Every Child is a Reader

Every child is a reader.It is up to the teacher to mold the child into a better reader. There are many steps that we as teachers can do in order to be the best teacher possible for each and every child. It can be learning about learning to best teach different types of students, using theory, inquiry, and research or creating a community in the classroom  through reading and writing together. All of things help children to become even better readers and scholars.

Response to Intervention

According to "A Child’s Response to Intervention Requires a Responsive Teacher of Reading" by Mary Lose (2008) that children who struggle to read show signs of the difficulties after only one year in school. RTI assessments should cover all aspects related to literacy. RTI must show steady progress over time or it has failed. RTI is supposed to use the most expert teacher with the most struggling child. For RTI to be successful it requires a skilled, responsive teacher.

This semester I saw multiple RTI interventions with different skill levels. The children in the lowest of the low category thrived in an environment that was more personal. However, all of the other groups were just given books to practice reading or time to play a reading game on a computer. I do not think that RTI is really helping them to become better readers.

If RTI is only being successful in the lowest of the low, is it still worthwhile? I know that this is mostly the purpose of RTI which is great, but at the same time I do not think we should be wasting the time of the children that are not the lowest of the low.

Guided Reading Article

I chose the article GUIDED READING: The Romance and the Reality by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell.  The article explained that the concept of guided reading is "that students learn best when they are provided strong instructional support to extend themselves by reading texts that are on the edge of their learning—not too easy but not too hard" (p.269) Which after being in the classroom with children that are on the edge of taking off with their reading, I would have to say I agree. Allowing children to read a little bit more difficult readings that with some teacher's help they are able to read seems to have worked. It also allows the teachers an easy way to cater to every students needs by offering differentiated learning. It also says that we need to make sure the leveled readers are interesting, engaging, and enjoyable for the children. Which I think is extremely important, we need to make sure that children are learning to not only read, but enjoy reading.

This is the structure of a guided reading lesson that was included in the article.

Also, when discussing text difficulty these are some characteristics that teachers should keep in mind.

 Do you think either of these charts left anything important off?

Vocabulary

Here is a link to vocabulary charades game that can be played with children of all ages!
http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/play-vocabulary-charades-12300.html

Comprehension Week 2

The Comprehension Matrix: A Tool for Designing Comprehension Instruction states that comprehension is a process. Readers can use many different reading steps in order to comprehend what they are reading. The first step is prereading. This could be using previous knowledge, reviewing plot, etc. to better understand the purpose of what they are about to read. The next step is during reading. This could be making predictions about what will happen next, stopping to look up vocabulary words that the reader may not know, etc. The last step is post reading; things such as asking questions about the book, completing a project to summarize the story, etc.

Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers has many different suggestions for teaching young children comprehension strategies. I think that many of these suggestions can be used in all grades. For example, questioning and "I wonders" could be used throughout elementary school for readers of all skill levels. These strategies could really help children to be good comprehensive readers throughout life.

I think both articles really encourage the idea of being intentional when teaching young children comprehension strategies.

Do you have any other ideas for intentional comprehension strategies to teach young readers?

Comprehension

Comprehension, while possibly the most important part of reading, is often the hardest to explicitly teach. Often times it is just understood that you should be comprehending what you are reading. This is probably because comprehension comes from the interaction between the reader and the text. Comprehension is very dependent on the individual reader.

As teacher's the best thing to do is to create an environment and activities support a reader's ability to comprehend. The first thing that came to my mind was taking time to do read alouds. This can be a good way to make sure each child is read information in the same, interesting way, and therefore had the exact same chance to comprehend the information, despite reading skill level.

What are some other ways to promote comprehension in the classroom?

This is a chart I found that gives children ways to work on comprehension while reading stories.

Decoding Words

I really enjoyed reading about the “Making Words” Lesson. If planned correctly, this could be a great, fun way for children to learn many words, including “word families”. 

The school I am currently in requires a CARE lesson every morning in which the children decode words and write them down. It is such a boring and long task. It would definitely make the CARE lessons a little bit more fun if the children were able to make their own words by using their own manipulatives.

The children do use their fingers to decode words by putting up a finger each time hear a sound in the word. This seems to work well to make sure that each letter is recognized and written down to form the words.

This is a picture of a bunch of different decoding strategies that children can use to figure out words. I love that it gives so many options for children to try. This would be great to have up in the classroom as a constant reminder to the children of all the different ways they can figure out the words by themselves.

Do you have any decoding strategies that are not on here?

If you know what CARE is, do you have any good ways to make it more fun for the children?