Overall, I really am enjoying the student teaching. I have one class that is a little harder, but I still am trying to find ways to reach them. Finding ways to incorporate literacy into my classroom has not been very difficult, the difficult task is finding literacy that is engaging to the students! However, I did find a really interesting article that we used in class last week and the students seemed to respond well to it. I believe that they are so used to History just being a note class or a lecture class that they are rarely exposed to primary documents and other interesting articles anymore. I try to bring in articles for the students to read, just to give them exposure, but I work a lot with vocabulary.
In my opinion, vocabulary is something that my students-and most history students, struggle with. There is so much vocabulary for every section/part of history that it is hard to keep up. This is what I decided to tackle. For my first unit I gave all the vocabulary terms-including people,places, and events, that the students were responsible for. Then, after 3 days of time to work on these terms, we played a game in class called HISTO. (like BINGO). This really helped to reinforce the terms into the students memory, and it was fun. We also discussed the terms DAILY in class discussion or through the notes that I gave out. I felt that by giving the vocabulary to the students before I started the unit gave them a chance to see the terms first, then we talked about them. This way, we were able to address prior knowledge as well as any prior misconceptions. I also believe that going over the terms multiple times helped the students retain the information. This may sound small or trivial, but these students were not grasping events such as the Red Scare or ideas like isolationism. Therefore, I broke these terms down for them and we talked about them daily! Now, I really feel that they have a true understanding for the terminology and when we read an article hardly any of the students were interrupted by misunderstanding words. I really felt proud of this and I plan on doing this for every unit- at least with this group of students.
READICIDE: Preventing Readicide seems like a great idea, but in the end I really don't know if its possible...I wish that every student could be passionate about great "classics" but even without overteaching the books, I really believe that these students are different and truly preventing readicide will take a lot more effort than one person. I believe that preventing readicide would take effort on behalf of the student and the teacher, and with what I'm seeing in the schools now--the effort of the students is lacking. We have 25 minute study hall on Thursday's in which the students can do something productive and very few of them read, most sleep. I feel that the schools, if they really want to prevent readicide, need to offer reading time and offer great books and book clubs. Instead, students are surrounded with everything but these things....=less and less reading, or reading for enjoyment = Readicide
That's it for now!! Have a great week!
