Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.
1st Grade students must have the knowledge of what makes a character different than a setting. Knowledge of these definitions and parts of a text is crucial to being able to describe what is going on.
Looking at a Strega Nona book that has many elaborate characters and scenes could be very helpful. Ask students who is the character on this page? What is the setting on this page?
Acknowledge differences in the points of view of characters,
Like in life, characters In texts have different perspectives and teaching this is crucial! 2nd grade student must be able to look at individual characters and where they are coming from. A good example to use would be the text My Mouth is A Volcano because the teachers view of the boy is different that the classes view of the boy, and the boys perceptions of what he is feeling.
Ask and answer questions
Kindergarten students must be able to identify that they do not know certain words, and then know to ask for help or ways to get to know words. Having everyone in the class underline 3 words they do not know in a text and then going around and talking about them could be helpful
With prompting and support, r
Teachers of 1st graders must provide appropriate instruction on how to read different pieces of literature. Exposure to different types of literature such as poetry is important. 1st graders must be able to read texts and know how to approach reading them even if they struggle. And teachers need to know how to prompt them without doing the work for the students. Having a weekly "poem in my pocket" could be helpful if teachers go over it and refer back to it/do activities with it throughout the week.
Compare and contrast stories in the same genre (e.g., mysteries and adventure stories) on their approaches to similar themes and topics
5th grade students must be able to look at books of the same genre and compare the texts within that genre to each other. It is here they can make connections between how plots of different stories have similar makings within that genre. An activity a fifth grade teacher could do would be to look at the magic tree house series (pick one of the books) and the A to Z Mysteries series (pick one of the books. Although they are different series how they develop the stories (exposition/settings/characters) are very similar. Making a T-chart with the order in which events happen could be very helpful!
read and comprehend
3rd grade students must be able to read and understand different types of literature appropriate to 3rd graders independently. Having SSR sessions and then journaling about what was read, and then sharing could help greatly in understanding/getting better at reading.
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.
5th grade students must be able to look at a text and what the words imply, especially in figurative language. An awesome example show students figurative language would be any of the books in the Amelia Bedelia series, because she is constantly misreading figurative language and would be a great start/talking point for looking at figurative language, plus they are all great reads!
Explain how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fits together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem.
5th grade students need to know how to look at texts as a whole and how they interconnect. An example could be looking at The Orange Tree Poem (John Shaw Neilson) and look at how it would be hard for the stanzas to make sense without all of them there.
Compare and contrast the treatment of similar themes and topics (e
4th grade students must be able to compare and contrast different themes in texts because it is what makes them different. Example Question: A good question in all texts would be "what do you think the author wanted to teach us". Here the themes of the texts could be talked about and contrasted by students.
Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact).
5th grade students must be able to look at a text as a whole in order to fully understand the meaning of it. By looking at the smaller parts that make up a story (such as characters and what makes them different from each other/why they are included) is crucial in reading, not just staring, at literature. Making a venn diagram with two characters and seeing how they are different and how they are connected could greatly help 5th graders see how characters interact and contrast.
Describe the overall structure of a story
A 2nd grade student must be able to describe how a story is laid out.
Knowledge
I think a good example of this is Charlotte's Web
name the author and illustrator of a story and define the role of each in telling the story.
A kindergarten student must be able to know the author of a story or book.
Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events.
A third grade student must describe different aspects of the characters in a story and explain their actions in the story.
Describe traits and explain character's actions.
A good story for this standard would be Being Frank because the story focuses on the character Frank and his different traits, feelings and actions through a sequence of events.
Writing Workshops
I used to do these when I was in 6th grade and they helped tremendously when it came
Vocabulary, background knowledge, and the use of comprehension strategies all impact how well we understand what we read.
All of these come to play in terms of reading comprehension. I feel like all of these are important and play their own role in helping us understand what we read.
Research has shown that students who can read with accuracy and fluency are better able to comprehend the material because they are spending the majority of their time thinking about the text and not deciphering the words.
This is a valid point and drives home the point that I made earlier about spending too much time decoding words takes way from a story or text.
Have students read the same passage repeatedly to improve rate and accuracy Monitor and track speed and accuracy
This is another thing teachers have their students do for homework that I noticed at the after school program I work at. I have witnessed students reading a passage 3 times and indeed their speed and accuracy greatly improved after reading it for the third time. The teachers have their parents I've them a score on how they did.
