I anticipate my personal and professional literacy experiences might affect my teaching because my professional experiences caused me to reflect on my personal experiences in a way to compare the two experiences. In comparison, my experiences to read were boring and I had few opportunities to learn reading strategies. The experiences I lacked as a young reader created for me a keen awareness in all that is offered to students today. My professional literacy experiences will be used to provide students with all the tools they need for learning and to enable me to guide their literacy experiences.
My personal future literacy goals and plans for achieving them will be implemented by my personal experiences, practical experiences, and professional study which will comprise of my belief system as a teacher. I plan to provide a literacy rich environment and foster reading strategies that will benefit all learners.
In my Early Childhood Education 322 class I learned about different ways of learning. There is no one specific style of learning. Some people need to be active learners, and others are verbal or visual learners. When considering that fact, as a teacher I will be able to guide children in literacy that will assist all styles of learning in order to read proficiently.
By implementing an interactive combination of the bottom-up method (see trees) and the top-down method (whole forest) I will begin to reach all learners. I will introduce the cueing system of graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic as a basis to build upon other reading strategies. I will offer language experience activities that encourage young children to share experiences, listen and tell stories, role play, and dictate. Other literacy activities like "read/write around the room", literature circles, and shared reading will stimulate readers. I will provide a literacy rich environment with materials like labeled objects, charts/posters, and a wide selection of reading materials. All the methods I've learned and when implemented will enable me to reach every learner at their own pace and in their own style of learning.
In my Early Childhood courses I learned the importance of observing students (especially young children) in their natural environment for best assessment results. That also holds true when assessing children for literacy. All the methods I learned will provide multiple opportunities for me to assess children through observation. Another way was through reading running records where children were assessed based on their individual progress.
Finally, as a teacher I plan to be a "coach who prepares, models, guides, supports, and stretches students to the limits of their potential as readers and writers" (Vacca, 2000.)