Literacy in Real Life

Elise Doyle

Literacy in Real Life

12/6/19

Literacy Across Curriculum

 Literacy in Real Life

Learning to read and write, one of the biggest components of growing up and going to

school. Is that all it is though? Writing pointless term papers and analyzing a sci-fi novel? Literacy

is something that actual goes into all components of our lives. The skills we learn in grade school

with our book projects and spelling lists help us with our decision making and comprehend

events in our day-to-day lives.

Before studying literacy, I had a very black and white sense of what it meant. You either

know how to read or you don’t. Literacy is defined as, “the quality or state of being literate”

(Merriam-Webster, 2018). Literacy leads me to recall the different levels of books we were

allowed to read. I find it fascinating that teachers would limit what we could or could not read at

a time. Obviously, they do not want students to get frustrated by outrageously difficult

vocabulary, but at the same time, why should a teacher limit what a student wants to achieve? I

can recall some of the book levels being very similar. Many children felt left out or dumb if they

couldn’t advance to the next level of books. They were stuck reading the same books over and

over again. I noticed these things as a student, but also as a teaching assistant in a first-grade

classroom.

I figured there are very specific ways in which one were to teach literacy. You first start

with different sounds of letters, then you move onto the names of letters and matching those

sounds to them. Eventually, a child learns to read by a specified age such as kindergarten. Then

the child just advances in spelling and vocabulary every year. In one of the texts we have been

reading, it mentions how children often learn best in small groups, this includes literacy. That

model of teaching for literacy, I never considered(Fields, Meritt, & Fields, 2018). I thought it may

distract from the task at hand of reading. Thinking about it now, it seems like such a smart way
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to teach children to read, having a small group, each child taking turns reading aloud with the

other children following along in their own books. This way if a child messes up a word or doesn’t

know how to say it, his classmates can help him or her.

Something else that I have realized is that the basic teaching model of literacy doesn’t

work for every child. For example, I never considered the struggle of dyslexic children until last

year. Speed reading in elementary was such a bragging right on the school yard. Only the dumb

kids read slowly, right? That was what I thought as a kid. I knew I could read extremely

efficiently, so I thought I was more intelligent than other children. If I am more intelligent that

equates to being a better person right? I felt superior due to my abilities. I received a lot of

praise, that was my form of reward. I wasn’t reading because I enjoyed it. I was reading to get

others approval. Literacy should not be about speed aloud. Literacy, I have learned, is more

about understanding and how to apply it to one’s own life rather than a competition or for

someone else’s approval.

I still believe that the ability to read and write is a component of literacy, but I believe it

goes deeper than that. Due to my experiences of watching other students struggle to learn to

read at a certain rate, the pace of learning literacy should be tailored to accommodate a

student’s individual needs. This is a better option than the style I have seen of telling students

that they “should” be reading at this specified grade level. Students should also be taught how

literacy permeates out of the classroom and into real life. Social skills can even be taught

through literacy. “To do this, select literature and tailor discussions around specific social skills

that children need to learn. If teaching social skills during your literacy time, focus on character

traits that help children resolve conflicts(Fields, Meritt, & Fields, 2018).”
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Another way in which this class has shown me the permeability of literacy was Jamie and

Brennan’s lesson on media literacy. In today’s society, we are bombarded with information. We

must process and analyze this information at an extremely high rate. Literacy goes deeper than

just being able to read at a certain rate. It includes comprehension and the ability to analyze and

apply whatever lessons you take from the piece of literature. This applies to media literacy,

because one needs to figure out if the information is real, biased, or even applicable to one’s

own life(Seitel, 2019). Fake news is a concept running rampant in politics today. We talked about

it a lot in my Public Relations course last year. Media literacy is an important skill to have as our

lives become more and more intertwined with media.

Writing was a part of literacy that I have always despised. I remember the first time

writing “longer” stories or when writing became about non-fiction. It was third grade. Although,

my teacher found a few ways to make them enjoyable. Each way ended up having another layer

to the assignment that was more creative. I wrote a step by step paper on how to make the best

peanut butter and jelly sandwich or pasta. This, was one of the few non-fiction papers I enjoyed,

as we got to present our step by step process. I remember my teacher prepared us for this

project by teaching us transition words in another assignment where we wrote about cleaning

our rooms, I chose my bathroom because that was my chore on Saturdays. Anyways, the point of

this is that, thinking about my past with literacy, I realize how great my 3rd grade teacher was,

because she found ways to make writing relate to my actual experiences. My fourth or fifth

grade teacher did this as well with a historical paper. We wrote about one of our favorite people

in history. I wrote about Laura Ingalls Wilder, as I loved Little House on the Prairie. I got to dress
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up like her and present my paper and project. It gave a tie in that was more than just writing. It

helped me connect the purpose of what I was doing to my own life. It made learning fun.

In school, I remember hating the why questions and what did you take away questions. I

hated explaining why characters did something or having to think about it. Especially if it was one

of those short stories from those thick, heavy reading books with over 300 pages of stories we

would use for comprehension that sat in our desks 24/7 unless we didn’t finish the in class work

and we had to lug it home. While I hated these books with a burning passion, I realize now what

learning they brought to me. Those why questions have helped me analyze the events in my own

life. The awful and painful experiences, I have been able to analyze and think about and take

away a theme or lesson rather than just dwelling on the pain of what happened to me. I think

this is a great skill to have. To look past the simple events or interactions that happened, and

take a lesson away instead. It shows that life goes on. That there is a why and a reason that

things happen.

