Readings

I found this week readings to be very interesting and useful. I liked how the Tompkins article gave us principles to perform effecting literacy instruction. It is very beneficial to see the different ways that students learn. In order to effectively teach in school we need to use a variety of teaching instructions because not every student learns the same way. Some students do better with audio instructions and some do better with visual. I thought the paragraph over authentic learning activities was interesting and that it the example the book used of being a chef going to cooking school and learning from experience was a good visual. I knew that in order to get better in literacy it is important to read and do activities to get better in it however I just thought that meant having the students read for ten minutes a day. However after the reading I began think that student could benefit more from authentic activities so that the student can get more experiences to further their learning. I also liked how the book mention that readers and writers are strategic because they use cognitive and meta-cognitive. It is important that student think about what they are doing but more so to think about how they are doing it. Students need to think about “does this make sense, do I understand this, or what should I change to make it better?” Whenever they are reading and writing. So I liked how the reading brought some light on to that aspect of student thinking and more off that how we as teacher need to ask thought provoking questions to make student think about their thinking. Once they are aware of thinking about their thought process they can become better students.

The main idea I took away from the readings this week was that students all learn in different ways and that it is up to teachers to realize this. Also that it is more understanding how they learn that we can then become effective in our teachings.