Getting Started

Hey there classmates. My name is Natalia Martinez, and I am a seventh grade language arts teacher in Las Cruces. I currently teach three regular sections and two sections of honors classes. I am in my ninth year of teaching, all of which has been done at the same school, which is also the school where I did my student teaching. So obviously I love my school, I love the kids we get, the community we serve, and the closeness among the staff there. On a personal note, I have two children, a daughter who just turned four, and a son who is 15 months old. They bring me so much joy! They both have fabulous personalities, and coincidentally (or maybe not so much) love to read books like me! The book I will be blogging about is actually not one from the list Dr. Pence provided, rather one I came across on my own, which looked really interesting. The book is titled Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice. The book was written by a very wide variety of experts in the filed of literacy, and edited by Kylene Beers, Robert E. Probst, and Linda Rief. The book was a project headed by Kylene Beers in order to create "an edited collection where many voices came together to explore the many facets of adolescent literacy: reading, writing, motivation, young adult literature, English language learners, multimodal literacy, civic responsibility, digital literacy, vocabulary, comprehension, and assessment, to name a few." As you can see from that description, the book has a lot to offer about a wide variety of issues related to adolescent literacy. I have already read the first few chapters, which are phenomenal, and I am excited to continue reading, and to share, through this blog some of the wonderful thoughts and ideas related to this topic which is near and dear to my heart. Until next time!