Entry #1

When talking with my teammate about our individual philosophies with regard to literacy instruction, we agreed that knowing our students is a very high priority.  By that I mean, knowing them as a reader and also as a whole person.  We discussed the many ways to discover them, i.e. inventories, rating scales about their reading abilities, formal reading assessments, one-on-one conversations, and informal observations.  It all goes back to the statement that students do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Of course there are the five critical elements of a comprehensive, research-based literacy curriculum which are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text-comprehension instruction.  These need to be taught explicitly with continual monitoring of each student's progress as well as tweaking daily lessons depending upon the needs of the class as a whole.

In the end, I believe it's in knowing your students and instilling that passion for reading through a myriad of creative ways that will create strong, lifelong readers and writers.