Literacy Philosophy
Literacy learning is the ability to read and write, and I believe that every student can learn literacy. Literacy is made up of reading, writing, and word work—without all three working together, it would not be balanced. Students need to learn how to both encode and decode to reach their full potential as readers and writers.
To teach reading, a teacher must be patient and differentiate instruction for each student individually through guided reading, shared reading, read alouds, and independent reading time through literacy centers. Reading must be explicitly taught through modeling, given time for guided practice in groups, and finished individually. The cycle begins with shared reading, where the teacher explicitly instructs the group on a specific comprehension strategy, giving the students ample opportunity to see and hear how to affectively do the strategy. This allows the students to see how it is done correctly and how the comprehension strategy can be done with a text. Guided reading involves the teacher meeting with leveled groups to practice a new reading strategy with less support from the teacher and more support from their peers. They are able to learn how to apply the
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Word work is looking for patterns and sounds in words and explicitly teaching them. If a student learns how to spell a word, they can spell a word, but if a student finds and understands a pattern, it can help them to spell thousands of words. Word work also includes the teaching of sight words, allowing the students to automatically recognize particular words that are often seen in works of writing. Through the use of explicit whole group instruction, differentiated small group instruction, and student investigation, students can learn patterns through word sort activities, requiring them to stop and think about patterns and sounds in