When I was in school my favourite subject was Language Arts.\u00c2\u00a0 Reading was my passion.\u00c2\u00a0 Writing was my emotional release.\u00c2\u00a0 The ideas, the comprehension, the inferences, and the arguments were just there in my mind, waiting to be articulated.\u00c2\u00a0 Conversely, Mathematics was my worst subject, and I struggled to understand the concepts that were shown to me.\u00c2\u00a0 As I progressed through my teacher training, however, I noticed something that at first struck me as unusual: teaching Math came more easily to me than teaching Reading and Writing.\u00c2\u00a0 After some reflection, I concluded that because I had struggled with Math throughout my educational career, I was better able to understand my students\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 difficulties and help them to overcome their mental barriers.\u00c2\u00a0 I could teach a Math concept three different ways because it had often taken me three tries to understand the same concept myself.\u00c2\u00a0 But because I had inherently understood stories, plays, and poems, how was I supposed to teach reading to struggling readers?\u00c2\u00a0 Because I had always been full of ideas on what to write in my own creative stories, poems, and essays, how was I supposed to teach writing to those with low writing output?\u00c2\u00a0 How was I going to establish that literacy is crucial to understanding our world, and instill that same interest in my students that I experienced growing up?<\/p>\n
Seven years of teaching later, and to be honest, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not close to mastering the teaching of literacy.\u00c2\u00a0 But I am also working to discover the tools, strategies, novels, and techniques that will assist me in this journey.\u00c2\u00a0 These are the ideas I want to share with others who have the same goal of encouraging literacy.\u00c2\u00a0 Some posts will be a discussion of curriculum theories and pedagogy.\u00c2\u00a0 Others will be reviews of novels for the intermediate grades, and still others will be literacy lesson plans that can be directly pulled from the site during one of those \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Whatever will I teach the kids tomorrow?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d moments.\u00c2\u00a0 To quote W.B. Yeats: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 If I have a passion for literacy, I want others to share in this passion, and together we can learn how to light these fires for our students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was in school my favourite subject was Language Arts.\u00c2\u00a0 Reading was my passion.\u00c2\u00a0 Writing was my emotional release.\u00c2\u00a0 The ideas, the comprehension, the inferences, and the arguments were just there in my mind, waiting to be articulated.\u00c2\u00a0 Conversely, Mathematics was my worst subject, and I struggled to understand the concepts that were shown…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5yfMi-5","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.somethingworthreading.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}