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     The article we read on assessment was  called "Matching texts and readers:  Leveling early reading materials for assessment and instruction."  This article discusses using developmentally appropriate books and gives a guideline for how to assess the reading level of texts.  It gives a guiding criteria that is broken up into ten levels.  I think that this article is very useful and will be something that I could use as a reference when I am trying to set up my classroom library and won't to label texts by developmental level.
    The other text that we read pertaining to assessment was Marie Clay's Running Records. This text is basically a manual for how to use running records in the classroom.  It tells you how to take a running record and then how to score one and then analyze the data.  I think this book will be a very useful tool in the classroom when trying to assess student's reading skills.  Running records seem like they will be tricky to use but with this manual it will make it easier.
      Assessment is an extremely useful tool that should be used to inform instruction.  I have seen running records taken in a class but I never saw the teacher use the information to inform her instruction.  I think that it is vital that as a teacher you always know where your students as far as their learning is going and the best way to do this is through ongoing assessment.


       The article "Looking inside Classrooms:  Reflection on the 'How' as well as the 'What' in effective reading instruction" discusses research that has been done on classroom practices that have shown to improve students' reading abilities.  The study observed several classrooms looking for certain classroom practices.  Some of the useful classroom procedures were coaching students using hints, including small-group instruction as well as whole group instruction, and using scaffolding techniques.
     The article entitled "The schools we have, the schools we need" by Richard Allington discusses several misconceptions about education that are limiting or misdirecting educational reform in this country.   Some of the areas that are being confused are experience vs. ability, acceleration vs. slowing down instruction, sorting vs. supporting, curriculum vs. instruction, reading vs. seat work, teaching vs, assigning and understanding vs. remembering.  Allington suggests that we need reemphasize the importance of the classroom teacher, eliminate distributed learning and replace deeper levels of understanding on fewer topics and reformulate the evaluation  processs.

Guided Reading

   The article that I found on the topic of guided reading is called "Guided Reading:  A Research-Based Response to the Challenges of Early Reading Instruction" by Anita Iaquinta.  The article defines and describes guided reading, provides rationale based on research on guided reading, illustrates the teachers role in it and gives suggestions for how to implement guided reading into a reading lesson.  The article states that guided reading entails a dynamic and flexible grouping of students based on their reading development levels and assigning reading materials for the groups that match their current reading abilities and that address the shared developmental reading needs of the students in each group.  I found this article especially helpful because it has some really useful table that list teacher prompts that correspond with specific skills used when learning to read.  The article also has a table suggesting a guided reading framework that can be used before, during and after reading instruction. 
     This article, in my opinion, is useful in giving an overview of the process of guided reading and also in suggesting ways to implement guided reading in a literacy program.   The link to this article is http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.utk.edu:90/ehost/detail?vid=12&hid=111&sid=3886e0ea-fa23-42aa-b0e3-391fcdc1bcf9%40sessionmgr104&bdata=JmxvZ2luLmFzcCZzaXRlPWVob3N0LWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=eric&AN=EJ74725
If this link does not work I found the website on the UT libraries website under ERIC.

Readings on Comprehension

     The articles we read for Tuesday's class all focused on helping students develop and use strategies for reading comprehension.  Comprehension is such an important skill in learning to read, arguably the most important skill, and so it is important that students learn these strategies early and well. The article entitled "Kindergartners Can Do It, Too!  Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers" the authors Gregory and Cahill stress the importance of teaching explicit comprehension strategies to kindergarten students.  They suggest that even though the comprehension instruction is more active and visible than it is with older students it functions in the same manner by helping them to understand what the are reading.  The article "The Comprehension Matrix:  A Tool for Designing Comprehension Instruction,"  the author introduces an organizational tool called the comprehension matrix.  The comprehension matrix is relating three factors affecting reading comprehension, the reader, the text and the situation to planning comprehension instruction before, during and after reading.  In the article “What every teacher needs to know about comprehension” Laura Pardo discusses how to help elementary-age students comprehend despite their individual differences.  Chapter 7 in Classrooms That Work contains the comprehension strategies that can be taught explicitly.

     Comprehension instruction is essential in helping students learn to read well and be able to use the information that they are reading to learn.  If a student cannot comprehend what they are reading then all of the other aspects of reading instruction don't matter.  All of the different components that we have learned about so far, fluency and automaticiy, vocabulary instruction and word study and decoding all make up the components that lead to comprehension.  It sort of all fits together like a puzzle with the end result being comprehension.  I feel like these articles and definitely the chapter in the book offered very good ideas for effectively teaching comprehension.

Vocabulary Readings

     The articles that we read for today are all  focused on building children's vocabulary.  The article, "Vocabulary Lessons" discusses four ways to implement vocabulary instruction in the classroom.  These four practices are developing word awareness and love of words through word play, delivering explicit instruction to develop important vocabulary, building strategies for independence, and engaging students actively with a wide range of books.  The article "The Vocabulary-Rich Classroom:  Modeling Sophisticated Word use to Promote Word Consciousness and Vocabulary Growth"  discussed the importance of the teacher using modeling in a purposeful manner in order to help the students to use a more sophisticated vocabulary.  The article uses two different teachers as examples, a kindergarten and a fourth grade classroom.  The last article "The Early Catastrophe"  outlines a study that was conducted on children from poverty or welfare in comparison to working class and upper SES families to see the effect of the parents vocabulary and speaking habits in the home on the size of the children's later vocabularies when they went to school.  The article found that the amount of words spoken to the child is a good predictor of the size of their later vocabularies.  Chapter 6 in Classrooms That Work contained  many great ideas for lessons and exercises that will be so useful in promoting not only vocabulary enhancement but also in helping students how to connect and relate new vocabulary words to their own everyday lives and experiences.

 

     The overall message that struck me with the articles and the chapter reading that was assigned this week is that researchers agree that the development of a strong vocabulary is essential to children’s success with literacy but that there are many teachers who are unsure of the best way to enhance their students’ vocabularies.  I think that there were many great ideas in these readings for ways to make learning words a fun and engaging activity for students and I plan on referring back to these ideas when I have my own class to teach.  I was disturbed by some of the research in the article on the 30 million word gap and it stressed to me the importance of teaching vocabulary explicitly in the classroom especially in schools where the majority of students come form poverty.