Overall, literacy is not just those mandatory twenty minutes of reading you had to do

everyday in second grade. Literacy is a transferable skill that helps individuals cope with events in

their own lives, to take away messages and lessons, to comprehend and take in the copious

amount of information surrounding us in this data driven era.

My lesson on literacy was done with Bree. Our main objective was to teach about theme.

It was the first literacy lesson to go, it showed. This is because we based our literacy lesson on

something that fit the traditional definition of literacy. We taught on theme. It was a lesson that

was definitely meant for a younger audience. After our lesson, students were able to
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differentiate between main idea and theme in their own favorite texts. We had a discussion

about it as a form of assessment. One of my personal issues with this now is it wasn’t the best

form of assessment, but again this was my first lesson. Some of the feedback we got was that the

activity wasn’t age appropriate which made sense as I thought to make it for younger ages. My

partner was great because her and I have similar teaching techniques. We made sure to not

procrastinate, which helped a lot.

It felt like timing went really well with our literacy lesson. People were engaged and

eager to discuss. The questions we received were well thought out and made me and Bree think,

challenged us even. Next time I would gear our lesson more towards college students. When

creating the lesson, I was thinking more in the context of the age that children learn about

theme. The lens that I approached the lesson was from a younger audience. We did add more

discussion to meet the needs of college aged students, but it could have been better. Next time I

would ask a few more clarifying questions about expectations. You could tell that the

students gained some knowledge based off of their discussion comments, but again it would

have been better to have something concrete.

My views on literacy have changed quite a bit since the beginning of the semester. I feel

my definition is much more broad, as previously I felt that it was simply if students could read

and write. Some students take longer to become literate. Some students need to incorporate

their body’s to become literate. There are so many ways to learn and become better with

literacy. This semester I learned how you can include the arts to better literacy. I learned how

literacy effects math with word problems. I learned how being literate has way more to do with

things other than the ability to read.

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One activity I did with my students was incorporating acting or kinesthetic activities in

with their vocabulary words. Getting their bodies and minds working together to learn a word

helped a lot. Plus the kids liked getting out of their chairs and working in partners and

performing actions that made them think of their vocabulary words. I hope learning this helped

students realize that getting their bodies involved can help them remember certain things.

What I noticed at my school, Grafton Elementary was that they followed the traditional

form of literacy teaching. There was a heavy focus on learning vocabulary and spelling. There

was a bit of differentiation with the reading group activities. The kids got to choose 4-5 activities

from 9 options to do before the week ended. Each of these activities was geared to help kids

learn the definitions of vocabulary or to remember their spelling words. Activities ranged from

acrostics, to code-wording, to short stories using the vocabulary. During my time there, my

teacher allowed me to add two kinesthetic/acting activities into the mix for the kids who needed

to get up and move a bit more. At the end of the week, around 18 of the 23 students would have

their reading group work completed. This meant that 5 didn’t get the work done. Students were

also more willing to get work done for literacy when they were working in pairs, specifically for

the acrostics, as they could bounce ideas off of each other.

Some students left the room to work the reading aide. The number of students total was

10. Five in the first half of reading time and five in the second half. It was honestly very difficult

to get quantitative data for this time as my teacher was very flexible/inconsistent with the

amount of activities that had to be done per week. This was because some weeks it wouldn’t be

a full week or other things would get planned during reading group time. Literacy was kind of all

over the place because they also did a reading comprehension game online titled iStation, which
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was known to help students prepare for standardized testing. Despite the fact that literacy

teaching was a bit all over the place, test scores at this school are an outlier from the rest of

Illinois, in a good way. According to Public School Review, Grafton’s reading proficiency scores

are 80%-89%(2019). This is incredibly high.

Overall, I really like the opportunities for differentiation in the reading group activities. I

also like that students that are struggling can meet with an aide and the average to slightly below

average students meet with the teacher. The needs are being met, I would just change the

reading group activities out more often and keep adding kinesthetic options. Just diversifying the

idea that is already there to keep it more interesting and appeal to non-traditional learners.

Grafton is a very traditional school, so it makes sense why they don’t have as expansive of a

definition of literacy.

When I become a teacher, my goal is to integrate as much of real life as I can into

literacy. I want literacy to be interesting. Whether that is with concepts I have experienced as a

child like J.A. BizTown or things I witnessed on our fieldtrips where teachers worked alongside

students as facilitators, to my internship where I saw reading groups and basic vocabulary being

integrated with differentiation. Students deserve to have a say in what they want to become

literate in. In high school, I got to choose career readiness programs that allowed me to become

literate in those areas. Those options keep kids motivated and bring a sense of control into their

lives. Those are the feelings I want in my classroom. I want kids to feel like they can have a say in

what they are learning. I want to give them some responsibility and help them learn how they

best learn.
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References

Fields, M. V., Meritt, P. A., & Fields, D. (2018). Constructive Guidance and Discipline: Birth to Age

Eight. New York, NY: Pearson.

Grafton Elementary School Profile (2019-20): Grafton, IL. (2019). Retrieved December 6, 2019,

from https://www.publicschoolreview.com/grafton-elementary-school-profile.

Seitel, F. P. (2019). The Practice of Public Relations. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.