Week 3. Literature in Classroom

I have seen literature incorporated into my classroom in a few ways. I see literacy in their classroom through poetry. Each week they memorize and recite a new poem with a group. The group must act out their poem, then answer questions from the audience regarding their performance. I have seen my students do this every week and their performances are every Friday. I have only seen them listening to a book as a class. The teacher read a picture book on the ELMO, then had the students use personal experiences to make connections in the text and write about them. Finally, I have seen them silently reading on their own occasionally. The ideas that are incorporated into literature are connections to personal experiences and the structure of poetry. I have observed the teacher talk about the stanzas and the author of the poem.

After the readings today, I would like to incorporate literature as a class. I would like to see them read a book as a whole and talk about many different feature of the book. I think they would really benefit from a book club or book talk. There are a few struggling readers in the class that I think would benefit from having a conversation about the book they read and benefiting from hearing what others have to say about the text. Similar to what Triplett & Buchanan discussed in their article, I think engaging the struggling readers in these discussions would help to motivate them and brighten their attitude towards reading. I also think that students would really benefit from analyzing text in a deeper manner. Like Hassett & Curwood talked about the different features of picture books engage a reader in different ways and how the features communicate meaning. I think that the students could learn a lot about text by creating assignments for them that do just that. I would like to see them make predictions about the text they are reading and discuss how the different features (of poetry, picture books, or chapter books) make them feel and think, instead of just making personal connections to the text. I think that they have the skills and knowledge to move forwards from this step. I think that this could be done both by doing a writing assignment or by have class discussions regarding these features.