My best wishes

This semester, I have been surprised by the literacy levels of my students. They are able to identify typos and misspelling on our presentations and they let us know about them. They are not able to relate my content area with any other part of their life.

What will your literacy-rich classroom look like? 

An utopic view of my first year as a teacher:

Sept. 30, 2013

Dear Journal:

This is the first month of my teaching experience; my literacy rich classroom has students that are engage with learning and are avid to know more. They express their interest in chemistry and we made a contract where we all agree on working hard to make this year a good learning experience.

My students are engaged in knowing more. They have many questions whose answer I don’t know, that we all need to start learning.

They are reading a sequence of books, that it is a best seller among teenagers.

December 15, 2013

Dear Journal:

I can’t believe that we are almost half way through the year, I am grading the first semester final test and my literacy rich classroom looks like are having a good experience. We are learning together. Communication is good and we created a good teaching/learning environment, where we promote literacy and science.

My students are engaged in solving problems. We developed a strategy where we solve the chemistry problems and then we write a narrative where we explain how we solved that problem and what are the important things of the answer of that specific problem.

We are also reading aloud a novel related to the development of the atomic program during WWII.

They are writing the narratives of the problems we solve

And we are discussing about the problems, the solutions, and how the new concept that we are earning are linked to our daily life.

May 30, 2014

Dear Journal:

Wow! The year is almost over, my first year as a teacher in California. My literacy rich classroom looks like a place where we all want to be. Where an holistic approach rules, where students are engage in their own learning and where we think and act “out of the box”

They are capable of independent learning in understand, solve and explain how to solve a problem. They know and understand that chemistry is present in every part of their life, they are able to do some research, to read and write about a specific topic and they can relate some of those topics to their daily life.