Final Thoughts

Wow! I've completed my presentation and feel such a sense of relief. I'm so proud of myself and am really glad that things went smoothly. I feel that I got some great feedback and had great support from everyone at my internship site. I actually feel empowered to go out into the world and continue my advocacy journey.  It's been a long road, but we've done it! Congratulations to my fellow colleagues and good luck to you in the future!

Final Preparations

I have a few questions such as where do I begin and how to get my audience to listen and take me seriously. I guess these are just my points of nervousness right now. The director and the owner of the school are very supportive of me and have been helping me along my journey, but I’m still nervous about motivating and encouraging the other staff members to engage in my plan. Part of my plan relays on the staff members to work with parents and provide parents with guidance for implementing literacy activities at home (which might actually add some additional workload for them). If I cannot get the other staff members on board, I’m a little worried I will not have the support to complete my long term goal of developing a parent board to help maintain a literacy program at the school.

I’m trying to gather more information about presenting an AAP. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. I’m sure there’s no right or wrong way to present information and the AAP, but I’m just curious about other’s ideas. Should I use a powerpoint or should I simply provide handouts? Should I show documented research results or simply summarize all my findings?

I have used several resources to gather my data to supply to my audience. One source that I have found extremely useful is:

National Center for Family Literacy. (2006). The effect of family literacy interventions on children’s acquisition of reading. Retrieved from http://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/lit_interventions.pdf

Another source that I have used quite extensively is http://www.read20.org/parents.html. This website offers helpful sites to educators and families regarding supporting literacy. This is such an important website for me because it allows me to gather additional data, help parents find information, and help other educators find additional information/resources. 

There are two quotes that really speak to me when it comes to advocacy. The first one is

“We must become the change we wish to create”- Gandhi

And the second one is

“It is not enough to be compassionate. You must act” – Tenzin Gyatso

What inspires and excites you most about your advocacy plan and being an advocate?

I think the thing that inspires me most is the prospect of change. For so long I have said that children need more literacy involvement and I always wanted to figure out a way to get my parents to be more involved in their children’s educations in the early childhood years. But that’s all I’ve done. I’m excited to actually be taking steps to try and make a difference.

What challenges and/or anxieties do you feel related to engaging in the advocacy efforts you have targeted?

I have so many anxieties going into this. I am a shy person and I do not do well with talking to people I’m not comfortable with. I’m afraid that I won’t get the parents attention and will not get the feedback or involvement that I’m hoping for.

What do you believe will be most effective in helping you overcome any challenging emotions you may be feeling with regard to presenting and implementing your Advocacy Action Plan?

I think the best thing and most important thing I can do is be prepared. If I have all my ducks in a row, I shouldn’t have any issues presenting to the families or the employees of my internship site. Also, I believe that if I practice what I want to say and have my handouts ready, I should be fine.

How can you encourage others in their advocacy efforts, and how can others encourage you?

I can encourage others by reminding that that we’re doing this for a bigger cause. I can also encourage them by offering any assistance or guidance that I might be able to provide. I would hope that others would do the same for me to help encourage me. I also would hope for honest feedback and guidance if someone feels that I’m off track or am missing something

Thank you!

We did it! We made it through EDU 411 and hopefully gained some new knowledge and skills. I want to thank everyone for your continued support throughout this course and hopefully we will work together again in EDU 412. All in all, this course provided me the chance to look at ECE in a new light and I gained some great knowledge about early literacy. The people that I was able to speak with and interview provided me with great ideas, insight, and knowledge about what really goes on in this field. All of you guys had such great ideas to share and some of them I plan to take back into my classroom. 

I hope that everyone else enjoyed this course as much as I did. I really appreciated all the responses, ideas, and thoughts to my blogs and discussion posts. They truly helped me to grow and learn.

Again, thank you to everyone. Good luck in EDU 412. 

Module 4 Blog Post

This past week I spent some time interacting with the students and with the parents. I talked to a few parents briefly at drop off time and asked if they have a few minutes to discuss their child’s literacy development.  One parent told me that she feels that it is school’s job to teach her child how to read, but once he learns how to read, she will spend more time reading with him. I asked her if she would be willing to talk more with me at a later date because I was interested in her views on early literacy (as a parent who seems to not be very interested in promoting literacy for her son). She agreed and we’re going to have a phone conversation next week. I asked my host teacher about this particular parent and she told me that she’s the type to drop off and pick up without really engaging in any conversation with her. As much as my host teacher tries to communicate with this parent, the parent seems to be uninterested.

