In one of the first blogs of the semester, I tried to explain to you my reasoning for making this Word Collector blog one your assignments for the course. Back then I wrote the following:
“The blog you create over the course of this semester asks you to make decisions about words! It asks you to become curious about words! It asks you to enjoy words! It asks you to think about words from a child's perspective! It asks you to see teaching as decision-making: how you choose texts and words for your students will make a difference in their learning!”
For this final blog, I want you to reflect on how this blog has worked for you – and why it matters that you have found lots of your own words, (hopefully!) enjoyed these words, and used them in your own learning. To do this, I want to first share with you a short story from Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s wonderful book called Teacher in which Ashton-Warner describes the importance of children using their own words to learn. In her book, Ashton-Warner describes her method of teaching reading to a group of Maori children in New Zealand this way …
Children’s first words and first books, she writes, “must be made out of the stuff of the child itself… words that have intense meaning to [them], from which cannot help but arise a love of reading. For it’s here, right in this first word, that the love of reading is born …"
Because of this, her method of teaching reading is based on the following question that she asks children each and every morning: “What word do you want?” No matter what the word children give her – “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “ghost,” “kiss,” “jet” – she writes it down on a large, heavy-duty card for them and asks them to learn it that night. The next morning she finds that the card is usually dirty and worn from the child’s “passionate usage” of it!! Children never seem to need help learning these words from her!
So … my final questions for you on this blog are as follows:
How will you find out what words children want? Can you see yourself using superhero words and environmental print and poems and magazines and so forth in your literacy teaching? Will you rely on what a prepackaged program tells you are important words for kids to know, and/or will you also rely on your own decision-making based upon what I know about children (and specifically my group of students)?
What words have you enjoyed the most this semester? Do you think that finding and using your own words in your blog has made a difference in your understanding of the content (e.g., vowels, root words, CVC/CVCe patterns)?
