Writing Lessons in the Classroom

I have been thinking about what to write for this last blog post for a while now.  Finally, today at practicum, I noticed that my teacher had a writing lesson in the schedule for the day.  Unfortunately, when it became time to teach the lesson, my cooperating teacher switched to a history lesson.  I was very surprised that this lesson was skipped because since I have been in this classroom, I have never seen a writing lesson.  Around the classroom, I do see some writing samples from the students, but I feel like more should be done.

According to the weekly calendar, my class has a writing lesson 2-3 times per week.  Since I am only in the classroom 2 times per week, writing lessons become difficult to observe.  Writing is done everyday in some shape or form.  Another thing I noticed today was that if students finished their centers early, they had the option to free write.  Although this is good exercise, I think that formal writing lessons should be done more often.

Reflecting on Vocabulary Instruction in My Practicum Classroom

For this week's blog post, I decided to focus on vocabulary instruction in my practicum classroom.  A couple of weeks ago, I was writing a reading response focused on vocabulary instruction for my Teaching Reading in Elementary Education class.  I wrote about how I love all of these different strategies and how I would implement them in my classroom.  I then began to reflect on how the strategies I described are taught in my classroom, and then I realize that they really are not.  This really made me think.

I think that my practicum teacher is great and the students are learning a lot, but vocabulary instruction is missing.  The only time I have experienced a lesson focused specifically on studying words was when I taught a lesson on adverbs.  Reflecting on this made me realize the lack of instruction that occurs in my practicum classroom.  I realize that the curriculum is very tight and there is not a ton of wiggle room, but some elements of language, like vocabulary are essential for students to know and learn.

I became even more concerned when that professor made a comment on that assignment saying that not teaching vocabulary seems to be a pattern in a few other classrooms at my school that have practicum students.  This shocked me because I feel like if a problem like this is just for a class, it can be easily fixed, by simply meeting with the specific teacher.  However, if the problem is school wide, that is a much larger issue to address.  Vocabulary is very important in any grade and I believe should be taught on a weekly basis.