Jonathan: Week 7

Jonathan:

First we need to remember everyday, that our class is made up of individual students.  Jonathan is a successful student in various subjects other than reading.  This struggle could be caused from a number of reasons.  From Kostelnick’s article regarding gifted and challenging students.  From the information shared about Jonathan, it seems as if he could struggle with dealing with more than one idea at a time, prefer to talk rather than write or he may just learn the basic skills with little practice due to the possibility of failure.  I was a similar student to Jonathan and continue to work on balancing my reading skills with other subjects.  Since we know his strengths and his interests, we can guide him to see the relevance of reading in these areas.  As stated before, Jonathan is enjoys playing the piano, which is an amazing talent; however, it also requires you to be able to read music.  He also does average work in mathematics, which again make you read equations and solve them.  This is the trend you can show him, he is good at reading, and he is very talented because he is able to read in many different ways.  Once he sees that he can read we can focus on improving his literature reading ability.  This can also be done by incorporating literature into music, baseball and mathematics.  Finding books of interest, maybe a book on imroving baseball pitching techniques, word problems in math or a book about playing piano/reading the words to the songs he plays.  All of these are different avenues to go down in order to spark his interest in literature.  Also, you could try allowing his to move around the room, out of his desk, to read in a more comfortable environment.  Students may sometimes feel as if they are being graded if they are stuck in their desks, so allowing him additional space around the classroom will help him feel more at ease.