For example, students who encounter the word “ungrateful” will be able to decode it quickly if they can recognize the words’ three meaningful parts (its prefix, root, and suffix) and comprehend it easily if they understand the meaning of each part.
I work at an after school program and sometimes the kids for homework have to identify prefixes and suffixes as well as put parts of words together to create words.
To this end, the teaching of both phonological and phonemic awareness and phonics and the alphabetic principle are very important in Kindergarten. In the phonological
Alphabetical Principle: is the understanding that words are made up of letters and letters represent sounds. If a child understands these letter-sound associations, he is on the way to reading and writing words.
Thus, one key task of the kindergarten teacher is to build students’ motivation to read books by building their foundational reading skills and exposing them to a wide variety of texts through the Read Aloud.
I want to be a kindergarten teacher, so this is something I will keep in the back of my mind if I get the opportunity to teach that grade level.
“First grade is the time when children bring together the many language and literacy skills they have been attaining—book and print awareness, phonemic awareness, letter and word knowledge, background information about different topics—and start getting comfortable with the conventions of associating letters and sounds.
A kindergarten teacher has a very important job because the skills their students acquire are very important to them in first grade
For many children, first grade is the time when they move from “pretend reading” to conventional reading
I work at an after school program and noticed that kindergarteners pretend to read when they "read" to me while first graders can actually read.
Unfortunately, disparate quality of past literacy instruction begins to evidence itself quite dramatically in second and third grade
A kindergarten and first grade teacher have a very important job when it comes to instructing kids to read
Third grade students learn to write in cursive
I was in third grade when I learned to write in cursive. I've noticed that the younger grades are fascinated by cursive and sometimes try to write in it at work.
Excellent teachers of literacy recognize the high returns that come from careful and constant assessment of their students’ literacy skills.
It is important to assess the students literacy skills so as a teacher we can recognize what we need to do to help.
One of the most profound and personal connections that young children make to print involves their names. The presence of students’ names in several locations around the elementary classroom (on classroom management charts, reading group lists, classroom job boards, etc.) is of great importance as an instructional tool for new readers.
I will keep this in the back of my mind and think of this when I am setting up my own classroom in the future. I never really thought of this as book and print awareness until now.
Without quick, accurate reading, comprehension is near impossible. We simply cannot focus on understanding a story if we must spend all of our time decoding the words on the page
This is so true. If we spend a lot of time trying to decode words, then less time will be spent focusing on understanding the story and we will miss the meaning. I felt like this when I took Spanish and did not know many words, by the end of the story after looking up all the words, I had no idea what I had just read.
word and structural analysis skills.
Definition: "The process of using familiar word parts (base words, prefixes, and suffixes) to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words."
phonics and the alphabetic principle
Definition: "The goal of phonics instruction is to help children to learn and be able to use the Alphabetic Principle. The alphabetic principle is the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds."
phonological and phonemic awareness
Definition: "Identify and manipulate individual sounds of spoken words. Both phonics and spelling focus on the letter sound relationship in WRITTEN words."
book and print awareness,
Definition: "Print awareness is a child's earliest understanding that written language carries meaning. The foundation of all other literacy learning builds upon this knowledge."
beginning readers who receive explicit, systematic phonics instruction and practice decoding simple words and reading easy books will eventually find that their ability to decode has become so automatic that they have to expend little cognitive energy on the process.
This is great but I feel like readers shouldn't just read "like robots". The students should be thinking about the words and what they are reading. This way of reading might not always work.
children master the important skills, strategies, and knowledge they need to become successful readers and writers most quickly and effectively if their teachers integrate both systematic instruction in letter-sound relationships and critical thinking about literature in to their literacy classrooms Researchers and educators often refer to this multi-faceted approach as “balanced literacy” instruction.
I am curious to find out what these systematic instructions are
The emphasis on teaching students to recognize whole words automatically and to use clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words became known as the whole language approach.
I never heard of this approach before and it actually makes a lot of sense to have the students do it this way and not have them decode words.
