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.