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I have not had the chance to be involved in making a display during school rounds as a student teacher and I have no memory of being apart of the process in making one during my school years. I'm sure posters or displays that were created were displayed with the rest of the classes to demonstrate our learning on a particular topic.

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Looking at the writing sample I have provided. It is evident that this child needs to develop their ability in the area of conventions. There are significant spelling mistakes and errors in capitalisation. This student also needs to develop their ability in spelling words that have slient vowels on the end. For example, they have spelt 'some' as 'som' and 'store' as 'stor'.

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Prompt 4

I’ve had a number of both good and bad experiences within a classroom teaching literacy to students or just exposing them to stories or text. On my third year of rounds I used a paragraph of text to help students identify and edit for conventions which was a rather successful activity that the students enjoyed doing and they seemed to take something away from it. On the other hand I had a learning experience come out of a poor lesson from my point of view when I didn’t have the proper grasp of the students goals within a lesson about recount writing. They were following a specific acronym which I was unfamiliar with which made my efforts to assist the teacher rather difficult.

  However, the best memory I have of both good and bad literary experiences would be reading stories to the class. In my first year of observation rounds I had the opportunity to take the class alone for a whole session when the teacher was forced out of the classroom. I only had about ten minutes to go over the teachers prepared lesson and both memorise and wrap my head around the concept of it. It was quite difficult and I remember how nervous I was reading the daily story to the prep class. My narrator voice wasn’t particularly suited to the audience I was reading to and even though the rest of the lesson went rather smoothly I was disappointed with how I conveyed the story to them. This was before I was a father and I’ve since had a lot more experience reading to both my son and students on other practical experiences.

  My second effort was much better. I was having a terrible time on my last set of rounds approximately eighteen months ago with an incredibly poor disciplined and difficult class. However, towards the end of the practicum I was afforded the chance to read the class a story near the end of the day. The students were rowdy and excited for the final bell but I was able to calm them down and get them immersed in the story I was reading. My narrators voice was much improved and I believe that helped to add excitement to the experience for the students. All and all much improved effort from the earlier experience.

[ecl310bf2lukem-blog]

Prompt 1

When I was in Grade Four, my teacher Mr. Jackson would read short novels to us after recess or usually lunchtime as a way to get everybody to calm down after all of the excitement from playing outside. This was also a way of introducing or reinforcing to students the enjoyment from reading a text where you had to create the visuals of the story by using verbal or written descriptions only. The benefits to a child’s imagination and creativity from doing this are no doubt substantial. The main books I remember him reading to the class were the series of short novels aimed at adolescents and young adults called ‘Animorphs’ by K.A. Applegate. He also read the ‘B.F.G’ by Roald Dahl that still sticks out to me, however, it was the ‘Animorphs’ books that really made an impression. I actually began reading them myself shortly afterwards and to this day own over thirty of the books from that series. I was already relatively big on reading and books before this experience, however, this leap helped me gain the confidence to jump to larger books such as a series that my mum used to read with the first books called ‘The Sword of Shannara’ by Terry Brooks which was aimed at young adults. I began reading this seven hundred plus page book – and the following titles - a little over a year after being introduced to ‘Animorphs’ before I was even twelve.

 The initiative of Mr. Jackson in Grade Four helped develop and blossom my love of books into something bigger that I’m not sure it would have reached without his efforts.

  To this day I hope I can instill that some love of reading in my children. In fact I already have a kids book titled ‘The Book with No Pictures’ written by B.J Novak that my three year old son enjoys me reading to him. This short story literally has no pictures and is based on the idea that the reader must say everything within the book, “No matter what.” This makes it an amusing book to have read to children as it forces the reader (teacher/parent) to say things and make noises that they otherwise wouldn’t say or make.

[ecl310deakin]

PROMPT 3

For this week’s Prompt, Prompt 3, we would like you to annotate a sample of children’s writing. 

If you are on placement next week take an image of a child’s work; we do not want the name of the child or the school’s name either, just an image of some of their writing.

If you are not doing placement use some writing you may have collected in an earlier unit, or maybe from someone related to you. If that fails, grab a writing sample by searching Google Images where there are plenty!

Then, we want you to read the students writing-sample, and look for an area that could be improved, using the 6+1 Traits of Writing. The 6+1 Traits of Writing can easily be located in the Winch text book, as well as in Google Scholar and Google Images.

You just need briefly mention which of the Traits matches an area for improvement in the students writing. Choose one Trait - you do not have to research this Trait to any extent.

