The teacher understands how learners grow and develop, recognizing that patterns of learning and development vary individually within and across the cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical areas, and designs and implements developmentally appropriate and challenging learning experiences.

Connecting the Writing Mentor Project to standard #1: Students in the fourth grade class we visited varied in their cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional levels. It was our assignment to be paired with one student and to develop an appropriate and challenging learning experience for that student. I feel this assignment connected with standard #1 in the following ways: The mini lessons I developed to help teach the student that I was paired with, were challenging and engaging. This worked well for the student as she progressed in her writing assignment and showed growth and development of skills such as punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, and how to make her story more interesting. I feel that I did begin to recognize the students pattern of learning, and I adjusted to that. For this student, visually seeing and reading with punctuation, capitalization and paragraphing helped grow her skills as a young writer. This writing mentor project was a direct result of what I learned as a fourth grade students writing mentor. We were to write about what (we as mentors) learned during our sessions with our assigned student. We wrote mini lessons and met with students twice a week during the semester. Each student had strengths and weaknesses. It was our job to assess our students writing abilitites and to make a plan to strenthen any weaknesses by making four mini lessons and implementing them each week. I believe the student developed her writing in an appropriate setting that challenged her.

What I learned from the writing mentor project was that being properly prepared had a direct impact on the learners growth and development in areas such as punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, and using emotion and expansion in her writing. My mini lessons included having the student read from a childrens book for part of the lesson as I wanted to assess her reading skills before analyzing her writing. I feel being able to read well has a direct effect on how well a student writes. One cannot write well, if one can not read well. For this particular student, slowing down her speed reading actually helped her spelling because once she read at a regular speed, she also learned to sound out words better (when reading and writing), because she was no longer skimming over hard words and guessing at them. Which also directly impacted her spelling more words correctly in her writing assignments.