Blog 3

I chose to look into the kindergarten standards for reading: foundational skills. I do not plan on becoming an educator, however I find it interesting to look at where children begin once they start participating in public education compared to where I personally am at now as a junior in college. I also plan to work with young children and find it important to understand the differences in intellectual development between infants all the way up to teenagers. These standards were made to suit different ages and if I were to become a teacher I would feel most comfortable teaching reading standards over writing or math standards. This is because I am better at reading than both writing and math and I find reading very important for communication skills to develop. I feel that helping students learn to read and implementing standards such as phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency would be fun to teach using engaging activities and images that will interest the children. Although kindergarten does not require teaching children to cite sources, I feel that one weak area of mine is citing my sources and understanding different formats for writing.

I found a lesson plan that incorporates a lesson into a game format. This is something I would use if I were to teach kindergarten because it is interactive and engaging for five year olds. This activity teaches students about English such as verbs and nouns. I feel that these types of lesson plans are helpful for teachers because they give them ideas to draw off of and alter in their own classroom and can be super effective.

Regarding the newsletter design assignment, I liked that it helped me understand Word more because I had to explore Word in order to understand how to complete certain skills within the assignment. However, it was extremely time consuming for me because I lacked any prior knowledge on how to use Word in order to create a newsletter. We hardly went over these things in class so I was confused as to how I was expected to know how to complete the assignment on my own. I also did not enjoy how the assignment was graded. I spent time on it and tried to complete every single skill required but still did not get full credit because of harsh grading. Even missing one skill caused my grade to go down to a 3.5 which doesn’t seem very fair. I don’t plan on being a teacher so I don’t know that I will need to use newsletters in my future career. 

Newsletter Assignment: