Blog 2: Defining Literacy

I define literacy as anything that can be "read".  This can be any text, words, music, images, or knowledge.  From a teaching standpoint, when I think "literacy" I think of literature.  After the class readings, I believe that literacy should have a large emphasis on online technologies.  My ideal literacy learning environment would be a classroom that has a broad availability of literature, with multiple ranges of reading levels, in multiple forms such as tangible books and online resources.  My current teaching placement has a lot of reading material and the availability of computers.  The computers are not used often, but the teachers library is put to good use and the students are able to use and read all of the books.  The way that the teacher presents literacy as engaging and exciting is similar to how I would like to present literacy learning to my students.  The students in my placement have quiet reading time where they each have a personal bin of books chosen specifically for their reading needs.  The students can sit anywhere in the classroom with pillows and stuffed animals and read to themselves or in small groups.  I would like to have as many up to date resources available for my students and to be able to present literacy in exciting way, such as having family book clubs, online reading/writing, journals, and family reading/writing nights (Allyn & Bacon, 2010, p. 32).