Reading Reflections

My reading has not gone as good as I had planned. Most of the books I checked out from the library were chapter books. The book I'm interested in reading is called, "Number the Stars" which is a Caldecott winner. It's alot easier to read picture books because the book does not take as long to read. Time has always been an issue with me. But that really is not an excuse because I have a 11 year old daughter who is in the sixth grade and ejoys reading chapter books. Reading together would be great benefit to us both. It's simply up to me to make this happen.

Well, I finally finished reading the book, "Number the Stars". Louell and I were reading it together but I went ahead and finished it alone but well continue reading it with her. The book was interesting and I think children would enjoy it also. The book is also an assignment for the book sell activity at Tibbetts Elementary. Reading it alone and again with my daughter will help me to sell the book to 6th grade students.

Today we met at Tibbets Jr. High for the first time. We got to meet the students who are quite remarkable. I read Number the Stars and did a book talk but did not do as well as I had liked but oh well. We then met at the UNM center for Uma's visit. Her presentation was interesting.It was fantastic to meet an author, she too was remarkable.

We met at Tibbets again today and the students were quite thirlled to have us there. We did not do as much today with the students it was more based on literature circles with a guest whom i forgot the name of. Francis and the guest did role playing and included the students to participate which they appeared to have enjoyed. At the park...Francis read a short story that was interesting and we did our small literature circle. We each gave input about thoughts of the story and how it compared to text to text, text to real life and text to real/whole world.

October 15, 2007 Storytelling Festival

I attended the story telling festival on Friday afternoon. The storytellers I listened to were Connie Regan Blake and Peggy Godfrey. Peggy Godfrey’s story was interesting. I enjoyed the way she included poetry into her story. The theme of her story was agricultural ranching. She talked about the nurturing of livestock and their babies. She also had student volunteers participate in her storytelling. The volunteers were two boys who pretended to be a ewe and an orphan baby sheep. The boys were not shy at all. They were very energized to participate and act out the scenes being told.

The way I think storytelling might be used to enhance student learning for English language learners is using real life experiences that might reflect on a child’s life. Sharing stories that have the same cultural background or similar kinds of stories children can relate to is a good way to engage children into storytelling. This could help children to share stories for their own culture and make comparisons with the structure of stories told in English.

The book I have just got through reading is called, Morning Girl by Micheal Dorris. This book was a little different but is a winner of the Scott O'Dell award for historical fiction. After reading the book on Saturday I took a long nap. My reading has been slow so I know I need to read faster than I'm doing already. I think this book resembles my daughters. The two characters are Morning girl and Star boy. They are brothers and sisters and are complete oppsites from one another. I think I'll do my author study on Michael Dorris.

I actually got a lot of reading done this weekend. I completed my picture book section, so now I need to move on to biographies. This should be interesting. I enjoy reading to my daughters but sometimes I get too busy to read to them. I think they would have ejoyed some of the picture books I read.