Classrooms as Learning Communities-Learning Integration Essay 2

Reflection:

• I learned from this essay that a communtiy of learners happens with how the classroom is set up. For example that the reading corner isn't next to anything noisy and that the students are able to interact with each other by placing their chairs in groups instead of off by themselves to encourage social skills. Another thing I learned is to have everything at students eye level so that they can learn and intact with everything in the room and to also gain independence.

Connection Essay #1

In Templeton, chapter 3, talks about having a classroom library and how important that is to students education especially in the early stagings of learning. Templeton mentions different aspects that will draw younger and older students into the reading nook such as puppets, poetry charts, warm lighting, soft chairs, etc by creating such an atmosphere it will hopefully encourage the students to go and pick up books to read and explore. I have seen this within my own placement at Hazelwood in a Kindergarten classroom, where the main teacher has set up the library in a quite conner of the room with many pillows, warm lighting that comes from the window, and puppets to use if the students desire. These items have drawn many students into the conner for a book. My CT has taken care in having all books easily accessible to all students by the bookshelves being at their level. Templeton also goes into detail about the quality and variety of book given to the students “these books will span several grade levels and represent many different genres….These books should be attractive, in good condition, and interesting to students in the grade level…They should also represent a wide range of cultures and peoples — intentionally including stories of children and youth with different abilities and various racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.” (79, Templeton). My placement teacher over the years has accumulated many books, ranging from picture book to small chapter books. She has continued to add more diverse books every year and she throughs out books that are falling apart.

Another concept that Templeton has mentioned and that I have witnessed within my placement is from chapter 3 on page 90 where it talks about independent reading time: time spent reading. Independent readers are being built in my Kindergarten classroom placement through book box time in the afternoon, which is where the student have a box full of personal level appropriate books that they will read by themselves quietly. Later in the year the students “visit [the] classroom library at least once per week with the intention of browsing for and selecting the independent-level books they’ll be reading during independent reading time” (91, Templeton), this allows for the students to have independence in what they read and are interested in. Another way independent readers are being implemented is the class is through the personal take home library, where student each morning will go and grab a book to take home and read with or to their parents.

This past week during our in-class time at Arrowhead, my first grade buddy and I went over her book that she had been writing to edit it with the edit checklist as our guard. We went over each page individual going down the list one at a time to check for things to edit. I noticed that she had many uppercase letters in the middle of sentences and in the middle of words. My buddy had a hard time noticing that she had uppercase letters in not appropriate spots until Mandi and I told her that we saw a couple of hidden things that we needed to edit from the uppercase checklist portion. I found myself having a hard time like Ms. Johnson said in chapter seven of Templeton about “sometimes you’ll want to help edit children’s work so it is polished and free of errors, but most of the time, their errors are developmentally appropriate.” (266, Templeton) but if I do this my buddy would not be learning to be an independent written and instead I would be teaching her to be dependent which is something I do not desire for any of my students.

In the afternoon Mandi and I visited with our fifth grade buddy for her reading conference. By having her read out loud it enabled Mandi and I to gather information, about how many words she reads correctly within a minute, how much she remembers by her retelling us the story, and her cognitive level as she answers the specific questions that are related to the reading without the story in-front of her. Gathering this type of information makes the reading conference as Templeton states in chapter three, page 89 to be a “give-and-take of information and not a “test.”’ Mandi and I were careful to show genuine interest about our buddy’s answers in a hope to not make it feel like a test.