacy development. Some of them are children starting to pretend read and write, listening and also producing a fictional narratives on their own.

This made me think about how I should view the grades ones in my practicum classroom with their literacy works. Should I correct most of their work or should I be selective in my correction?

End.

For this week, we were introduced to some of the read aloud resources for our future read aloud lesson planning and also our read aloud lesson plan assignment.

Moreover, we went over the new BC Language Art curriculum and its main contents in the classroom. It was good to see the new curriculum and us trying to make some connections and understand how it has changed.

Lastly, we went over our Autobiography assignment and shared some feed backs for our Autobiography assignments.

Two main things were covered in this weeks class.

Kaltura is a program/application that allows us to record what we are doing on the computer and also allows us to record our voices while doing something on the computer.

This was specifically introduced for us to use it for our Autobiography/literacy assignment.

The second thing was practicing to organize texts into categories of different levels. We have chosen 3-4 books and brought it to classroom to practice grouping these books into appropriate level of category so when we are in the classroom in the future, we have some idea to match the appropriate level of books for students.

It was good to have a practice doing the categorizing and seeing different types and levels of books.

Today really focused on read aloud.

We read the story called Shin-Chi’s Canoe. It was good to see how read aloud is done and how it tries to engage readers by using visuals and questions of why something might be there in the illustrations of the book.

The book was specifically about residential school and Indigenous children.

I liked the fact that there are three different parts to read aloud; before reading, during reading and after reading.

Tapping into the story in different part of the read aloud really helps the readers to understand and be engaged in the book.

This week, we met at the library for the first half of the class time.

It was very helpful in terms of having a general ideas about where each sections of literature were and to see how they had different types of literature to learning how to find them in the library.

The second part of the class was mainly sharing our ideas about our readings and our literacy projects. We were sharing our rough draft of our literacy assignment and share our thoughts about how we are going to move forward from what we have so far.

I have presented a literacy on soccer and how we also need different type of literacy in order to play soccer. It is interesting think about that literacy can be defined in many different ways.

Today was the first week of our literacy class.

Our main topic was about literacy. The question of the day was what is literacy?

We were to come up with our own definition of literacy and think of some other literacies that we have heard or know of in the class.

As for my own definition, I would define it as an ability to mentally visualize and perform with purpose to meet that particular visualization that one had in mind.

I think it is good that we think about different types of literacies and be more open about people’s different abilities to become literate on something.

However, most importantly, literacy is also an ability to understand something given some kind of information as well.

I think it is great to start off with the defining what we are trying to learn and engage in.

End.