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?

Fluency

The Literacy Dictionary says accuracy, rate, prosody, and comprehension go into developing a reader's fluency (p. 445). However, Deeny says that a deeper view of accuracy is more than just those four parts. It needs to be broader rather than narrower. We need to look at fluency as a whole rather than just minute by minute.

Rasinski agrees that there are different dimensions of fluency, however it is the whole thing that creates allows a reader to be able to read fluently.

I think this is a great concept of fluency because practice and experience is what gives children fluency not the short choppy assessments.

I know in the first grade class I am in currently, I am not sure how I feel about the leveled readers because the books that are on most of the children's reading levels are not that interesting or entertaining. Instead of working on fluency, which is the point, the children are reading like robots because they are just reading the words without taking in the meaning. It is too boring and dry. The children simply hurry to read two of the leveled readers so that they are able to read a "real" book on the book shelf such as Cat in the Hat. 

Do you think it is ok to use "real" books to promote fluency instead of the leveled readers?

Here is a link to a good parent letter to give parents tips for working on fluency at home. This includes a list of high frequency words.
http://blog.maketaketeach.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Oral-Reading-Fluency-Parent.pdf

Teachers as Coaches

I think Clark’s idea of referring to teachers as coaches is great. It sends a message about teachers being there to guide and help, but that the real success comes from the children’s willingness to work and learn. I think it is important to encourage children that they all can learn if they keep working hard, and that learning is very important and will continue to open doors for them the rest of their lives. I think that also means that we as teachers need to give children the opportunities to love learning; whether that is by learning through games, learning about something specific they are interested in, or just by encouragement that they can do it. Clark suggests providing a scaffold for the children when needed instead of directly giving them the answers. She also suggests that small groups are a great way to give children the scaffolding they need without scaffolding children who may not need it.

One of the activities in the Cunningham and Allington (2011) textbook refers to using rhyming words all in a row so that the children are able to see the spelling pattern. This will help the children to be able to recognize similarly written words. In the first grade classroom I am currently in, the teacher is big on using “word families” For example; the “ack” family would consist of words such as sack, rack, tack, back, black, snack, etc. She always asks the children, “What family are these words in?” The children reply with “the ‘ack’ family!” or whatever family it is, and then she says,  “So do we need to sound out all these letters when we read?” The children then scream, “NOOO! We know it’s the ‘ack’ family so we just have to sound out the first letter!” It seems to work really well for the children, and they are getting much better at reading words they know are in a specific family.

This is an activity we did during a reading group in which the children cut out the provided strip of letters and put it through the slits in order to form different 'ack' family words. 

Also in my first grade class, we use a word wall for words that cannot really be sounded out. It helps the children to be exposed to the words constantly so that they are able to memorize them. The words may be high frequency words such as the, or the words can be words such as yellow. For the high frequency words, the children also have a sheet that they have to read daily as fast as they can twice in a row in order to begin to memorize the words.

Do you think there is a better way to learn these words besides repeated exposure?

Small groups by level are a great way for teachers to tend to a group of children’s academic needs, but does it sometimes injure the students? Then what do we do? There is a child I know who does not want to work because he knows he is in a lower reading group. We have been encouraging and challenging him to jump up reading groups and that seems to be working for now, but he still becomes visibly sad when it is time to switch into reading groups.

Young Children CAN Read

NAEYC

One of the main points that I gathered from the NAEYC reading was that children need to be exposed to reading and writing early in life. Children begin to understand some print concepts very early on. Reading skills develop early on. Just because a child is not reading words on a page does not mean that they are not reading. They can be reading through picture and symbol recognition, through facial expressions, through environmental print, and many other things. Before you can read words you have to be able to understand the use of symbols.

Bell and Jarvis

I think one of the main ideas of this article is that we as teachers should make a point to value all children readers no matter what academic level the children are at. I absolutely love Bell’s (2002) statement, “I was not going to look at my five-year-olds as nonreaders; I wanted to empower children with the knowledge that they were already readers…” (p.12). I think this is such a strong statement because giving the children the power and knowledge that they already are able to read can help significantly with confidence and attitudes. The environmental print activity described in the article is a great example of this. It is so important to build children up from wherever they start and to show them that you believe in them, and that you are going to work on getting even better together.

Yopp and Yopp

Yopp and Yopp (2000) say that phonemic awareness instruction for young children should be playful and engaging, interactive and social, stimulate curiosity and experimentation with language, should be deliberate and purposeful, and should be viewed as only a part of literary instruction. (p.130) I think it is important to remember to reflect about teaching lessons in order to really decide if the lesson is helping the children to understand and further their education. 

Here is a link to a blog post I found last year about an environmental print activity you can do with Kindergartners. I love that she starts out the year proving to the children that they can in fact read when they still think they cannot.

Family Literacy History

Main idea:

Interactional, instrumental, news-related, environmental, financial, spiritual, recreational, and educational are the eight distinct uses of literacy identified by the Jones family.

Response:

I found the eight uses of literacy interesting. I had never really considered breaking up literacy uses into categories. I just always viewed it as reading, no matter for what use. When I really stopped to think about it, I think that the eight uses the Jones family stated are probably the eight ways my family uses literacy as well. Can you think of any other categories that need to be added?

I think taking a family history approach to literacy for the purpose of finding out more information when a child is struggling to read could be a positive or negative approach. I think it just depends on the child. Which goes back to last week’s reading where you just have to know your students in order to determine what can help them to succeed. If you were going to do a family history approach to the literacy, how would you go about determining what questions to ask?


I know that my parents were influential in helping me to not only learn to read but to love reading. That being said here is a link for seven ways to encourage your child to love reading!

Not Everyone Learns the Same Way!

I loved the way “What I’ve Learned About Effective Reading Instruction” by Allington (2002) starts out the article by saying, “instruction that cannot be packaged or regurgitated from a common script because it is responsive to children’s needs” (p. 740). Not all children learn the same way, and in order to really teach a child anything, not just reading, we have to understand that.

I completely agree with the article that time, texts, teaching, talk, tasks, and text are all important in reading instruction. However, I think that we need to remember that there is no foolproof way to teach reading and writing. Each child is different and that is what

we need to remember as teachers. Also, teachers need to be intentional in the work and testing that they give so that children do not become overwhelmed by the “have to” and therefore lose the joy of reading and learning new things.

This article was a great reminder for me that every child is different and that one teaching method does not always work. This semester I spend nine hours a week in a public school; therefore, I am at the school during reading twice a week. In the school, I am able to see what is required of teachers each day by common core. The children are often times read to by a program on the interactive board instead of by the teacher that was present. I am lucky that I am observing in a classroom in which the teacher is passionate about reading and often times bends the rules a little in order to better teach to the children’s needs.

 

I just hope that as future teachers we are able to make the time to teach the children in our classes in the ways that work for them.