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.