EDLI635 Theory and Practice of Literacy Instruction

Carolyn Wilhelm provides an outstanding lesson plan for Grades K-2 that seamlessly intertwines all the areas of the ELA Standards. Creating a found poem by sifting appropriate words out of a text is a genius idea to promote literacy. First, it focuses on reading comprehension, since the reader must determine which words and phrases make sense to transfer to the poem. Then, of course, it helps children expand their writing skills, as they create a brand new work from their reading. Speaking and listening skills are developed in conjunction with all this, as the text is read aloud and the poem created together as a class before continued as individual or small group projects. The lesson can also be adapted to older grade levels with an extension of challenging students to create a parallel poem with original text.

Shiela Owens' classroom is a literacy-rich environment filled with fun and empowering activities for her ambitious kindergarten readers and writers. Her goal is to help her students learn to read and write independently and she uses various methods and techniques to achieve that goal. She provides a seamless curriculum between reading and writing and uses scaffolding to tap into and expand her students' fullest potential. First she does a read-aloud with the class, opting for a book that would be challenging for the children to read on their own but stimulating enough for a group conversation and to maintain their interest in the story. While she reads the story, she asks relevant questions and connects the story to the children's real lives. Next she continues to shared reading where she reads together with the whole class from the board. She uses this opportunity to point out new rules they've learned about sentence structure and grammar, such as punctuation. I fo...

Becoming literate is arguably the most important objective of our current education model. Illiterate is almost synonymous with uneducated, right? This is because the purpose of education is to prepare students to become productive members of society. Language and literacy are often used to judge a person's intelligence and success. The ELA Standards were established to ensure proper learning of all aspects of the English language across the United States. The Standards focus on 5 key components to proper ELA instruction and then proceeds to explain the expectations for each component at every grade level. Reading - The goal in teaching reading is to help students master comprehension skills and apply what they read and learn to their real world. As students advance and acquire more sophisticated comprehension skills, they learn to think critically and use textual evidence for reasoning and comprehension. Writing - Writing can often be a response to reading, as well as an ori...