Guided Reading

For this week’s assignment I found an article from Michigan State University. I had never heard of guided reading until this class (really this assignment), so I found this article to be very informative. According to the source, guided reading consists of small groups of children on the same reading level reading the same text. The students read books that they can be successful at reading which they consider to be 90-94% accuracy and 90% comprehension. As the students sharpen their skills they have the chance to move groups. I think this could be very effective because the students recognize that others have the same reading troubles that they do. It also helps that they are given materials that they can be successful with, as opposed to being given text that is much too difficult and that hinders comprehension. My one concern is how the students move groups. I wonder if it would be discouraging for other students when someone moves from their group to another one. Here is the link to the article:

https://www.msu.edu/user/tarjason/What%20is%20Guided%20Reading.pdf

Vocabulary

The thing that caught my attention most about the readings from this week was the fact that vocabulary is integral to reading comprehension. This is important because, in my opinion, comprehension is the whole reason for reading. I think one of the best examples of how important vocabulary is to comprehension is when you are learning a new language. I took Spanish and I remember how difficult it was to understand something when I was first starting out. I had to look up every other word, and sometimes it interfered with me grasping the whole picture. I think it is important to teach words explicitly, but we cannot overlook the power of incidental word learning either. Think about it. Most of the words we know we learned by encountering them in everyday life and seeing how they are used. Sometimes I find learning words like that is easier and sticks with me longer. Check out this vocabulary video and see how many you can remember later. 

It's All Important

Comprehension employs all of the concepts we have been talking about, and the Pardo article did a good job of illustrating this. The author says that some of the ways teachers can support readers are to teach decoding skills, build fluency, build vocabulary, and build and activate prior knowledge. Those are just a few of the suggested ways, but even there you can see it touches on many of the aspects of reading. Comprehension is kind of the culmination of all of the smaller facets of reading. When we think that all that we teach can aid comprehension it puts more importance on everything! It is good to be a fluent reader, but if you don’t understand what you are reading because you don’t have the necessary background knowledge or do not understand the word meanings, is it really reading? I think it is incredibly important not to isolate the various facets of reading. Instead, I think it could be beneficial to teach them with comprehension in mind. Another very important point is to teach strategies specifically for comprehension. The video below talks about this very thing. It gives tips for using prediction to aid comprehension.