Reflecting

In the past 3 months my view of ELA in the middle school classroom has changed significantly.  When I started this class in September, my thoughts were that ELA would consist primarily of reading novels, writing book reports, and studying boring poetry.  How wrong I was!  With Nancie Atwell as a guide, and several new strategies up my sleeves, I feel that I now have several tools to make my ELA classroom a fun and engaging learning environment. 

For starters, oracy is much more important than I had thought, and there are so many engaging and exciting activities to incorporate oracy into learning and make it fun.  For example, in class debates, creating a class podcast and reading books to younger students- even better if they have made these books themselves.  Another thing I would like to try is to have kids play the “um, uh, like” game, where they are given a random topic to talk about for 20 seconds without saying um, uh or like.  They could do this in small groups, several times throughout the semester, and I think it would really help with oracy.

I think it is very important to make learning interesting, and incorporate new activities.  When reading the case study on Page, I felt such a connection to her.  I felt exactly the same way about ELA throughout school.  In my younger years, I loved to read and write, but as I got older, and started to find the curriculum boring, I stopped putting forth my full effort, and wrote only to complete the assignments, definitely not to the best of my ability.  I think teachers have to be more creative in teaching ELA, and be constantly introducing new activities to encourage learning in a fun and interactive way- another thing that just didn’t happen when I was in school.

Nancie Atwell introduced an interesting concept with her writing workshop approach.  As much as I like Atwell’s idea of a writing workshop, and would love to try it in the classroom, I have my doubts that it would work.  I think there would be too many students who would not be able to focus individually and would need constant support and prompting from the teacher.  Luckily, I have also learned several ways in which to prompt students to write, and I think these are going to be extremely helpful in teaching ELA.

I think the most important things I have gotten out of this class are the strategies and games.  I think the writing experiment where the teacher reads three poems and afterwards students jot down words they remember from the poems, then write their own poem out of those words is a great activity, especially for a class that struggles with finding their own topics to write about.  Also keeping a writing territories booklet to jot down important memories, places or events that could inspire a story is a good idea.

The most important thing I have learned is that there are ways to make learning fun, and this is my goal as a teacher.  If I can make learning fun, my students will learn to enjoy reading, writing and speaking without even realizing.