My ECL210 prompts

1. ECL210 Weekly Prompts

2. Read Chapters 2 and 3 of Developing Early Literacy: Assessment and Teaching by Susan Hill (textbook) Reflect and respond to these questions based on the reading, lecture and your classmates responses: 1. Who or what influenced your oral language development as a child? Use your memories of your childhood or ask a parent or sibling. 2. Who or what do you think will influence the students you will teach in regard to their oral language? Is this different from who/what influenced you? 3. What influence, if any, does the community have on the development of a child? See examples in Hill text Chapter 3. How can you address this in your classroom? Date: 25 February 2007 10:19 PM Author: Holly Hill Topic: BURWOOD-TUESDAY 12:00 TUTORIAL Subject: First Tutorial Discussion Prompt

3. Reflecting on my early childhood I can see a vast range of influence on my language development. First of all from the ages of about 2 until I was 5 years old my family lived in Papua New Guinea. My early exposure to oral language was within a minority that spoke English (Unfortunately I can’t speak pidgin). My parents and my older sister were a huge influence on my language acquisition. We had no TV but my parents were big on reading books to me and I can recall a lot of role-playing games with my sister and friends in which I would have practiced and enhanced my oral language. I also remember seeing and hearing tapes from stereos and video cameras that I used to explore language i.e. creating a radio program or movie. I agree with the idea that family are going to be the biggest influence on a child’s development of both spoken and written language, as Dora, Anastasia and others have stated. A child’s family determines their socioeconomic background, their culture and their exposure to all the different mediums of text and oral language. I feel that although technology is playing an ever increasing role in language development, it is only one more medium in which children will use to develop language skills. Similar, in some ways, to what stereos were in my generation. I believe my students will still have acquired most of their language understanding from their home life, which is will most likely be very different to my own in a diverse classroom. The community in which a child is surrounded will have an enormous effect on a child’s development. From the varying pronunciations used in their oral language to the values they put upon literacy. Children model members of their community in many ways such as how to behave society. The best way, as a teacher, to incorporate and include this diversity of culture and upbringing is, as stressed to us in our first lecture, to know our students and where they are coming from. Asking questions and engaging in general conversation with both the students and their parents will give the greatest insight into a child’s home life, community and culture. Response

4. Please Read Chapters 1, 6, and 10 of Developing Early Literacy: Assessment and Teaching by Susan Hill (textbook) Please reflect on the lecture, readings, and classmates' postings in responding to these questions: 1. Do you remember learning to read? Or how you learned to read? Reflect on your memories! Do you have any? Or does someone in your family have memories of you learning to read? 2. How do children learn the alphabet? How did you learn your "letters?" As a teacher in training do you think you should teach a letter a week? Why or why not? 3. How can you expand on a child's letter-sound knowledge when he/she can already read? Is it necessary? Why or why not? Date: 2 March 2007 10:14 PM Author: Holly Hill Topic: BURWOOD-TUESDAY 12:00 TUTORIAL Subject: Second Tutorial Discussion Prompt

5. My early memories of learning to read are very vague, I can clearly remember being read to but I’m not sure when it changed from my parents reading to me, to my parent reading with me, to me reading. I can vaguely remember reading little books that concentrated on high frequency words, as stated in hill and early by Claire and Nikola. However the books that stand out in my childhood are the Little Golden books, which I couldn’t read at first but kind of remember beginning to be able to read them myself. I can also recall books with lots of little pictures, and single words such as tall and small, most likely gaining visual and semantic cues to link the text to meaning and full words. Children often learn the alphabet through the same process, linking the letters to visual cues and the initial phoneme or sound that the word begins with. Hill mentions that familiarity with letters is vital to both letter recognition and phonemic awareness. I recall having posters and books of all the letters and pictures for each sound. Teaching children a letter a week is a great way of building awareness of letters and phonemes. On my last rounds show and tell was based on the letter of the week, it was a great way to engage children to not only familiarize themselves with the alphabet and it also got them actively seeking and exploring objects and theirs letters and sounds. A child may be able to read well using methods such as predicting text, recognizing words and using syntax to complete sentences. Strong letter-sound knowledge will enable the student to figure out more complex words, as has been mentioned by many tonight. Building child’s knowledge of the alphabet and all its phonemes, rules and rule exceptions is an on-going development and, as Stephanie discussed, is directly linked with improving vocabulary, comprehension, spelling and reading competency. Response

