Overall: The classroom environment is a community of learners. All students should have the right to come to learn the same things their classmates are learning, feeling safe and valued. In order to this everyone’s opinions and thoughts will be shared to expand from. This environment also includes an amazing support team. The team is comprised of the teacher, the student or child, and the family. To keep this team together and so supportive home to school communication will be sent home. Communication is for all aspects, good news, needs more help, for your information, etc. This communication can be between the family and teacher or the student and teacher. Communication between the student and teacher allows the child to share concerns so the teacher can assist the child with the concern.
The members of the learning community are responsible. They will be a part of the rule making in the class. The students will also be in control of their behaviors. Communication and homework will be a responsible of the students as well. The teacher may need to let the families know of an event coming up, but has the students copying into the agenda or home folder for the parents to see. The show the students the responsibility they need to possess to succeed. Learning happens every minute of every day. Learning is not core subjects but also social skills.
One other valuable piece of the puzzle is the communication the teacher has with her co-workers, a team member teaching same grade level as well as a supervisor. Each person can give feedback to improve teaching techniques and strategies. It is beneficial for everyone to have a member of the profession be of assistances, to ask questions, ideas, or even to watch lessons to give feedback or to have the teacher watch them to get ideas on how to teach in a different way.
Children learn at their own pace, on their own day, and in different ways!!!
Literacy:
I believe every child has the right to learn. Literacy development begins at birth. Children can look at pictures while someone reads to them. It is also beneficial for children to interaction with others. An adult who speaks with a child about items and words in the environment around them will greatly enhance the child’s literacy development. As a child grows it is still important to continue the communication and noticing of items in the environment. Taking a trip to the grocery store can be a great literacy lesson, matching beginning the letters of items in the aisles. For example, helping children recognize that A is for apple and M is for milk. Walking through a park, another normal activity of a family can be a great literacy activity. It may begin with the adult saying, “Oh yes that is a dog. He is brown. Did you hear him? He barks. That his way to communicate with us.” As the child grows and literacy expands the child will begin saying, “dog” to “Mom, look at the brown dog! He said, ‘arf, arf’.” Children come to school to continue learning literacy skills. This will include letter recognition, letter sounds, blends, phonemes (adding and deleting), and reading. To fully teach children these skills teachers need the help of the families. This will be possible with the teacher and family staying connected and communicating. Teachers should send home fun activities families and children can do together. On example, a teacher can send home literacy bags. Each bag contains books with varying formats, developmentally appropriate activities, small games, surprise material or manipulatives. A journal can also be passed with the bag to communication between classmates of what they learned. These bags encourage children to read and have fun activities that can use with the family involved in the learning process. The classroom should be a symbol rich environment. This means the alphabet should be visible to everyone, a word wall for children to see correct spelling of words as well as sight words. Classroom materials labeled, such as the marker container has a picture of markers as well as the word ‘markers’. This allows children see the picture and make a connection with seeing the word. In the symbol rich classroom, the books will be at the reach of the children, the calendar will have the days of the week, as well as the months, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Another important component of a symbol rich classroom is having all the children’s names posted throughout the room; whether it is for their job or on the display of an activity they did. Again, literacy is important and every child has the right to learn and grow. If there is a child who may need extra assistance for me I will make time to help and guide this child to success.
