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. 

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.