My personal reflection of the course and how I developed this semester was how if I want to have engaged readers, literate, and creative writers I need to be intentional and direct when creating my curriculum. I have always thought that writing and literature can be taught in a classroom without traditional “what I read” sheets being the assignments. This semester though I began to actually write out lesson plans, research ideas, and organize my thoughts so that I am prepared to teach students without requiring them to fill out work sheets. One of the best ways I think is to use literature that relates to different classroom subjects and I have thought of three specific ways I can use literature in my classroom in social science, art, and science.

The social sciences are one of the most obvious ways to encourage literature. This semester I became convinced that it is not enough though to simply have the books in the classroom but there has to be a way to help students realize that there is information that relates to them in the books. I think that one of the best ways that I can encourage students to be interested in reading about other places, cultures, and people is to let them chose the people, places, and cultures they want to read about. If the school curriculum requires certain social issues to be studied then I can put those on the list of possible books to read. Oh, there are so many ideas running through my head about projects and assignments relating to this topic but the truth is that this is the first semester I realized that the school’s specific curriculum should hinder my creativity as a teacher to create a classroom that is engaging and based in literature and writing.

Another subject that I want to incorporate literature in is art. When I do my own art I find inspiration in things around me, and one of my favorite ways to find inspiration is in children’s picture books. I think that before doing an art project we could read portions of a picture book that demonstrates the style of art we will be using in art class that day. I actually have a few motivations in this. First, I want to increase my student’s awareness of the different moods literature can create by discussing why the artist’s work relates to the mood the text creates. Second, as we have discussed in class relating literature to students’ lives helps them value it. I think most Kindergarteners sincerely care about their art work and so I believe this is the perfect subject to talk about audience, mood, and styles found in literature. Throughout the year I have learned that it is important to relate literature to subjects, people, and places my students care about.

Unfortunately many students already do not believe that science is important to their lives but I think that literature can help me engage my student in science. I have never enjoyed writing a research paper more than when I had to write a grant for this English class because I knew that what I was writing had real world application. While writing this paper I was not motivated by the grade but by the possibility that there was real world application to my writing. An idea I had to motivate my own students was to have each of my students write a scientific article, I could even establish classroom peer editing boards, and then eventually publish our own class scientific journal. In a classroom of Kindergarteners I think if I showed my students a scientific journal and we then published our own my students would be motivated to write and research because they could see how both science and writing have real world application.

Because of the lessons I learned this semester I have begun to think of ways I to incorporate literature in social science, art, and science. I was shocked to learn how many creative ways there are to teach literature and writing without relying on worksheets. Now, I firmly believe that it is not important to think of imaginative ways to teach literature but engaging ways to teach literature.