Everyone can read... with the right techniques!

The first article that I read was the Pinnell article. It was wonderful for a future educator to read because it encourages teachers to "learn about learning." The teacher that they used in the article as an example, used many strategies in her classroom that helped her students with reading. The article firsts discusses how it is important to observe your students and study their interests in order to create lessons that promote their interests in reading. The articles also stresses the importance of testing out theories with your students and implementing them into areas of your classroom. A good teacher will never know if an idea will work or not unless they are willing to try. If the idea fails, it is important not to get defeated. The articles also talks about how it is important to enjoy reading and writing with your students, and make it enjoyable for them.
The second article that I read was, Excellent Reading Teachers. In the article, it provides many examples and ideas of what excellent reading teachers do in their classrooms. The beginning of the article contains a six point checklist of what excellent teachers do. I think that two of these items really stuck out to me. Excellent teachers know a variety of methods of how to teach reading. They know which methods to use on which children and what strategies will work and which ones will not.  They are also good reading "coaches". They are able to help their students learn techniques and strategies in the areas they need the most help with. I think that this was a great article, because it reminded me to remain open minded and flexible about not only reading instruction, but every other aspect of the classroom as well.
Question to consider: When you have been teaching for a few years, do you think for yourself as an educator, that it would be beneficial to take refresher courses on teaching reading?

Real Life Inquiry

      For my real life inquiry I went to a local Elementary school and observed a reading lesson that was conducted in a first grade classroom. The goal for their reading lesson that day was to identify cause and effect within the story. The teacher asked the class to get out their reading books from their desks and they all opened to a story about kids who invent great things. They read the story as a whole group using a choral reading approach. The teacher would stop every two pages or so and ask them a question or two regarding the information in the story.
      After the class read the story as a group, the teacher told the children to find their partners for peanut butter and jelly reading. The children got up from their seats and found their partners. They re-read the story with their partners. I observed that when one of the children get stuck, their partner would help them sound the words out. It was nice to see a new strategy that I had never observed before and saw the benefits that the technique had.
     After the peanut butter and jelly activity, the teacher pulled up an interactive vocabulary game on the classroom smartboard. When the children were asked to go to the board, they had to first read the sentence, and then fill in the blank with the word they thought belonged.
   I really enjoyed this observation opportunity. It was nice to see choral reading take place as well as a new strategy that had great benefits to the children. They were able to help each other out with their struggles and work as a team.

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?

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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.

Making Word Connections

                                                                   

After reading the two articles assigned for this week, I began to think about my strategies for teaching reading. I learned to read strictly through a phonics approach, but I know that this way may not work for each individual child in a classroom. It is important to have many techniques and options handy while working with beginning readers. The Cunningham and Cunningham article suggests an activity called "Making Words." I enjoyed reading about this lesson, because of the unique twist it puts on spelling and gaining word meanings. It allows children to learn to spell with a hands on technique that is meaningful and engaging to them. They will be able to understand that some words have other, smaller words inside them. They will be able to make so many connections with words. In the Yopp and Yopp article, they suggest providing texts that have rich vocabulary repeated several times throughout the book. The more that children see a word, the less they need to think about decoding it and what its meaning is. They also suggest using a technique in which children choose the ten most important words out of a book or passage and provide a definition for them along with a small summary of what they read. Choosing these novel words forces the children to reread sentences and use context clues to conduct the word's meaning.
-Question to consider: How would you modify these lessons in order to fit the needs of struggling readers?

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness

 

 In language and reading development, Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that contain meaning. I strongly believe that in order to properly help a child learn how to read, the concept of phonemic awareness must be taken into account. All three of the articles that we read for today stress the importance of focusing on the smaller units of sounds within a word. In the Allington chapter, it states the importance of the Nifty-Thrifty-Fifty words. All of these words contain common word beginnings, and ends that can be easily broken down into chunks. The chapter suggests placing these words up on a wall a few at a time and making them available for the children to observe and compare other words. The idea in the Clark article about how to coach reading was wonderful. The idea of sounding out words may work on some occasions, but on many others it may not. For example, the word bow in the sentence, "The ballerina took a bow after her performance." If a child reads the word bow, like the word snow, the word takes on a completely different meaning that is not correctly matched with this sentence. Providing context clues in coaching helps children decide the meaning of the word in a more appropriate manner. It allows them to think of other scenarios and provides other forms of knowledge than the ones already in their minds. I loved the idea of the game, "Teacher May We," in the Yopp and Yopp article. It is a perfect way for children to hear the breakdown in syllables in a word, and also gets them moving their bodies and releasing some built up energy. So forget the old way of sounding out words, bring on the coaching style of teaching children how to read!