Response 8

Woops! I totally missed a blog! I was absent that week and didn't think we had to post but after reviewing everyone else's I realized I was mistaken and went right from 7 to 9 on my own so here is my response to Literacy/Fluency in regards to Tompkins and other articles we have read thus far:
Firstly as we have seen throughout all of our readings regarding fluency we have come to understand that fluency isn't just the ability to read a word/sentence with fluidity. It is so much more than that. As teachers we need to make sure that our students not only know how to identify/read words but also know what the words mean, and understand their context. As you all know, I am in a Kindergarten classroom and even they are working on perfecting their fluency with words. My CT has integrated Literacy into nearly everything she does (even using math based journals)! There are star words located around the room (which was in the skit Brittany W. and I presented to the class as a vocab/fluency lesson), color words posted, month/day words, weather words, etc. all over her room. She also has the students read through the morning message as a class and circle certain patterns in words or vocab words they have been working on; she even has them go through and fix words that sound right but are actually spelled wrong. All of this at the Kindergarten level! And you should see their writing journals! One student in particular wrote a whole paragraph about how she went ice skating one weekend; totally amazing at that age. I feel that these examples are great motivating factors for me and to all of us as future teachers. While the idea of teaching fluency and literacy in general appear to be daunting tasks for us inexperienced educators, they really are more than manageable and can be incorporated/integrated into almost anything. If Kindergartners can make stabs at fluency and other literacy elements, I'm sure we can learn to teach it!