First Assignment

1. What content area are you teaching? Why are you teaching this subject?
I teach Social Studies. Social Studies was always my favorite class through grade school. I love the opportunity to talk directly about social issues as they relate to geography and history. I am currently teaching 7th grade geography and I am trying to help the students build some sort of basis of geographic/social studies knowledge, so that they may go on to look at more complex issues. I personally feel I would rather be working with students at a higher grade level, though there are some rewarding moments in the 7th grade classroom.

2. What have you noticed about the students you are teaching this year? Do they have particular problems with reading or writing? What are their strengths?

The literacy skill spectrum runs the gamut among my students. I'd say about an average of 5 out of 25 are on grade level or above. Perhaps another 5 are not far behind that. The next 10 are 2-3 levels behind. And then the bottom 5 are even further back. That is just a rough estimate, but in my workings with students, it is clear that the literacy skill spectrum is incredibly stratified. This creates quite a problem when trying to do book work. There are often 1-3 students in each class that are not much further along than sounding out words - what to do with these students?

My solution in my Geography classes has been to draw up questions for the book in a worksheet format that they can work on (the questions range from short answer to defining terms to drawing pictures). We then go over the worksheet the next class so that those who cannot read well enough to complete the worksheet are exposed to the information auditorily.

3. What do you most want to learn in this course?

I'd like to learn about some strategies for teaching reading/writing to a group that is so stratified in term of literacy skill level. Perhaps teaching reading/writing skills with the use of a textbook (gearing lessons around the textbook) would be beneficial as well since that is the main material I have for sharing knowledge with my geography students.