A landmark study conducted at the University of Kansas examined the exposure to verbal language of children in several socio-economic settings and found a dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 million). All children will show up for Kindergarten on the same day, but one may have heard 32 million fewer words in his or her lifetime, a fact that will almost certainly affect how quickly a child can decode and understand words.9 Clearly, environmental factors—including those at play before children ever arrive at school—have an enormous impact on students’ literacy development.
I never really thought about how many words children are being exposed to before starting kindergarten could have such a big impact on how quickly they can decode and understand words. But after reading about this study, it makes sense to me now.
the literacy skills of students in the under-resourced schools where we teach often lag well behind those of children in wealthier areas.
This point in particular stuck out to me because it's true and it's not okay that some students don't get the same opportunities as other children when it comes to learning to read and write.
Young, capable readers will seize the opportunities provided in a literacy-infused classroom and develop invaluable confidence in their own abilities, which leads directly to success in other subjects such as social studies, math, and science.
Without being able to read and write, then children will struggle in other subjects because all of them involve reading and writing in one form or another.
children who read well in the early grades are far more successful in later school years
The sooner children are exposed to literature, the better and more successful they will be in the future.
No single method of intervention will have as dramatic an effect on a student’s future learning and success than a solid foundation in literacy.
Without having the ability to read and write, then a student's future is dim. These two necessary skills are needed all through schooling and life.
, it is essential that elementary teachers follow the constant cycle of diagnosis, instruction, and assessment that is the crucible of excellent instruction
This cycle is something that if done correctly can be very beneficial to a student
Perhaps the most obvious benefit of such an initial diagnosis is that it shows you where to begin your instruction.
This is very important because if you know where to start then you can help the students build upon them.
Phonological Awareness Tests.
This test is necessary and can really help a student.
Finally, you can ask individual students to read from a Word List, which contains short lists of progressively more challenging words. When a student says a word incorrectly or skips it, the teacher records that as a “miscall.”
I never seen anything like this and really like this form of testing.
As the name implies, this assessment approach requires students to retell a story to the teacher that the student has read. By recording what aspects of the story the child recognizes and retells, the teacher establishes a picture of the student’s literacy skills.
I could see how this type of assessment could be very helpful in determining what the child considers important enough to remember. I do not necessarily remember doing this in school but its a simple assessment that can tell a lot about a child.
To measure a student’s fluency (also called oral reading rate), you would conduct a Timed Reading Exercise with a text on this student’s independent reading level
This exercise is something I would do with my students because I think the speed of a child reading is important when determining what level they are on.
Most teachers—even at the kindergarten and first grade level—find that rubrics are an invaluable tool.
Why is this so? Is it because children's reading skills are so different from one another at this age or is because without many skills in terms of literacy, you can't evaluate a child?
They use graphic organizers, story maps and outlining techniques to teach students the form and structure of various genres of text.
I feel like these are very helpful in terms of seeing what the children understood and took away from the story.
Running records, which are useful for students of all grade levels, do not have to be complicated.
Running records are something that can be easily done and can be helpful in the long run when tracking a students progress.
Running records, which are useful for students of all grade levels, do not have to be complicated.
Running records are something that can be easily done and can be helpful in the long run when tracking a students progress.
some teachers use the “five finger rule,” where the student is asked (and taught, so he can use this method to choose texts he reads on his own) to read an approximately 100-word passage and put up a finger every time he comes across a word he can’t read. If he puts up fewer than five fingers, the text is at his independent level and he will be able to read it and comprehend it without assistance from the teacher; the process of doing so will also build his fluency, due to the repeated exposure to words he already knows.
I never heard of the "five finger rule" until now and realize how important is when letting kids read and choose books they want.
lassroom Snapshot: Word Study
create a classroom word wall and have the children help come up with some of the words
Improve students’ ability to hear sounds by working with rhymes, riddles, and stories;
can be done during transition time
print awareness
creating a print rich environment can help
we should use tier 2 vocabulary that we will identify with the students. Sticky notes can help keep our instruction intentional and on track.
second grade, Ms. Cleary’s students build their comprehension during the Read Aloud and in Shared Reading. During these times, students are listening to a book read to them or are supported by the voices of other fluent readers; thus, their cognitive energy is freed to think strategically about the texts. In fourth grade, however, students are able to use comprehension strategies during Independent Reading; for most students, decoding has become an automatic process. The fourth graders with weak decoding skills (Clayton, Shawnice, and Troy) listen to a book on tape during this time to improve their reading fluency and also attend Mr. Moreno’s small group for additional instruction in troublesome spelling patterns.
