Back to School...

I am a student at Meredith College who can not wait to be a teacher! As I enter my first day of classes I wonder how the children of our future must feel when they enter school after a glorious Winter Break. As students are learning about reading, writing, science, and mathematics, I am learning about how to teach these students Language Arts.

How much is Language Arts used in the classroom. Lets think about this, Language Arts is used in reading and writing. It brings in imagination for all ages. Language Arts is used as early as kindergarten and continues until...well beyond college.

Language Arts covers a wide array of what we take advantage of every single day. There are six Language Arts that I will be responsible for making sure students know. The six consist of listening, talking, reading, writing, viewing, and visually representing. You see I learned these at an early age and then I took advantage of knowing them.

Out of the six, two of them are often neglected in schools. These two are listening and talking. But, these two are so important. Listening consist of three sub-categories. Aesthetic is emotional response, efferent is focused on information to be learned, and critical is comparisions of facts versus opinions. Reading is also very important because we have to be able to read to survive. There is independent reading, shared reading, guided reading, buddy reading, and the read-a-louds. Writing is also another must in Language Arts and as teachers we have to remember that spelling and writing always count! The stages of writing are pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing. Commericials and billboards are also extremely important. As a teacher I have to teach children these things and how to do it on their own. The most newly added categories are Viewing and Visual Representing.

It is now so obvious how important Language Arts is and how I have a huge job ahead of me, but I am more than excited!