EDRD 600 K. Sherbine

In other words, adjusting children’s seating and taking quick one-minute movement breaks will offer some support — but we will continue to see significant sensory and behavioral problems, as well as a decline in children’s overall health (i.e., rise in obesity, decrease strength, and poor body awareness) if we don’t start allowing for adequate time in which children can get up and out of their seats to move."

Mills & O'Keefe as well as Short & Kaufmann (2000) all write about learning language, learning about language, and learning through language. In what ways do literacy teachers facilitate opportunities for children to engage in literacies in such ways? Interestingly enough, the researchers who wrote the articles and chapters for this week all very much value and take up stances of inquiry in classrooms. As we move to think about how what we value becomes an integral part of our classroom pedagogy and the teaching of reading and writing, these are certainly concepts of which to be mindful and curious.

"Acquiring the habit of turning to books for pleasure or to find out what you want to know does more for reading development than working on decoding words or trying to speed up fluency."

I'm reading a bit more into social constructivism this morning as I work on a literature review, and this quote struck me as interesting in light of the video we watched in class on 9.8. I'm thinking specifically about the ways in which the teacher organized and created space for (1) engagement (through the integration of multimodalities and the social nature of the activities); (2) meaningful processes of learning (in that the literacies in which the children were engaged connected to their own lives, experiences, and identities); and (3) relatable to the real world (in that the conversations and encounters with literacy were authentic means of inquiry that explored outer space and the children's own connections to others' lives).

orthographic: readers "have word knowledge that includes prefixes and suffixes. These readers can use letter-sound *patterns* that recur across words that they have learned to read" 

Guthrie & Anderson refer to CORI on p. 24 of Engagement in reading... Follow this link to view professional development materials and information about the study and curriculum, which seeks to "enhance intrinsic motivations, strategies, and amounts of reading."

How is it that motivation is fostered? *Remember, motivation is, according to Cambourne, different from engagement. What are ways that we can get kids to WANT to read? 

This is at the heart of sociocultural perspectives of learning, which value that literacy encounters are produced by social beings who have vast background knowledges and who construct knowledge for a variety of purposes across diverse contexts. 

Robinson says that it is a matter of "waking [kids] up." Can you think of examples of children who have seemed engaged based on the definitions offered by the readings this week? What did that engagement look like?

I suspect that for those of you who are currently working in schools and for those of you who just completed your internships, this quote resonates. The Discourse of schooling now involves an increased emphasis on rigor and achievement [on standardized tests]. And while that certainly has a place, the idea of engagement is overlooked altogether. This is problematic because, as you read in Cambourne this week, engagement is perhaps the most important condition for any type of learning to take place. And Cambourne moves beyond engagement-as-interest to a multidimensional definition of engagement (I'll post on that elsewhere). So how might we bring these conversations back into schools? (see the Changing Education Paradigms video above).

There is much here about digital literacy, multimodalities, and engagement. There is also much about invented spelling, story-telling, and the childhoods that are emerging among the rise of social networking and access to social media.

- Anne Dyson, Writing superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy, p. 31