What is a language arts teacher...

In my opinion, a language arts teacher is ideally a motivator to teach children to immerse themselves in reading and to determine their preferences on reading in order to become lifelong readers. Elementary school teachers should exemplify this attitude. When children are at this stage in life, they can easily become discouraged readers due to struggling to read or simply not finding books they like to read. My mother has been a wonderful guide to model how to get children excited about reading. She teaches the children how to bring books to life and how to choose books based on enjoyment that also teach them at the same time. Teachers need to provide children with a large quantity of reading material as well as time to explore and just have time to read. I do not think that elementary schools that focus on basal readers create environments in which children thrive as readers. These kinds of classrooms do not allow children to read based on their own choices and preferences and take a lot of pleasure out of reading. While it does allow for many small personal successes, I do not feel like students in this type of environment are exposed to as many good reading experiences as those who are in constructivist classrooms do. Children in the elementary years do need to be taught basics, such as phonics and grammar, but I believe this needs to be taught through mini-lessons and explained through real life reading situations. For example, in a lesson on using quotations for dialogue, the teacher would instruct the children about the rules and mechanics, but the children would explore this idea through books read in class. A good book for something like this is a narrative such as Junie B Jones. This uses real life text to portray the idea being taught and allows children to construct this knowledge through their own means.