Making a case and a place for effective content are literacy instruction in the elementary grades

I really enjoyed reading this educational article. I felt like it had a lot of good ideas and reasoning about what and why I should teach my future students informational text. In the very beginning it mentioned how we are trying to teach our students comprehension in the classroom through our basal readers, but most of the time it ends up with the teacher reading the text aloud or listening to a tape of the text. This is such a disservice to our students because they will not get to experience and learn whole literacy comprehension through listening to a read aloud. Listening to a tape or a teacher read aloud is just allowing students to learn and practice listening comprehension. Preparing our students for success in future grades includes teaching students to read for themselves and through other instructional strategies to gain whole comprehension of each text. I believe this is especially important for the early grades such as Kindergarten through 2nd because that is when the foundation literacy skills are laid.

Moss made some very important points about incorporating informational text in early grades. One of those being, build a scema for what is to come in their future educational practices. I am a firm believer in practice makes perfect. If we expect students to read and gain knowledge from informational type text then we must offer opportunities for them to practice with it. I think presenting informational text in early grades can be challenging because you always want to keep the students engaged and interested. And lets be honest, informational text is not the most exciting thing to read most of the time. However, Moss made some good suggestions for incorporating this text into their daily learning. Discovery Kid magazine is a good resource to use to bring informational text to young students in a fun interesting way. There are many other magazines like Discovery Kids that offers fun learning opportunities while incorporating informational text. Also allowing kids to explore different types of books, magazines, or journals make learning opportunities available to the students. Letting children choose a book can also help students make connections throughout other types of text. When students get to see the different types of literacy content that is available to them they can build experiences with different text that might not have been available to them in the classroom. For my future classroom, I hope I take the knowledge gained from Moss's article an apply it to my students. In conclusion agreeing with Moss, it is crucial to start as early as possible when preparing children for future academic.