Why We Teach: Learning, Laughter, Love, and the Power to Transform Lives
Summer professional reading can bring smiles, reflections, ah-hahs! and new inspiration for aligning your teaching philosophy and practice. Here are some excerpts from the engaging new book, Why We Teach: Learning, Laughter, Love, and the
Power to Transform Lives, Scholastic 2008, by Linda Alston:
I use every possible opportunity to infuse my language with rich vocabulary for the children. They acquire big words easily and effortlessly because they are immersed in them. In our classroom, we
don’t just have helpers. We have a Class Logistics Team. The jobs of the Logistics Team include the historian, who identifies the date on the calendar and any important upcoming events
like assemblies, back to school night, or upcoming holidays; the meteorologist, who tells us about the weather for the day and what season it is (along with advice about proper dress to protect us from the elements); the
facilitator, who reads the name and job of each child in order from the Logistics Team wall chart; the couriers, who messenger things to the office and bring papers back to us; the
botanist, who waters our plants; the zoologist, who cares for the animals by feeding them and giving them water; the distributors and collectors, who pass out supplies;
the custodians, who make sure we all clean up after ourselves and push our chairs under the tables; and the vision keeper, who reads our class-generated “vision” statement every day.
For additional excerpts see:
Why We Teach: Learning, Laughter, Love, and the Power to Transform Lives, by Linda Alston (Scholastic, 2008).
We also love The Daily Five: Fostering Literacy Independence in the Elementary Grades, (book and DVD) by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser “the sisters” (Stenhouse, 2006). We plan to
continue dialoging about The Daily Five this summer with our Kindergarten Cadre.
Excerpts from The Daily Five:
We begin be asking ourselves, “What meaningful activities does research say my students should be engaging in that puts them in charge of their own learning, is self-motivating, is worthy of their time and effort,
and will improve their skills?”
Children need to know that researchers say reading each day is the best way to become a better reader and that the best readers practice each day with books they choose. When done enough, reading will soon become
an enjoyable habit.
We needed to teach children how to build their stamina for independent work. We had the opportunity to introduce this in a kindergarten classroom. The students were able to read silently for only one minute
on the first day. After focused instruction and only one week’s practice, they had increased their on-task independent reading time to ten minutes.
The important thing to remember is that if a child, even one, goes off-task during the practice time, the signal should be given to stop and gather students back together to review how it went. We never want children to
continue with the off-task behavior, because that means they are practicing the wrong way and training their muscle memories incorrectly. It is very difficult to change incorrect behaviors if we allow them to become
ingrained.
One of our goals is to help children become self-reflective about their behaviors and learning. We’ve seen that some kids are naturally self-reflective, but all children can learn to become more
so. Effective instruction is about developing learners who actively and independently monitor and regulate their own learning.
See
www.the2sisters.com to learn more about this powerful and practical literacy framework.
One of the other books we still wish all educators could reflect on over the summer is Choice Words, by Peter Johnson (Stenhouse, 2004). In case you missed it, see
Excerpts from Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning
Kindergarten Writing Resources will be the focus for our July Newsletter.
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video clips on our website; to view video clips, visit our