Final+Thoughts

====Overall, I really enjoyed my middle school experience at Grover Middle School in the West Windsor/Plainsboro school district. I have learned a lot about myself as a future teacher and how the middle school is very similar to an elementary school classroom. I learned many literacy techniques in the classroom that I can implement in an elementary classroom setting as well. My cooperating teacher had a word wall on her wall for the students to reference words of the day at any time. I like this idea because words of the day in my schools were always forgotten after taking the test on them. After the test, I forgot the words and did not seem to find a reason to include them into my vocabulary. By having a word wall, the students can reference them at any time which is something I enjoyed. I also liked that my cooperating teacher had a big unit on creating memoirs. The students were able to write about their lives and something important that has happened to them to make them the person they are today. The students liked having the choice to pick any topic that they knew a lot about to write about. I will try and include choice writing pieces into my curriculum as a future teacher. ====

====My Wikispace demonstrates all of the characteristics of a great literacy program in any school. Book clubs are an important aspect to a literacy program because it gives students the choice to pick from a group of texts that might interest them. They can collaborate with their peers about the text and answer each others questions together. They can investigate the text together and come up to solutions for some of the problems in their books. Assessments are always talked about, whether formative or summative assessments, because it demonstrates the progress of a student overtime in the classroom. It shows how the work done in the classroom has improved the student's performance and has taught them something. By conducting literacy, informal reading, and writing assessments on children, the teacher is able to see why the student is reading or writing at the current level t are and can find solutions to have the students perform better and learn more. Even though there is always a negative connotation when people hear of high stakes assessments, they are just a way that the state is able to track student progress over a period of time and see if the teachers are doing their jobs. ====

====Personally, my Wikispace portfolio demonstrates how balanced literacy supports adolescents' literacy development because I am able to use all of the tools that I have learned in each of my education classes to support adolescents' and their literacy. I know how to properly set up a balanced literacy framework in my classroom because I know how important reading, writing, and word study are in a classroom. Each are equally as important as one another because they make a balanced student. I have demonstrated on my portfolio how to properly use different types of assessments (informal reading, literacy inventory, and writing assessments) to learn about an individual student and see how they can improve and how well they have done already in the year. Being able to assess a student is very important because as a teacher, you need to be able to push your students into doing their best work. By knowing what they need to work on and how to fix it, the student will perform better in your classroom and can apply it outside of the classroom and into the real world. My pictures from my lesson demonstrate a balanced literacy program because I am helping students with their work to better themselves and assessing them in how to improve their work. Each of my assessment papers demonstrate that I know how to properly use the correct tools in assessing a student and how to improve their reading and writing. ====

====Overall, I feel that my Wikispace portfolio demonstrates a balanced literacy program which supports adolescents' literacy because I have demonstrated the proper tools over the course of a semester to understand student development and to improve the student's literacy. There is evidence from pictures, videos, and papers to demonstrate my growth and progress over the semester which I am very proud of. ====