I think teaching is most effective when the teacher finds ways to engage students through personal connections and experiences. Students learn in a variety of different ways and it is important to also incorporate their interests as well as their learning styles.

This sentence made me think about an article I read about about funds of knowledge that families can offer to the school and their children. For example, a mother who knows how to sew, crochet, and make clothes can be a fund of knowledge that can be helpful to students. Connecting these funds of knowledge and overall experiences that children are most familiar with to the classroom curriculum will make it more purposeful and meaningful to students. I believe this is something the teacher is realizing.

Giving into students curiosity is a way to engage them into a topic. Also the teacher connects the curriculum to the outside world. This teaches students more about the environment and community that they live in. They are also able to make a personal connection and become engaged in this way. The discussion about the world around them is a lot more beneficial and though provoking then talking about apple sauce and teddy bears. It is important to remember that children are curious and want to learn about the world around them.

Here the teacher is reflecting on her experiences which is important to do in order to improve your own teaching. It seems that she wants to shift her pedagogy as she wants to incorporate the world of literacy outside the classroom into the classroom and her lessons. I believe this will help her students she deems as "struggling" if she transfers their knowledge of literacy at home into the classroom.

It is clear that Aaron is engaged in the stories the old man is telling him. This made me think about the importance of literacy and how we should be expressing this to students. Aaron is interested in how the old man wrote letters to his mother during the war as a way to communicate. This can be an engaging way for students to think about literacy. It also gives literacy and writing a purpose. What the old man is telling him, reinforces Aaron's purpose to learn how to read and write. This is something that can be taken into the classroom.

This exemplifies how important it is to get to know the students in your classroom. Here the teacher is seeing the how well the student is participating in literacy in his own vernacular. Now that she sees Aaron's wonderful use of literacy, she can't apply it to the classroom to advance Aaron and other students' knowledge of literacy in different avenues.