One Singular Sensation
So many times we hear people say there just aren't enough hours in a day. Teachers everywhere hear what you are saying and agree, tenfold.
Try as we may, there never seems to be enough time to cover everything that needs to be covered. More often than not, certain areas of academia fall by the wayside because, quite simply, there just isn't enough time.
Frankly I don't know how my teachers did it. When I was in school, not all that long ago, we had reading, writing and 'rithmetic, and we still had time left over for studying things like the states, the life cycle of a butterfly and something called "y period" which was basically an excuse for teachers to get an extra 45 minutes to chill. We also tackled wacky, downright prehistoric subjects such as spelling and sentence diagramming.
Well I'm here to tell you that all of it is gone. At a workshop we had a few weeks ago the question arose, Are children today learning more? Given the expectations on state tests, the answer seems like it would be yes, but as a few old school teachers pointed out, they aren't learning more silly, they are just being exposed to more and as we all know, sometimes less is more.
One teacher brought up the not so simple subject of geography. The majority of fourth graders in our school could not tell you the difference between Iowa and Chicago. They are all equally foreign words that, if they don't effect them, they simply don't matter.
Then there's the ongoing debate of grammar and spelling. I teach in an urban district where for most students, speaking the English language at home is not a given. So you would think that in a district like this there would be an onslaught discovery of parts of speech, punctuation and subject/verb agreements. But this just isn't the case.
Replacing old-fashioned spelling lessons is a block of time known as Working with Words. During this time you are supposed to do fancy word activities such as Guess The Covered Word (filling in what makes sense) and Making Words (applying word families). Basically they are word play games about words. Mostly though, they are activities that surround a group of prechosen, grade-appropriate words off a word wall that hangs on every classroom in the school.
While I do teach these lessons from time to time, I couldn't resist the back to basics, tried and true spelling list. Each week I give my students a list of ten words and one challenge word, chosen by me. Some of the words are word wall words, the rest are words that I find they like to butcher a lot in their writings or words that deal with subject content matter we will be working with that week. They do 3x each every Monday, ABC Order every Tuesday and sentences every Wednesday. Thursday they study, Friday is the quiz. If they spell any spelling words wrong, they have to write said word 5 times, and so on and so forth. The challenge word is always longer and is something that will hopefully help improve their subpar English language vocabulary. Just because they aren't exposed to it, doesn't mean they won't be responsible for it somewhere down the line.
But educators everywhere have an uphill battle with a capital B ahead of them. This is because for every correct reinforcement, there is a pop culture arch nemesis lurking in the shadows, waiting to destroy the ABC's of good spelling.
Our culture is latent with incorrect spellings and pluralizations of words and the Speak N' Spells of yesteryear are virtually obselete.
Take for example, toys. Bratz dolls, for instance, are huge with the girls in my class. They will never know Bratz should really be Brats because they have no frame of reference to apply to it.
Then we have movies. Right now, there's a movie in theaters children might want to see called American Dreamz. Not American Dreams mind you, Dreamz.
When did 'z' become the new 's' anyway?
Then we have kids literature. That should be safe right? Well, not always. Have you looked at your child's precocious Junie B. Jones books lately? Sure she's adorable in the way she tackles the school bully, but she talks in what I like to refer to as Junie B speak. In other words, she talks like a kid. It's cute when you're an adult reading it back, but a kid doesn't catch Junie B's mistakes. Instead, those mistakes become examples of how to talk, not how not to talk. You try telling an eight year old that a book they can easily find in their school library is teaching them the wrong thing.
And there's a number of other examples where those came from.
A few posts ago y'all attacked Gwen Stefani for her nonsensical Hollaback Girl. I'm with ya. The song makes no sense. But at the very least, with It's BANANAS! B-A-N-A-N-A-S! kids are halfway to writing that gramatically correct story about a monkey in a jungle.
I'm just saying.
Try as we may, there never seems to be enough time to cover everything that needs to be covered. More often than not, certain areas of academia fall by the wayside because, quite simply, there just isn't enough time.
Frankly I don't know how my teachers did it. When I was in school, not all that long ago, we had reading, writing and 'rithmetic, and we still had time left over for studying things like the states, the life cycle of a butterfly and something called "y period" which was basically an excuse for teachers to get an extra 45 minutes to chill. We also tackled wacky, downright prehistoric subjects such as spelling and sentence diagramming.
Well I'm here to tell you that all of it is gone. At a workshop we had a few weeks ago the question arose, Are children today learning more? Given the expectations on state tests, the answer seems like it would be yes, but as a few old school teachers pointed out, they aren't learning more silly, they are just being exposed to more and as we all know, sometimes less is more.
One teacher brought up the not so simple subject of geography. The majority of fourth graders in our school could not tell you the difference between Iowa and Chicago. They are all equally foreign words that, if they don't effect them, they simply don't matter.
Then there's the ongoing debate of grammar and spelling. I teach in an urban district where for most students, speaking the English language at home is not a given. So you would think that in a district like this there would be an onslaught discovery of parts of speech, punctuation and subject/verb agreements. But this just isn't the case.
Replacing old-fashioned spelling lessons is a block of time known as Working with Words. During this time you are supposed to do fancy word activities such as Guess The Covered Word (filling in what makes sense) and Making Words (applying word families). Basically they are word play games about words. Mostly though, they are activities that surround a group of prechosen, grade-appropriate words off a word wall that hangs on every classroom in the school.
While I do teach these lessons from time to time, I couldn't resist the back to basics, tried and true spelling list. Each week I give my students a list of ten words and one challenge word, chosen by me. Some of the words are word wall words, the rest are words that I find they like to butcher a lot in their writings or words that deal with subject content matter we will be working with that week. They do 3x each every Monday, ABC Order every Tuesday and sentences every Wednesday. Thursday they study, Friday is the quiz. If they spell any spelling words wrong, they have to write said word 5 times, and so on and so forth. The challenge word is always longer and is something that will hopefully help improve their subpar English language vocabulary. Just because they aren't exposed to it, doesn't mean they won't be responsible for it somewhere down the line.
But educators everywhere have an uphill battle with a capital B ahead of them. This is because for every correct reinforcement, there is a pop culture arch nemesis lurking in the shadows, waiting to destroy the ABC's of good spelling.
Our culture is latent with incorrect spellings and pluralizations of words and the Speak N' Spells of yesteryear are virtually obselete.
Take for example, toys. Bratz dolls, for instance, are huge with the girls in my class. They will never know Bratz should really be Brats because they have no frame of reference to apply to it.
Then we have movies. Right now, there's a movie in theaters children might want to see called American Dreamz. Not American Dreams mind you, Dreamz.
When did 'z' become the new 's' anyway?
Then we have kids literature. That should be safe right? Well, not always. Have you looked at your child's precocious Junie B. Jones books lately? Sure she's adorable in the way she tackles the school bully, but she talks in what I like to refer to as Junie B speak. In other words, she talks like a kid. It's cute when you're an adult reading it back, but a kid doesn't catch Junie B's mistakes. Instead, those mistakes become examples of how to talk, not how not to talk. You try telling an eight year old that a book they can easily find in their school library is teaching them the wrong thing.
And there's a number of other examples where those came from.
A few posts ago y'all attacked Gwen Stefani for her nonsensical Hollaback Girl. I'm with ya. The song makes no sense. But at the very least, with It's BANANAS! B-A-N-A-N-A-S! kids are halfway to writing that gramatically correct story about a monkey in a jungle.
I'm just saying.
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