What Happened During Clinic This Week!
Learning about students with an All About Me game!
It’s the spring semester, which means that the Literacy Clinic is in session! Each spring semester, the students in the Literacy Education Program at Old Westbury work with students in grades pre-k through twelve in the college library and prepare reading and writing instruction to support the kids who they are teaching. This is the culminating semester of their graduate program.
This past Monday was the first session of the Literacy Clinic for this semester. The graduate students met the students they are working with as well as met the families. At the beginning of the semester, it is important to learn about the students and for the students to learn about the teacher. This is a way to build trust between the teacher and student as well as build a community of learning – where students feel safe and supported to take risks and try out new skills and strategies.
Creating a supportive and trusting classroom community is a topic that I emphasize in each of my classes. I dedicated an entire podcast episode to this topic as well – it’s that important! Before the semester, I met with the graduate students and emphasized the importance of creating activities that would allow them to learn about their students as individuals as well as readers and writers. They did a fantastic job – and after working with the kids, they discussed how important it was to learn about the kids.
One student created an All About Me Game for her fifth grade students. It was similar to Monopoly – where the students had to roll dice and when they landed on a spot, they had to answer the question. This generated a lot of discussion in this group! The kids shared about their favorite activities and learned about their teacher’s favorite things as well (she played the game, too!).
I have another student who is an amazing artist and she created a visual of a person for her student to color in and then answer questions about himself. She learned about his hobbies and interests as well as his family and favorite foods. She made a model to show the student what they would be doing – but also to introduce herself to him. It was a great activity and the student was super impressed with her drawing ability!
The graduate students used books as a starting place to learn about their students and then planned activities that connected to the books. They really did a great job connecting reading to writing and modeling how the two go together and how we can use them both in our daily lives. In her book Into Writing, Megan Sloan emphasizes the importance of connecting reading and writing at the beginning of the school year when working with students because it allows you to introduce literature to students but you also learn more about the student through their own writing.