New Literacy Lesson Plan

This project has been so much fun! I really have enjoyed it! Before this project, when I heard the word “literacy” I always thought it meant reading, writing and referred to language arts. While this can be true, I learned through this project that, which is not even close to everything that literacy holds. It has been interesting learning about all the different literacies through people’s projects and learning more in depth about the literacy I chose (emotional literacy). I can see the importance of all of literacies and how they build on each other. I am now aware of ways I can incorporate all of the literacies in the classroom. Jenny’s literacy informed me how to incorporate numeracy in the classroom. Her project was super helpful because numeracy is something I struggle with teaching. Researching emotional literacy has taught me how important it is to teach it in the classroom. Being emotionally literate is important to function in the classroom and in life. Children need to know how to deal with their emotions and how to read other people’s emotions. A lot of other people in the class did emotional literacy and it was fun seeing how we found similar and different information. I like how Lindsay included the quiz on emotional literacy on her website. I really enjoyed learning about and using Voicethread. It was a lot easier to use than I thought. After finishing it, I think I would use it in my classroom. All the children have to do is hit the next button and do not even have to know how to read. They can just listen to the presentation and then comment on it by speaking. This can help ELL students become more involved in the classroom as well! If they know how to write better than speaking they can write on it to make comments or vice-versa. I also really liked the prezi’s people did. It is really simple and to the point. It was easy to navigate as well. All of the literacies I learned about in this project were really interesting and important. It was fun to learn new things to teach children and the importance of them. It was interesting to see how all of these literacies tie into language arts and how they are all important for the children to know in order for them to read and write. It was also fun to see new ways to teach them. I liked doing these projects as readings for this week. It gave us a new way to learn about things that can build our foundation of LA.

To provide effective literacy instruction to diverse learners means to have literacy instruction that will reach all learners in the classroom so that they all learn from it. In the classroom teachers will have ELL, special education students, typcal students, and other learners. Throughout my research I have found it to be very important to for teachers to be teaching in an effective way so that all their students are learning. For example, I chose Voicethread for my technology. All children can use this technology as long as they know how to click a button. They also need to know how to either speak, listen, read or write in order to participate. This is a broad spectrum and can almost reach all children in the classroom, if not all. My students in my classroom could also use prezi if the words were simple enough to read. It was pretty much straightforward and easy but the students have to know how to read. Both of these are effective literacy instruction for students in my placement classroom.

Lesson Plan: By making a short movie to tell about their culture

Target area/rationale: Most recently my students have been working on (more diligently) summarizing key events and important information in a text. Doing this through a movie and about their own culture would help reinforce learning this newer concept and help them apply it in other ways. My students struggle with picking out the VERY BEST events and information and tend to just tell the whole story. Focusing on this area will make them pick out the important information and key events because there may be a lot to tell about their culture.

Objectives: Students will make a short movie telling about their own culture.

Materials: Some sort of computer that has a moviemaker on it, a camera (or a camera on the computer), paper and pencils.

Outline of Key events:

- Teacher will tell students what the definition of culture is.

- Students will start by watching a movie I made about my culture

- Students will watch me show them how to get to the moviemaker.

- Students will explore moviemaker.

- Students will have a letter sent home explaining the new project and have their parents explain to them and help them find good websites about their culture or help tell them about their culture

- Students will come back and record their movie

- Students will edit their movie

Closing summary: Students will have the next day set-aside during class to watch other students videos. They will learn about many different cultures

Ongoing assessment: Students have just begun journaling in my class. So I will have them journal about at least one other culture they learned about through this experience.

New Literacies Project

For our New Literacies Project, Marie and I are investigating the Voicethread technology and Emotional Literacy. At first I was really not looking forward to learning about Emotional Literacy. It did not sound very interesting to me and did not sound very important. However, Marie and I both did not know very much about it and as future teachers thought it would be important to learn more about it. As we have done research on it I have seen how it is VERY important to teach emotional literacy in the classroom. Today children have become obsessed with technology. Technology IS useful but hinders children from learning about their emotions and other’s emotions. When talking to others they are behind a computer screen or cell phone a lot and not face-to-face. This does not allow the child to show their emotions and work through them or read other people’s emotions. We have learned that not knowing about emotional literacy can be very dangerous to the student and has caused a lot of children to go into depression because they do not know how to deal with their emotions in a proper way. I have learned that emotional literacy is important to all of the other literacies children us on a daily basis. For example, understanding a cultural literacy is to grasp the social cues, literal cues of one’s culture that apply to reading and writing. Reading, writing, listening, viewing and speaking all play a vital role in becoming emotionally literate. Although, speaking, viewing and listening are especially important in order to effectively display your emotions, while understanding and cooperating with their emotions. Reading and writing are important when teaching this literacy through Voice Thread, but we see it as a potential problem when students are learning social and cultural cues, which play a huge role in being emotionally literate. I think that emotional literacy is important to teach starting right off in pre-school because children need to know their emotions all throughout school.

Voicethread has been very interesting to learn about as well. I see that it can be very useful and gets children away from worksheets and their daily routine and let’s them explore a new way of learning. I do not think that this is a technology that would be useful in my kindergarten classroom unless they were guided through the steps of how to use it. My kindergartners are not very tech-savvy yet. This program was easy to figure out once you searched around a bit but I am a lot more tech-savvy than my kindergarteners. The students must have some concepts of print that are not only applied to traditional writings and literature mediums(i.e. reading left to right, top to bottom, starting with a capital letter and ending with a period), but they must be able to understand the different concepts of print associated with Internet, technology, etc. (See Tompkins). Internet and computer use is a vital key that should be integrated into student learning. We live in a time where the use of technology is exponential and it seems that more and more young children have a greater understanding of how to use technology. As a teacher, it is important for us to point out the different concepts of print so students have a better understanding of the variety in text fonts, colors, orientation, etc. In Voicethread children are using reading, writing, viewing, listening and speaking all in different ways. They are watching videos or voice overs and then can comment by writing, speaking, texting or calling in. Overall I have really enjoyed learning about both Emotional Literacy and Voicethread and can see the importance of both in a classroom