6. Please read Chapters 12, 13 and 14 of your set text and respond to ONE of the following prompts. * Reflect on the writing you do on a daily basis....think about getting ready to do this post.....if you had to explain to someone else the process of writing/composing...how would you explain it? * How would you describe the relationship between talking, listening, reading and writing? * What do you think is important in teaching children how to write? Date: 8 March 2007 5:24 PM Author: Simone White Topic: BURWOOD-TUESDAY 12:00 TUTORIAL Subject: Third Tutorial Discussion Prompt

7. What do you think is important in teaching children how to write? In all stages of learning to write it is important that children have wide and varied teaching resources to support them, including; tasks specifically made for each stage of learning, a range of strategies to overcome difficulties and exposure to lots of different texts. It is vital that the teacher understand where student is at and can focus learning to suit both the group and the individual. Being exposed to different teaching strategies is central in laying the foundations of a confident writer. As stated in Hill (2006) the four major teaching strategies are modelled writing, shared writing, guided writing and independent writing. All four are important to developing writers as they provided scaffolding for learning and build on students understanding of texts and their features. I also agree with Edward’s statement that children need to write what is important to them. Task need to be authentic and interesting to the child to ensure they connect and enjoy the creation of texts in its many forms.

8. Please read Chapters 7 and 8 of your text. Respond to BOTH questions by reflecting on your reading and your classmates' posts. 1. Why do we assess students in the early years in literacy? 2. How does assessment inform our teaching? Date: 15 March 2007 9:51 AM Author: Holly Hill Topic: BURWOOD-TUESDAY 12:00 TUTORIAL Subject: Fourth Tutorial Discussion Prompt

9. We assess students to find any difficulties students are having and monitor student progress as their reading develops. As pointed out by Emma assessment is also shows the knowledge student already has. With regular assessment a teacher can be flexible to cater for the reading needs of their students. The focus of lessons and tasks can be shifted to areas unclear to students and can assist in scaffolding students through each level of development. It can also be used to insure students do not loose interest or become disengaged with reading. Assessment methods such as observation gives teachers insight into, as stated by Hill (2007), how well the concepts of print are understood and not just the students ability to read text.

10. It is time to go multimodal. For this week’s prompt design a space for yourself online with Google page’s website creator. Why? It is a great place to house your multimodal artefact that you will be working on over the next three years at Deakin. We have chosen Google Pages because it the easiest way for you to get online in seconds (maybe minutes). Design a space for yourself online: Date: 22 March 2007 9:26 AM Author: Christopher Walsh Topic: BURWOOD-TUESDAY 12:00 TUTORIAL Subject: 5th Tutorial Prompt

11. Please read Chapters 11 and 12 in your text and respond to BOTH questions. 1. Critique the website: http://www.education.tas.gov.au/english/strategy.htm for spelling and handwriting strategies. Give the strengths and weaknesses of the website. 2. Find one website that you like for either spelling or handwriting strategies to use in the primary classroom. Please state why you liked this particular website and give its url. Date: 29 March 2007 10:59 AM Author: Holly Hill Topic: BURWOOD-TUESDAY 12:00 TUTORIAL Subject: Prompt #6

12. I found the website to be a great resource for ideas on planning lessons and a good knowledge base for any teacher. Like Ashleigh I found the site a bit lacking in design, information could have been presented a lot more clearly than it is. The site would not really be suitable for students unless they were using to link to a specific task. And like others have mentioned the “band” system was unnecessarily confusing. The site is however a great guide to assisting in adapting strategies to the classroom with well rationalized purposes. The website I liked is the Personal Best Academy website, http:// www.personalbest.com.au , the site, while is basically a selling point for education programs, has interesting views on reading, writing and spelling. It has quite a technical focus on writing, and based on a “new twist on old ways” of teaching. The spelling section didn’t really have much detail but does throw in some interesting points. The reading had even less detail and more selling the program. Overall the website makes some interesting points on reading and writing and while it doesn’t offer a lot of information or teaching strategies it is an interesting read. That’s if you can find the useful articles.

