Magic Reading Ride with Ms. Martinez

     Reading and I have complicated relationship. When I made the transition from elementary to middle school I switched school districts, so I was forced to insert myself in a new environment. First day of school my new reading teacher asks for our summer reading assignment, and I was completely lost. After explaining my situation to my teacher, she sent me to the library and asked me to check out The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. I wasn't as interested at first, because it was an assignment, but as I got further into the book I completely fell in love with it and did what I could to complete the series. When I entered high school, the summer and school reading assignments started to get more "difficult", and didn't have the Greek monster fighting adventures that Riordan included in his books. Our classes were instructed to read novels such as: Old Man and the Sea , Macbeth , Wuthering Heights , Lord of the Flies , and other classics. Reading started to become a t...

     I love to keep things in a theme, and my current theme for my classroom is Disney, of course, which is why the word onward fits the mold for this year. Onward is defined as continually moving forward, and with all the changes that have occurred in the past year the only thing we can do is move forward. Especially in the classroom, we never want students to move backwards in their progress we always want them to climb up and exceed their goals. It takes going through an experience like the year 2020, for students to realize that their learning can now be expanded in many ways. Daily I use literacy to model  for the students how we can utilize new texts and see how we can benefit from it in multiple ways. Not only do we enjoy the content of the text, but we can always take away new information or new messages that we can share with others. When students begin to doubt themselves in their progress, especially their literacy progress, I will remind them that we nee...