Olivares' Final thoughts on Ladybugs

          As a future teacher, I am always on the lookout for fun activities to do with my students. This book brings up a lot of good points to take across as I deal with ELLs in my classroom. In fact that acronym, ELL, is new vocabulary for me. I like it a lot better than ESL which seems to carry some negative stereotypes when you hear it. Kids catch on too subtleties like that very easily. I think the biggest thing the book impressed upon me was reality of having to teach ELLs. I didn’t think too much about teaching students whose primary language wasn’t English until this book. Maybe I assumed, or hoped, that most of my kids would be speaking English already. Perhaps in the upper grade levels it would be less common, but if I stick around in elementary school I am likely to find many students who are initially struggling with a new language.

         

          But back to the book. Ladybugs and Swirling Galaxies gave me great ideas for showcasing my students work in the classroom. It also conveniently allows me to have a fairly blank room with the promise that it will be filled up later; a boon to just starting out teachers without a lot of stuff. The book, along with the guest speaker, reinforced the value of structure to the students. In a system that seems to be greatly favor student creativity, it is good to know that structure is important and that students will do better with it.  This is of course especially important when we consider the difficulty in trying to teach large class sizes where individual help will be hard to give. But the book also points out to when too much structure can be a negative. ELLs tended to like poetry because it was freer than regular writing.

    

          I am glad to have read both Nonfiction Matters and Ladybugs and Swirling Galaxies. It’s given me a better grasp on how important nonfiction reading and writing is and given me the confidence to teach it. I came in to this class thinking that I didn’t like reading nonfiction work. If you had asked me to name off some nonfiction that I liked it would have been either hard or a short list. These books have expanded my horizons. I can feel that my brain has grown from the experience and I am glad that I went through it. Above all I’d recommend these books to all elementary school teachers. They will give insight into how to deal with English Language Learners and nonfiction material, both of which are extremely important and both are topics that I was lacking in experience with.