13. Teaching reading and reading comprehension Read Chapter 8 and 9 Your response this week requires you to discuss what you understand about how to teach reading from Chapters 8 and 9 of your set text. Ensure this week that you also include in your response a short direct quote that supports what you have discussed and ensure you reference the page number in the standard format. Date: 11 April 2007 6:54 PM Author: Simone White Topic: BURWOOD-TUESDAY 12:00 TUTORIAL Subject: Prompt 7

14. When teaching students to read, teachers draw on a number of activities and resources that revolve around the four roles of a reader; the code breaker, meaning maker, text user and text critic. The teacher focuses the students on the prompts that they can draw on for information when reading, these are; visual information, phonology, syntax or sentence structure and semantics. The teacher must also incorporate a wide range of teaching strategies to insure students that are having difficulties in particular areas of reading or not being able to use all available cues or prompts, stated earlier, “Effective readers use a range of strategies to create a match between the visual, structural, semantic and phonological cues.” (Hill, 2006, p180). Student’s comprehension in reading can be assessed by these prompts and cues too, a teacher should be able to recognise where the student is having difficulty with texts. Also as Hill states (2006 p.177) 'Reading involves drawing together information from several sources' a teacher must consider a students background and what socio-context he/she is coming from. An ESL reader, for example, may be confident in the phonologically and structurally breaking down a text when reading but still have little understanding semantics. It is important for a teacher to expose this child to more words and their meaning for them to become an effective reader. All students are different and have had different exposure to texts, it is important that the teacher takes this into consideration when developing a students reading comprehension, they may need to be encouraged to take more texts home is at home the don’t have access to text. As Cara and others have mentioned, it is important to keep students active and engaged whilst reading. Students should find reading enjoyable and exciting, and they will as long as the teacher develops understanding and models good reading habit to the children, in both reading to the students and demonstrating individual reading. Encouraging Students to participate during reading an activity is vital in insuring they gain the most possible out of the activity and do not become disengaged.

15. There are no tutorials this week, but the lecture is still on. Reading: Read the chapter on Multiliteracies in the Hill (Chapter 16) text and “Using multiliteracies to teach” (http://www.stenhouse.com/pdfs/8207-P1_ch05.pdf) by Jennifer Roswell (2006). Prompt: How does the term “multiliteracies” and the idea of “design” change how you think about teaching literacy education in the primary years? Self-Directed Activity: (1-2 hours) Because there is no tutorial this week, we expect this activity will take you between one and two hours to complete. Drawing on the Roswell reading, design one literacy activity for students that incorporates—or draws on—their family literacies or out of school literacies. For this activity you want to strategically come up with ways you can get students’ families involved in the literacy activity to make teaching and learning relevant to students’ lifeworlds. Be creative and think of all of the different ideas covered so far in this course (multimodality, multisensory learning, pod casting, web design, etc.) The Roswell text gives some great ideas you can use as a model (Multimodality for a day, Documenting literacy practices, new and old technologies, interviews, surveys, etc.) You might even want to upload this activity or make it an activity that happens online via your multimodal portfolio. The idea is to make the literacy activity relevant, interesting and enjoyable for students. Date: 18 April 2007 11:48 PM Author: Christopher Walsh Topic: BURWOOD-TUESDAY 12:00 TUTORIAL Subject: Prompt 8

16. My idea of a literacy activity that incorporate a multiliteracy approach would be to have students write a movie script about their life, family or favourite activities. Then with the assistance of their families film the movie. Some students may already have video cameras at home; others can borrow from the school. The students straight away gain from this a multimodal approach to learning, using different mediums to convey meaning. The activity is fairly open to interpretation by student and family. And since it is about the student’s life the task will be very relevant to them. It will give both teacher and other students an insight in to an individual student’s social context, ideals and values. To further activity the teacher could organise for a family member day in which the students parents or relations come into to class and help with the next stage in task; editing. With assistance the students, and their family member, learn to digitally edit and create there own digital move (task would need appropriate software and hardware). Students could then choose to upload the digital movie onto the internet and see how many other family members they can get to look at and comment on their film. Once they have created this film the students would also be more confident in taking on similar tasks with more open criteria. I agree with Kate who stated, Multiliteracies are becoming such a huge part of education. And I think it is very important for a teacher to understand and use all the resources available. I don’t believe the commonly held idea that technology will completely change we teach. Multiliteracies have been incorporated in teaching for many years now use varies types of print and non print texts and while each new text creates a problem for teachers who need to be able to incorporate these texts into the classroom, they also opens up a whole new range of approaches to teaching and multimodal communication. I feel that the internet will slowly become a bigger but of our everyday life but it will not take over existing text but more so become another medium in which texts can be explored and communicated.