Williamsme1's Blog

I enjoyed reading this article and found it quite easy to read.  I think shared reading is very important in your classroom; no matter if you teach kindergarten or 8th grade.  One thing I found meaningful was the section in the article on vocabulary.  I think vocabulary is so important for students to know.  I also feel that it is very important for students to be able to figure out the meanings of words through the use of context clues, word parts, and resources.  I also like to order in which these are presented.  You would not want students to look all their vocabulary words up on the internet and in the dictionary before they looked for context clues and word parts.  I agree with the expert teachers in the article, and would always look for context clues first.  I would then look at the word part and what each part means.  If neither of these things helped students figure out the meaning of the word, I would then let them use other resources.  I also felt like these 25 expert teachers were all on the same page, especially when the authors of the article asked teachers about letting students “skip it”.  Some of the teachers were shocked because they would never encourage their students to just skip words they do not know.  One teacher made a great point about giving permission to a struggling reader to skip words.  I totally understand her point.  Can you imagine how many words a student would skip?  The story would probably not make any sense to the reader, and the reader would be gaining nothing.  I really thought this article was quite helpful.  I look at shared reading in a whole new light.  I am ready to embrace shared reading!

I’ll have to say, that at first, I was not too excited about learning and researching pirates.  However, after I got started with internet workshop, I had a change of heart.  Before participating in internet workshop, I did not really know a whole lot about pirates.  I do not really remember learning much about pirates when I was in school.  Most of what I know, or thought I knew about pirates, came directly from movies and television.  Most of what I knew was not historically accurate.  I learned that pirates rarely buried their treasure, and their treasure was not really gold and silver.  Most of the time their treasure was food, clothes, alcohol, etc.  I had a lot of misconceptions about pirates and exactly what they did.  I also did not know much of anything about the different types of pirates there were in different locations.  Most of my exposure to pirates was through Johnny Depp, Jack Sparrow, in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  I found it very interesting how four different websites had different information about buccaneers.  All four websites stated different ways the buccaneers got their name.  There were many discrepancies found when comparing the four websites to one another.  One thing that was pretty much the same, was the location and time period of the Buccaneers.  I guess there are discrepancies because it happened so long ago, and may have not been documented the same or at all.  I think it is important to teach kids that there can be discrepancies, but that does not mean that the information is inaccurate.  I really learned a lot of good information that I can use in my classroom.  Internet workshop is a great tool to teach students, as well as teachers, all about pirates.  I am glad that I got to participate in this experience, which will help me greatly when I become a classroom teacher.