January 30th Post- Sara Lorenc

I hope to teach in a community similar to the one I grew up in. I was raised in St. Johns, Michigan which is a small community of about 10,000 people in a very rural setting. The town is full of suburbs and could be classified as middle class. Everyone seems to know each other which gives the city a strong community feeling. I have interned for four years during my career at Michigan State and have been placed in 2 inner city Lansing schools and one suburban school in Holt; I have to say that I enjoy Holt the most because I feel most comfortable and secure in the surroundings because I have become familiar with them through growing up. Because teaching jobs are so scarce, this class will hopefully show me how to adapt my teaching style to accommodate all children and not just the ones I am used to teaching or feel comfortable teaching.I would like to learn different teaching rechniques to utilize when teaching literacy in general; I want to know all the components that correspond to literacy to make sure I am covering all bases. There are many diverse literacy learners in my placement; my CT takes students back 5 by 5 and tests their reading once a week and levels them in 4 different color categories. With one color being the highest reading level, colors in between being in between excellent and poor, to one color indicating very poor. The students are then placed in reading groups and are allowed more one on one time with the teacher if they are struggling and less if they are succeeding.

Reading: Hassett and Curwood: Theories and Practices of Multimodal Education

The reading presented how children learn multimodaly, which means their learning is influenced by the context they're in while learning and the context in which the text is presented. A student not only reads text for face value but also goes under a sub-conscious sociocognitive experience as well. The student sees the text but intakes the date depending on the font, color, placement, etc. Picture books also lend themselves to this category because the pictures presented in the books can also determine how one reads text. The teacher can help address and influence the way students looks at learning literacy through her lessons. She can model how and what is important when reading text and what visual cues to be aware of in order to get the most out of the text the students are reading.