TIP Chapters 5, 6, 7

In chapter 5, I am familiar with Piaget’s theories and stages of cognitive development. I feel that most of what we are taught in our classes here stem from that. We hear about developmentally appropriate documents when we are working on lesson plans all the time. It is important to create lessons that are on target with the stages in which students are at in order for them to be effective. Basically we know that if we took a lesson book for a first grade class and used it to teach an 11th grade class it wouldn’t serve much purpose in helping students learn and advance, and vice versa.

I don’t know that I agree with the maturation theory. As I was reading it I almost got mad, like why would anyone not let a child learn to read? Words are all around as, and as children we see that our parents need to read words to tell us information, like menus, signs, books…so why would we withhold this information from our curious children. They develop curiosity, they want to learn. When you read a book to a young child, they look at words and listen to what you say and try to match it up. I think that if you kept this from a child until they were six and a half years old you might even slow down that development. Students should have foundations laid before they enter the formal learning process we call school. Basically I agree with the Theory of Literacy Development by Holdaway.

I feel the emergent literacy theory describes how most children learn to read, through exposure as a child, at home, out in the world, and in school. Children aren’t necessarily at the level that their school grade says they should be at. Some will be more advanced, some will be right on target, and some will struggle and be behind. That is why we have advanced level classes for the gifted, mainstream classes, and supplemental support classes when needed. I think the environment that a child grows up in plays the largest role on how they develop and how much they care for and desire to learn more. I think that the Family Literacy Theory goes along with this as well. I believe we need to encourage reading, and praise a child when he or she accomplishes something in the stages of learning to read. When a child feels a sense of accomplishment, a child wants to continue to show you that he/she can do it. This creates a love of reading and learning.

As I read about the Sociolinguistic Theory in Chapter 6, it reinforces something I was thinking myself while reading chapter 5. As I read chapter 5 and they talked about families and their influence on a children ability to read and learn to read, I was thinking to myself that children from more affluent home and more academic homes will have more exposure and more chances to learn to read better. They might also see their parents in these situations more, creating more of a will to learn. Where in poorer homes, and less privileged homes, children will not come across this opportunity as much. They also will not be exposed to as many words and ideas. This is sad because I feel that a good majority of people end up similar to their parents, instead of going above and beyond and moving up in life. I guess that proves that the more you see your parents and peers love reading and use reading, the more you will want to, and same with learning. But how is a child supposed to think something is important if they are not exposed to it, and brought up to think it is. And that carries out through the rest of the child’s life as a student. They might not be encouraged to do school work at home, or might not get the help or support they need, and the cycle just continues. And people wonder why in more cases than not, people who come from affluent places and rich academic lives stay like that, and people who don’t end up in the same situation that their parents were in. This also makes me think of silencing teachers from the last readings. How they used that system of scripted and not individualized learning to teach in a poorer, lower class school. They didn’t care because it wasn’t a school full of “smart, affluent children” it seemed. Basically this chapter proves why people are classified in classes such as upper, middle, lower, white collar, blue collar, poor, rich…and how they ‘usually’ (not always) seem to stay very close in classification when they grow up.

Children learn from their families, from their cultures, from the communities around them. They learn through the social interactions that they encounter. Everything we are exposed to as a child is what shapes us as learners, creates our knowledge base, and guides us to our next step in learning. We are products of the society in which we are exposed to. I agree with Vygotsky’s ideas about exposure to our sign systems and how manipulation of such information can affect who we become as people and learners.

I guess writing as I read is funny, because as I read something, and write about what it makes me think of, I feel like the next thing I end up reading confirms what I just thought about. The Critical Literacy Theory basically talks about how people end up staying in the same classifications they grew up in, because they are not offered equal chances and equal education as the members of other classes are. My whole idea of how the poor get less than the affluent kids. It seems what you are born into is what you are destined to be unless you can excel and break free and really take advantage of any opportunity you have to go above and beyond and learn more on your own.

I find the substrata factor interesting. I would like to see a class of young students and analyze them to see these skills and see if they relate to their reading abilities. As for Rauding, I don’t know, maybe this is a majority thing, but I am a slow reader, I have to reread sentences sometimes to make them sink in too, but I think I have a fairly high vocabulary, and a good knack for putting an unfamiliar word into context and figuring out what it means too. I know I have had this problem forever and it has always been a struggle for me, but I think it is something I have learned to deal with.

I think that all of the information and cognitive processing models are interesting and in another sense similar. I feel that the pattern that the brain uses to get, decipher, store, retrieve, and filter information is complex and that maybe everyone’s brain works a little differently. I think these are all good theories and I think they all make significant contributions to what we understand about reading.