Classroom Practices

One of the articles that caught my attention this week was Gay Su Pinnell’s work entitled Every child a reader: What one teacher can do. In it, Pinnell discusses eight things teachers can do to help promote reading in their classrooms and a few of the ideas stuck out to me. First is that teachers have to understand how students learn, and, more specifically, how each of their students learn. If we do not understand how our students learn, we cannot teach effectively. This is especially true for those of us in special education. Secondly, I liked that Pinnell points out that teachers should enjoy reading and writing with their students. Children are incredibly perceptive and they know when their teachers are completely disinterested in something they are teaching. It is only natural that the children assume that if we are not happy about teaching it, it is probably not very interesting or important. I think it is essential that teachers show students there is something to love about each subject, especially reading. Finally, Pinnell states that reading is a right, not a privilege. Every child that can learn to read should learn to read. Moreover, teachers should do whatever it takes to make that happen because we live in a world where the ability to read could mean the difference between life and death.

The other article was Richard Allington’s piece The schools we have. The schools we need.  In this one, two things caught my attention. The first was the section on “Teaching vs. assigning”. He says it is not teaching to simply assign children work to do. Teachers should give student explicit reading instruction through a variety of means. The second thing was that there is a difference between remembering and understanding. It is so important that everything in the classroom be meaningful and help children to understand. Similarly, it is important that assessments be designed to measure understanding and not simple recall. 

Real Life Inquiry

For my real life inquiry I chose to look at emergent literacy by reading to an almost three-year-old boy (his birthday is in May). We looked at an unfamiliar book and a familiar book. The unfamiliar book was about trucks, and he seemed to be mostly interested in the pictures. He would look at the different types of trucks and ask what each one was. I would then read the description and if he seemed interested in something I said we would talk some more about it outside of what the text described. The second, more familiar book was about the Little Einstein’s. This book was interactive with symbols in the text that corresponded to buttons on the side. When pushed, the buttons would make different sounds and he seemed to enjoy that. He knew who each character was and which button went with each. What I liked about both books were the elements of nonfiction. He was more interested in the things he recognized from real life. I think picking relevant and relatable material is very important at any age.

What I noticed about this experience, in particular, was how many of the reading strategies you engage in without even thinking about it. For example, one of our handouts from class talked about the importance of picture naming. We did lots of that just because it comes with the natural curiosity of a child. In chapter four from All Children Can Read (the class handout) it discusses dialogic reading, and I noticed that we did a lot of that too. It says that dialogic reading helps children take a more active role in their reading, and they suggest doing this by a couple of different ways. One of them is through PEER, which stands for Prompt, Evaluate, Expand, and Repeat. We followed this pretty closely when we were reading through the book on trucks.

I will definitely draw from this experience in my future work with children. First, I will make sure to pick developmentally appropriate books because some of the books I took to read were a bit too lengthy for someone his age. Secondly, I will continue to make sure the topics are interesting. He liked the nature of the books, but some of them will probably be more of a hit when he gets older. Finally, while we engaged in many important reading strategies without considering them prior to the reading experience, I think I will do more to employ specific strategies as I consider what each child needs to work on in the classroom setting.