Thus far into the school year I had expected to much more instruction involving the aspects of literacy. Although literacy is easily transferred across subject areas, there has been far less focus on literacy within my placement. This has been due to a rough start to the school year. Two days before school began, our principal was to inform two of our primary teachers that they will no longer have their job. This shifted teachers to unknown classrooms, raised student to teacher ratios, and placed our assistant principal in a classroom as a full time teacher. Therefore, resources still have not been distributed (textbooks, etc.), and the remaining teachers at my school are still fearful that they will lose their job.
However, I have yet to see any representation of the book club plus model within my classroom. My CT has informed me that he does incorporate a book club into his literacy instruction, but he is still waiting to receive student scores from the Scantron and from STEP (which is beginning this upcoming week) so that he can effectively group the children and begin assessing their literacy needs. Nevertheless, it is a relief to know that my CT has a major in Language Arts and that is his primary passion in teaching. The first two hours of our day is becoming dedicated to language arts. The students engage in 25-30 minutes of silent reading, D.E.A.R, then they actively journal a summary of their reading or orally retell the main events of their book. My CT and I have already initiated small group sharing, pair sharing, and individual oral retelling of a students reading for that day. This has been a great morning “procedure” to include in our classroom, as students are already beginning to pick up a book and start reading immediately follow the pledge and morning song.
Literacy is actively engaged in by both the students and adults in my classroom as our classroom community has allowed students to feel comfortable interacting with literacy in a variety of forms.
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