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.

Phonemic Awareness Readings

    The readings assigned for today all focused on teaching initial reading skills such as decoding and word recognition in order to help beginning readers become more fluent.  The Yopp and Yopp article focused on incorporating phonemic awareness into a strong literacy program.  The Clark article focused on using coaching to help while teaching word recognition.  The chapter in Classrooms That Work focused on different activities that a teacher could use to help build word recognition.
    I have spent time in a first grade classroom with a teacher that was very good at incorporating some of these techniques for helping with word recognition and phonemic awareness.  I spent time in this classroom as part of my Education 100 class so this was my first exposure to a classroom.  Not having taken any other education classes yet, I was not aware of the specific techniques that the teacher was using but after reading these articles her methods make a lot more sense.  She had the students clap and snap when they were introduced to the words and she would use the techniques of replacing phonemes with other phonemes to make different words that the students had already been exposed to.  I think this teacher did a really good job of incorporating phonemic awareness into her literacy instruction.

First post: Fluency Readings

The two articles and the chapter in Classrooms That Work were about reading fluency.  The article entitled "Creating Fluent Readers" discussed the three dimensions of reading fluency which are accuracy, automaticity and prosidy.  Accuracy is referring to how well a reader can sound out the words of the text without error.  Automaticity is how little effort it takes to process the text while reading.  Prosidy is referring to how much correct expression and punctuation a reader uses while reading.  The article "One-Minute Fluency Measures: Mixed Messages in Assessment and Instruction"  discusses the methods used for fluency assessment and whether those methods are effective in informing instruction.  The author believes that the common method of assessing fluency, having students read a passage for one minute while recording errors to calculate an accuracy rate, is not always the best way to inform fluency instruction.  She believes that this method leaves other aspects of fluency such as endurance and comprehension out.  Chapter four in the book outlines fluency and gives some good ideas for helping to promote reading fluency in the classroom.  Some of the teaching ideas are word walls, echo reading, choral reading, and reader's theater.                         
I was placed in a third grade classroom for my field studies class and I saw the students practicing one-minute fluency tests.  The teacher would have the students practice reading the passages to each other and recording each others errors.  The teacher told me that her class always did really well on their statewide assessments on fluency because they practiced so much.  While I think that practice is useful the teacher did not use these assessments to inform her instruction.  She never stopped the activity to discuss the meaning of the passages so she didn't have a grasp on whether the students were comprehending what they were reading.
In my classroom I plan to use a lot of the techniques that Allington suggests in the textbook.  I definitely plan to have a word wall and I would like to use reader's theatre because I think the students would really get into it.