My future ELA classroom: Part 2

I am excited to teach ELA in the near future.  My motivation to create fantasticsuperawesome ELA experience is rooted in my predominantly negative association with ELA during my school years.  Sometimes I struggle with writing in a sense that I can feel demotivated and find myself deliberating intensively in my mind before putting words on the page.  In terms of reading, it took me a lot of time and encouragement from peers before I really started to invest myself in books for pure enjoyment.  I am human and have my own quirks but I really believe that a different ELA experience growing up could have positively influenced my views towards reading and writing.
As a student in ELA, I felt disengaged and demotivated.  The writing I reflect back on was mostly structure based, stripped of creativity and one dimensional.  In addition, we had little choice in literature and rarely read books that I could relate to.
This motivation derived from past experiences will be coupled with strategies and ideas I have developed through our ELA education class and critical thinking this class has prompted.  Yes indeed, I hope for my ELA class to be fun and engaging, which can be achieved through choice in speaking and writing, relevance to personal interests, encouraging humour and using drama to extend creativity.  Beyond these initial ideas and conditions I endeavoured to fill, I now believe it will be extremely important to start to practice the art of writing myself-writing in ways that I will be leading my students.  I need to be able to show them first hand the enjoyment and possibilities in writing.  I will try to experiment with them in collaborative writing, keep my own journal of class activities, create a class blog and be there during each step of the writing process.  I want to provide the time it takes to go through the writing process in producing well crafted pieces.  I will work to create a classroom where reading and writing are intertwined and "the power of teaching in a workshop grows from making a place where students and a teacher can say “I don’t know” and feel [like] “I think I can find out.” The tension of knowing and not knowing— writing, reading, my students, myself—becomes a continuous adventure and a source of inspiration for a lifetime" (Atwell, 484).  In this sense my classroom will be a place for collaboration and the sharing of ideas to bridge over troubled water and help each other connect their dots.
I must say I enjoy reading and telling stories.  This is something I will bring to my classroom with enthusiasm.  I will try to set up a story sharing corner (story telling time) each week or regularly.  This will be half volunteer half firmly prompted.  My students will have the opportunity to share aloud a short story, poem, or chapter from a book they're reading (personal writing or something they are reading/read).  Maybe it's a graphic novel, comic book or comic strip.  The idea is to have them sharing/telling the story orally, using their voice in different ways and hopefully enjoying the material they present.
I think the main difference between my current vision of my ELA classroom and my vision from a short time ago is that I am going to need to focus of the way I present material and prompt written work and oral language and not just what I present to my class.  Trying a variety of strategies to prompt writing and continually reflecting on the effectiveness of these strategies will progress my teaching and enhance my classroom.  My classroom will be an open learning space where the sharing of thoughts and ideas will always be encouraged.