I didn't realize that was there...

This week I was once again reminded of how much I haven’t been paying attention to the things around me. It’s so easy to take everything at face value without stopping to think about why things are the way they are.



This week I read the first 3 chapters from “Word Identification Strategies” by Barbara Fox and I began looking at the classrooms I went into in a whole new way. I walked into Ms. Bunny’s room for the first time since school ended last spring and examples of what I had been reading about began to jump out at me. I had been in this classroom more than any other over the last four years, and until now, my mind just took for granted the things that I saw! I have spent too much time seeing the forest and not the trees that make it up.

There are words and labels all over the room. “Desk, chair, calendar, clock, red, blue, green, flower, and airplane”; the list goes on and on. The words within the posted daily schedule are words with corresponding pictures. It’s the same with the tables and graphs that are part of the daily morning routine on the Activeboard. The students' names are everywhere throughout the classroom. On their pencil boxes, on the white board, under pictures they drew of themselves.

When I first entered, the students were presenting their homework for the week. This week’s letter was “F”. Their kindergarten homework consists of a letter of the week that they need to make a “project” for. It is usually a standard piece of paper or construction paper with words starting with that letter. They can be cut out of magazines, clip art from the computer, small glued objects, or pictures drawn by the student. During sharing, they tell their classmates about what they did, then they get in groups of 2 or 3 (including someone who “forgot” their homework) and they talk about it “knee to knee” on the floor. I had known about this homework since my son was in this class 4 years ago, so it was familiar to me. But this is the first time I actually considered WHY she arranged the “homework” like this!

I could envision the higher level of thinking the student needed to use to complete this (as opposed to just coloring pictures given to them or tracing words). I saw the opportunity for different learning styles to come into play (draw, write letters, computer skills, verbal, possible 3D projects as well). And I saw it as an important way of incorporating families into the importance of learning together and a way to get the students to think about words at home. I saw that by having students "teach" what they knew, they were advancing their own understanding. I hadn’t realized any of that until I began to look at it in a new way through my own learning of literacy.

To quote Kevin Henkes, "all I can say is "WOW"".

What other trees have I not been noticing? It’s a huge forest…