Reflective Essay

How did my reading experience influenced my students when I was teaching first grade? Teaching is about engaging students or keeping your students interested. So if you like reading you will transmit that to your classmates in a way they will feel engaged with what they reading. when I was teaching first grade 4 months ago, I would use the adequate voice intonation and act out the reading for them, as u know children from 5 to 7 years will definitely feel interested in things like that.In that way that would help them to understand what was going on in the story and would comprehend better. The reading books they have help alot because these are books that have many pictures so that works best for children in that age. Also, we used Story Cards which are cards that have only the pictures of the events of the story and we would developed a conversation based on the pictures, kind of like a summary based on pictures so that they would get involved with the characters and all the events.
What we often did in class was like bring to life the characters of the story. One time we were reading about animals in the jungle so for homework they had to bring to class a mask of any animal of the story, so next they when we began reading i would make them make the sound of the animal they were representing. In that way they really felt excited about the story. There was this other time when I was talking to the parents in a teacher-parent session and I was telling the parents they need to encourage their children to read at home, because we will have exams every week to check the fluency of the student. So one parent told me "Oh yes my son is always telling me to buy new books because he says his teacher told him he needs to read books at home, and I think that is good that you as teacher motivate our children to read more". I really felt like I was accomplishing my goal because children will always do what their teacher tell them to do. So if I will pressure them to read more at home they will do so, because when they are at that age they really respect the teacher and they feel like the teacher is a really important person in their lives.
I had in my class a really smart kid that he would immediately understand what the story was about and he once came next to my desk and asked” Ms. Do you have to read all the books from school to explain the topics to us? And I answered “Yes I have to do a lot of reading” and then he said back “ Ms. So that means you really like reading, just like me!” I felt he really felt identified with me and that was like an inspiration for him to continue reading.

So why did I present a class plan as my "thing" well to demonstrate the different activities we as teachers do to keep students engaged with what they read. We need to find a way to get students to like what they are doing in class and not to feel bored, because if that happens we fail as teachers. So it is really challenging to do that because not all of them are interested in the same things or some like to do things in a different way than others, etc. So this is my project which shows that your experience of reading can affect/ influence others because in that age specially first graders you can start building their reading attraction.
I also have a picture collage of students doing different activities in which they are rewarded because they met the reading goal of the month, which was for example to read 200 words in 2 minutes and so on.