Susan: Learning Goals

I am minoring in both mathematics and history. I really do not enjoy reading and writing. One goal that I have for this semester is to find some parts of Language Arts that I can be enthusiastic about, and, in turn, teach LA in an enthusiastic way to my future students. I also want to expand my ideas about what LA is. Right now I feel that it is students reading and writing stories. However, this is what turned me off from LA in the first place. I want to discover new ways to teach these subjects.



Jami's Comment:
I totally agree with you on expanding ideas about what Language Arts is. There is so much that goes along with it. It is not just strictly reading and writing, but it is hard to understand what exactly it is and how we need to apply it and teach it to our students. For me I loved writing stories when I was a child which is why I decided to focus on Language Arts. A great deal of it is reading and writing-but we also need to know how to get our students to do so correctly and teach them the correct ways to read and write if they don't know how when they enter our classrooms.

Veronica's Comment:
I think it would also be very interesting to learn ways to make students enthusiastic about Language Arts. Everyday, my field placement class does a D.O.L (daily oral language) assignment; it usually includes a story problem that incorporates both Math and Language Arts. They also do an exercise where they have to make different words from a word given by the teacher. Last week, a word they had to use was inauguration. They have a lot of fun making words since they like to get as many different words as possible than their classmate did. When I was in second grade, I remember having to write in a journal every day. We could pick topics of our own or our teacher would select topics for us. This was a fun way to incorporate writing since it also gave us choice.