On Jul 9, 2010, at 1:52 PM, soozq55...@aol.com wrote:
1) What were your first experiences as a teacher of reading? Discuss the students, and situations, you encountered. My first year teaching I taught at a magnet school (all the students were bused, evenneighborhood children could ride the bus) The school was designed by parents and submitted to an intergration judge who gave them permission to try it. There were 114 children from all over, it was well integrated, racially and economically. The reason the judge allowed it. There was a bus that sat at school all day and was available for all of our field trips to the library, art gallaery. We had a park next door that we used for Pe and swimming. This was the year of the big layoff so we had the teacher experts who had been released from training positions and me, a brand new teacher. Parent participation was off the chart. When I said I wanted to teach about the Holocaust I had two survivors to call the next day and volunteer to come and talk. I wanted to talk about Greenpeace, I ended up with the lady that helped to start it. This was the up side, the downside was I taught Reading for Pleasure wth few books and children with reading levels from 1st grade to 12th grade all in the same class. Luckily I loved to read and the library was a bus ride away. I read every novel anyone in the class wanted to read, before I let them read. My weekends were filled with non stop reading. And I learned how to teach non readers how to read using books they wanted to read. I have never worked so hard or had so much fun. Two of my non readers were 9th graders, one had two sisters in the same class, a 4th and 5th grader who read on the 12th grade level. (the difference in being in an ESL program when they started school, the sisters) The school and the class ranged from 3rd to 9th grade. One aside that year one of the students was reading a Judy Bloom book with her mother, Judy Bloom great right. No! The book was Wifey apparently her first adult book. Was I in shock when I started that book.
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