Post 2

I really enjoyed reading Crystal's blog.  I also am really excited about dealing with adolescants, because in my experiences in this program so far, I have only worked with younger students.  I want to see what it is like working with students in their teen years.  I enjoy when we go to the middle school for observations.  I also, like Crystal, and excited to be corresponding with the students up north in Pennsylvania.  That will be interesting communicating with them.  I also really enjoyed reading Donya's blog about her son with dyslexia and ADHD.  Donya, like myself, is a dual major, and I think it is great that she will be able to help her students with learning disbilities, such as dyslexia and ADHD, as well as her son.

An idea that I found important from the article we read was the biopoem.  I found this very interesting because I had never heard of it before.  This strategy teaches students to make inferences about what a statement implies.  This is a very important concept for students to grasp because being able to infer is a huge part of reading comprehension.  The most important idea I found in the article is just writing to learn in general.  From what I have seen in classrooms, writing is not used very much, and there is no emphasis placed on it.  Also, while reading the article, the listen-stop-and-write strategy stood out to me.  This is a strategy used where teachers will teach for a period of time, and then give students a period of time to reflect and take notes on what they just heard, and formulate any questions they might have about what they just heard.  I think this is a great strategy and students would really benefit from it, I know as a student it helps when I can think about something after I listen, information makes more sense when you have a little while to process it.  A few questions i have after reading this article are:  Why is there not any emphasis on writing to learn in the classroom?  Is it because the instruction time is limited?  I was also confused as to what they meant by assessment to writing to learn?  Was it saying it should be assessed, or not?