Guided Reading

 

The article that I read for Guided Reading is called, Promoting Literacy Development for Beginning English Learners. The article is written about a third grade classroom with a Chinese ESL student. With the help of his ESL teacher and her techniques, he becomes a more enriched reader and writer. His teacher begins the expansion of the cognitive process by choosing a story that is familiar to children from all around the world, Jack and the Beanstalk. Many children have read this book time and time again and are familiar with the plot in their own language. From there, they began by reading the story in Chinese. After the story was read in Chinese, they read the story chorally in English. Reading the story chorally allowed the teacher to help the student make personal connections and comparisons to the other version of the story. Once both languages had been read, they made a word bank of all of the sight words that he had the phonemic knowledge about. With each reading of the story, the teacher pushed him to increase his vocabulary and sentence structure by encouraging him to think aloud and add more depth to his sentences. The project took two months to complete, but at the end of it, he could read the story and comprehend the vocabulary. He displayed his understanding by writing paragraphs about details from the story. The article lists many ways that teachers can help ESL students in their classrooms. In your own classroom, what are some ways that you believe will be beneficial when helping ESL students read?

Text Retrieved from Eric: 3/26/12 http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.utk.edu:90/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=6&hid=104&sid=9e2cb871-4da4-4338-a68c-70152cd4051d%40sessionmgr110

Written by: Eurydice Bouchereau Bauer, Juliana Araz

Vocabulary and Read-Alouds

In the articles that I read, the common theme was the importance of a wide vocabulary in students of all ages. The articles suggested that by providing a high literacy environment, students will absorb new vocabulary and it will help them become better readers. In the article, Vocabulary Lessons, by Fisher and Blachowicz, they give many strategies to help teachers provide new ways to present novel terms. They suggest playing word games with students as well as reading to them. They also give the suggestion of having a word wall in the classroom. In the example that they listed, children obtained a point for every new word that they put on the wall and shared with the class. This is a great way for children to get excited about discovering new vocabulary and wanting to improve on vocabulary skills. In the Lane and Allen article, the main focus of the article was how educators should model vocabulary usage in the classroom.By modeling how to correctly use the words, students will become more comfortable in using them and want to share the new words that they have learned. They gave two classroom examples about how vocabulary words were modeled throughout the school year and how the children's reading and writing assignments became filled with these novel terms. The classrooms were a Kindergarten class and a fourth grade classroom from at-risk schools. The modeling took place during each classrooms circle time and the teachers and outside onlookers saw a major difference throughout the school year in the children's personal conversations as well as their school assignments. Question to consider: How would you model using new vocabulary in the classroom? Do you value word games or conversation more? Or do you like both equally?

Comprehension and Think-Alouds

In the article, What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Comprehension, Pardo gives some excellent strategies on how to help children understand what they are reading. She begins by stating the importance of teaching children how to decode words and increase their fluency. She says with these skills, children will spend less time trying to tackle difficult vocabulary words and more time comprehending the material. The part of this article that I enjoyed so much, was her suggestion to build children's knowledge on subject materials. It is also important to discuss the concept of a schema with the children. This allows them to think about their previous knowledge. With prior knowledge about a subject, the children will have to spend less time thinking about what the text is saying, and will be able to spend more time making text to text, text to self, and text to world connections. They will gain much more from the readings if they are able to make these types of connections. It is also beneficial to discuss the book that you are reading. If you provide some type of information and background about the story, the children will be able to understand what is happening more easily. Another great suggestion that Pardo gave was to provide the children with questions about what they are reading so that they can "check-in" and be able to monitor if they are grasping the content of the text.
The second article that I read was, Kindergarteners Can do it too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers. In this article, Gregory and Cahill suggested many of the same ideas that Pardo did. The biggest idea in the article was the idea of discussing schemas and making connections to the literature. The teacher in this article taught reading in a creative way and her students had many creative ways to express their thoughts and ideas. They created charts, had meaningful discussions and expressed their thoughts about the stories they read. The idea that I liked in this article was teaching the children to think about the "Mind Movies" in their heads. They were able to imagine what was going on in the story and draw the pictures and ideas after the story was over.