Then, comment on the part of the students work-sample that matches an area for improvement based on one of the 6+1 Traits of Writing. We want you to add multi-modality to the image of the writing sample. You might voice record or video your comments to the image, or add in your own comments, use emoji’s perhaps, make a poster etc.

Please attempt any media format you wish, we will welcome any creativity in this task. You will need to work out how to save your multi-modal reflection on to the students work sample and load that to TUMBLR.

Please upload the writing you have chosen without anything that could identify it, please keep all the writing samples entirely anonymous.

To those on placement, have a brilliant placement and we will see you in a few weeks.

[ecl310bf2lukem-blog]

[ecl310deakin]

PROMPT 3

For this week’s Prompt, Prompt 3, we would like you to annotate a sample of children’s writing. 

If you are on placement next week take an image of a child’s work; we do not want the name of the child or the school’s name either, just an image of some of their writing.

If you are not doing placement use some writing you may have collected in an earlier unit, or maybe from someone related to you. If that fails, grab a writing sample by searching Google Images where there are plenty!

Then, we want you to read the students writing-sample, and look for an area that could be improved, using the 6+1 Traits of Writing. The 6+1 Traits of Writing can easily be located in the Winch text book, as well as in Google Scholar and Google Images.

You just need briefly mention which of the Traits matches an area for improvement in the students writing. Choose one Trait - you do not have to research this Trait to any extent.

Then, comment on the part of the students work-sample that matches an area for improvement based on one of the 6+1 Traits of Writing. We want you to add multi-modality to the image of the writing sample. You might voice record or video your comments to the image, or add in your own comments, use emoji’s perhaps, make a poster etc.

Please attempt any media format you wish, we will welcome any creativity in this task. You will need to work out how to save your multi-modal reflection on to the students work sample and load that to TUMBLR.

Please upload the writing you have chosen without anything that could identify it, please keep all the writing samples entirely anonymous.

To those on placement, have a brilliant placement and we will see you in a few weeks.

[ecl310bf2lukem-blog]

Looking at the writing sample that I have provided below, the student needs to develop their ability in conventions. Spelling is clearly a problem, as is capitalisation. The student also needs to work on words that end in vowels, for example spelling 'store' as 'stor' and 'some' as 'som'.

[ecl310bf2lukem-blog]

Prompt 4

ECL310 Prompt

As I’m not on placement I’ll choose to reflect on my attitude on social media in the classroom.

Frankly I’m very torn on the subject. On the one hand it is a valuable networking tool that can be used in very creative ways, especially when talking about cyber bullying. Students love to use computers as they are very visually engaging and students really connect with learning done on the internet.

On the other hand, social media can be very distracting. The lure of being able to talk to somebody indirectly is appealing to many people, especially children. The ability to say whatever you want about somebody is rife throughout social media and there is very little respect on social media as there is little to no punishment in spouting outright idiocy.

However when policed correctly by teachers, especially on a closed cache it could potentially be a great way of teaching students respect and proper decorum on social media. Perhaps that has been the problem in the last decade or two, student’s actions aren’t being policed by anybody and they aren’t being educated to use it in a respectful manner.

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Prompt 3

ECL310 Prompt

Admittedly I use Facebook to do most of my reading. I don’t really use it as a social tool, more like a political tool. I have many friends from different countries, most of who are politically motivated so it’s a great way of networking and not relying on local news sources.

I’ve also checked my emails numerous times, had text messages from family and friends, read a novel by Alan Dershowitz, read an online recipe for chocolate chip cookies along with a book on baby names.

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Prompt 2

ECL310 Prompt

It sounds uninteresting but I would just use an array of prompt questions to get the students thinking about what might the book could be about before reading it.

-Just by looking at the title, what could the book be about?

-Using the pictures, what do they suggest about the book?

-Why do you think there are no bright colours on the front page?

-Can we derive any information about the contents of the book from the tagline?

-Has anyone heard of Nick Earls? What style of writing and what types of books has he written in the past?

This could easily provoke a brainstorming session that could last at least 10-15 mins.

[ecl310bf2lukem-blog]

Prompt 1

ECL310 Prompt

My fondest memory of being read to is from Grade Four. My then teacher, Mr Jackson was one of my favourite teachers throughout school. It’s difficult to remember specific details but I definitely am able to recall sitting down on the floor in class after lunch time was over and he would read all sorts of books to us. Usually it was something along the lines of the B.F.G or the Animorphs series. I know that these reading sessions had a large impact on me because I ended up purchasing the entire Animorphs series and reading because of how hooked I got on it from Mr Jackson reading it to us in class. He had such a special way of reading that really had the majority of the students hooked on what he was doing. Really special teacher.

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