I continued to observe my host teacher work with her students on literacy development activities. She works with them on a daily basis to help them recognize the letters of their name, spell their name, and pick out familiar letters in text. She also encourages them to practice writing their names and provides them with laminated examples to copy. I asked her what aspects of her literacy program work best and she told me that she has had the most success with name recognition and spelling. She finds that for some reason, the kids develop literacy concepts from working with familiar words and letters.

When I was observing her circle time, I noticed that one of the students commented on the fact that February has 2 “R”s. I was very interested in this because it proved me that through repetition and practice, the students are developing emergent reader behaviors. They are starting to develop letter-sound connections and are working towards being able to recognize all letters and the sounds they make.

I continually become aware of the fact that a large portion of parents do not understand the important role they play in their child’s literacy development. I feel that my advocacy plan is perfect for this center because the parents just need a bit of information. It’s not that they don’t care about their children’s education; they just don’t realize their roles and the importance of their roles. If I can provide them with a little information about how they can help their children, I feel it will make a difference. Another insight I gained this past week is that even though teachers make every effort to include families into the program, it is incredibly difficult. My host teacher expressed some frustration about getting families involved, but didn’t seem to have any ideas on how to promote involvement. I’m hoping to share some ideas with her that might benefit her classroom. 

Blog 3

I spoke with a program director this past 2 weeks and we spoke for awhile regarding how to implement appropriate curriculums in terms of promoting literacy, how her staff does assessments on literacy, and what they do when they feel a student needs further assessment. I also spoke with some parents about their experiences at the center and what they liked and disliked about the curriculum in terms of literacy development.

I learned that literacy can be a very difficult thing to assess simply because children’s vocabularies vary so much. However, we strive to have all children learn the vocabulary words and develop their vocabularies. We also strive to help them attain early literacy skills but these skills will develop at an individual pace. With that in mind, it’s hard to determine when the right time is to intervene and request additional assessments. 

2nd Blog--Observing and Interacting with Professional Colleagues

The name of my setting is Village Children’s Academy. This is a privately owned preschool/childcare in IL. This program services children ages 6 weeks to 12 years. There is a broad range of abilities within this environment and many diverse students. There are 6 different classrooms for the children and they are broken into Infants, Toddlers, Two’s, Preschool, Preschool For All, and Kindergarten. The School Agers share a room with the Kindergarten class in the afternoons. The preschool classroom and the Preschool For All classroom have mixed age groups of children ages 3-5. The demographic for this center is mostly Hispanic and Caucasian. The teachers vary in their educational levels from high school diplomas to Master Degrees in education.

This past week I spoke with a couple different people. I spoke with the Preschool For All teacher who is an IL 04 certified teacher. She works with the children who are determined to be at risk for developmental delays. I spent a lot of time talking with her about literacy and the children she is working with. I gained some great insights about her students. Her class is mostly Hispanic children and most of these children speak little to no English. She shared with me that she fears many of these children will be academically behind in literacy because many of them cannot recognize or say the letters of their name.

I also spoke with the owner of the school. She has owned and operated the facility for the last 15 years and she has seen it all (in her words). She has seen students come into the facility at 3 years old already reading and students come in barely speaking a word. She has also seen students thrive in the classroom with individualized attention and an individualized curriculum.

I learned quite a bit this past module from my observations and discussions. I have gained some hands on knowledge about English Language Learners and their struggle for learning to speak and understand the language and try to learn the alphabet and letter recognition.

The PFA teacher is going to try to connect me with one of the parents in the program because she is a Literacy Specialist. I am very anxious to see if this parent will spend some time answering some of my questions and talking to me about literacy.

One quote that I will share this week is from the PFA teacher. She said “All children learn at their own pace, however it’s a fine line between their own pace and needing to be concerned about their development.” This really resonated with me. I completely agree with her and feel that there is a very fine line between the two aspects of education. Knowing when the right time to step in is can be very difficult to determine.

Another quote that I want to share this week is from one of my resources. It states ”ELLs tend to exhibit lower academic achievement (particularly in literacy) than their non-ELL peers, and similar negative trends are observed in other educational outcomes” (Klingner, J, et al. 2006). This quote hits right on with what I wanted to figure out. I am curious as to how to create interventions that will help decrease this gap in educational achievement.