School lessons-- They will always be connected to the real world!

**No Week 3 Post because there was no school**

In today’s class, we learned many things from both a student’s perspective and from a teacher’s perspective. From a teacher’s perspective, we learned the importance of doing your work carefully and the value you add to your work when you make it look professional. In the beginning of class, our teacher gave us a mini-lesson on using Microsoft Word to create math worksheets for the students. It shows the students that you care enough to make their work, and it shows that as a teacher, you take pride in your work.

We also learned the importance of being meticulous when creating graphs. We had a project where we got into groups and had to create a story out of data (chosen by each group) and represent that story in a visual graph. In today’s class, we had a gallery walk where we walked around the room and left questions and comments on people’s graphs. It was really interesting to see how having the story in our heads sometimes causes us to forget important details in our graphs. When creating such graphs, we must always do so in such a way where we assume the audience knows nothing about the story, and must therefore be done very carefully. Interpreting a graph correctly can only be done if the graph itself was done right. So, how can I make this relevant to my students’ lives? I understand that by allowing the students to choose their own story to tell, I am allowing them to make a personal connection to the project. Still, making students feel like the lessons they learn in school are relevant to their lives goes much further than this.

The implication for classroom practice in regards to this topic would be to get the kids to start thinking about their futures. Have them share their potential career interests and have them do a project where graphical representations would be relevant. Still, this is hard to do since middle school adolescents often change their minds about future careers, but it will at least get them to start thinking about the association of the lesson and careers in the ‘real world’.

Phonemic Awareness

I had my last meeting with my kindergarten buddy. I hope he learned as much from me as I learned from him. The last activity we did is called Interactive Spelling. The goal was for my buddy to listen to the sounds I was making and associate them with letters. I would make the sounds by stretching the words. For example, one of the words I used was ‘get’. I would say the word slowly and stretch each sound so that all sounds are clearly heard. I asked my buddy what sound he heard at the beginning and what letter goes with that sound. He wrote the letter down. We did this for each sound: beginning, middle, and end, until each part of the word was spelled out.

I learned a lot about my buddy through this activity. For example, he gets the ‘a’ and ‘o’ sounds mixed up sometimes. One of the words I stretched out for him was cart. He wrote it as cort. He had a harder time with vowels, but with there was one example of his struggle with a consonant. Instead of writing the word ‘had’ he wrote ‘hat’. After a few more examples where he displayed difficulty differentiating the vowel sounds for ‘a’ and ‘e’ I decided to work on two similar words: bet and bat. I had him pay close attention to my voice when stretching the words. He also had a hard time with ‘e’ and ‘o’ so we continued this practice with the words ‘get’ and ‘got’. As we did more examples like this, he became more confident making these distinctions.

In Word Identification Strategies, we have read about the importance of phonemic awareness. It requires children to identify single sounds. Phonemic awareness makes it possible for kids to use phonics to read and spell new words. It was interesting to read that kindergarteners that have good phonemic awareness become better readers than kids that have good rhyme awareness but less developed phonemic awareness. It is more beneficial for kids to learn to identify single sounds than to depend on rhyming to be able to read words. Identifying single sounds will help children better identify words. It will give them the ability to distinguish and manipulate individual sounds, helping them decipher new words. As a future teacher it is great to read about these things now. Helping kids create phonemic awareness will allow them to become better readers, and also help them relieve the stress that accompanies learning how to read, as it would ideally make the process smoother.