This shows the difference in reading between 2nd and 4th grade readers. 4th graders- decoding has become automatic and they are now able to focus on comprehension. where 2nd graders need to listen to another reader to free up cognitive energy to comprehend.
Phonological and phonemic awareness
Reading Habits Checklist.
develop your students’ prior knowledge by allowing them to share their knowledge of the subject and giving the class important information they will require to make sense of the text.
it is important to understand the context of a text. so build background knowledge
frustration levels of your students
it is important to keep this in mind when teaching so the child doesn't give up altogether
prefix, root, and suffix
Understanding the function of print and the characteristics of books and other print materials
book and print awareness ie. a book walk
One of the most profound and personal connections that young childre
their names
honics (decoding words by examining relationships between sounds and letters)
absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement ga
more than 74% of children who enter first grade at risk for reading failure will continue to struggle to read into adulthood.3 Weak literacy skills will prohibit these children from accessing entire fields of knowledge
absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement gap
absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement ga
not learning to read early=risk getting left behind
it's another thing entirely to observe a ten year old who can only read 40 words per minute at the beginning of fourth grade, when he should be reading over 100
startling example of achievement gaps
dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 millio
dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 million
environment impacts students literacy ie. # words heard before entering school
Upon encountering a word that had not been taught, children were told to use picture or context clues to determine its meaning.
Upon encountering a word that had not been taught, children were told to use picture or context clues to determine its meaning.
whole language approach
bothdecoding and comprehension processes
=balanced literacy Teachers provide instruction on foundational skills then opportunities to practice
by reading books on their independent level and thinking about more challenging books that are read aloud to them.
Children learn best this way gradual increase in difficulty foundational skills->practice those skills->read independently->critical thinking about challenging books read aloud to them
mental energy can be used to read and comprehend increasingly complex words and texts.
What Is Literacy?
Phonological Awareness: Understanding that the spoken language is made up of units of sounds, such as sentences, words, and syllables
ntain both syllables and individual sounds, or phonemes. They should be able to hear and produce rhyming and alliteration, as well as begin to segment and blend simple words (to break the word cat down into the sounds /c... a... t/ and put those sounds together again to say cat). Students should also be able to recognize, name, and easily write the individual letters of the alphabet (both capital and lowercase), and know their corresponding sounds
Children become, in a real sense, independent readers.
diagnosing your students’ abilities and progress is a necessary foundation for achieving the significant academic gains that your students must make in order to catch up with students in more privileged communities
Formulating students' IEP is the most effective way for students to make progress and gains in their education.
First grade is the time when children bring together the many language and literacy skills they have been attaining—book and print awareness, phonemic awareness, letter and word knowledge, background information about different topics—and start getting comfortable with the conventions of associating letters and sounds
Standard for 1st grade?
Phonological Awarenes
pre-writing strategies
common roots, prefixes, and suffixes)
A close look at this graphic shows us that our ability to decode—to translate individual letters or various combinations thereof into speech sounds to identify and read words—is built upon our book and print awareness, phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics and the alphabetic principle, and word and structural analysis skills. Our ability to comprehend—to actively read and understand language—is based on our background knowledge, vocabulary, and ability to use comprehension strategies. Finally, our ability to read fluently—with speed, accuracy, and expression—is dependent on our ability to read non-decodable words on “sight,” to decode with such automaticity that we spend no mental energy in the process, and to read with appropriate phrasing. Reading fluency is the bridge from decoding to comprehension, hence its placement in the graphic.
Decoding is amazing. We are able to look at words, and understand them. They are just lines put in a certain order and we can look at it and find meaning.
We simply cannot focus on understanding a story if we must spend all of our time decoding the words on the page
An example of this is when I was taking a spanish course. I did not have a good understanding of the language so I constantly found myself looking up sentences word by word. If we had to do that all the time we wouldn't even bother with language.
Most teachers develop students’ Book and Print Awareness through constant, explicit modeling. When they hold up a Big Book that the class is reading, they “think aloud” about how to hold the book, where to start reading, and in what direction. While a teacher is writing the morning news on the board for his first graders, he might ask the students, “Should I start at the top of the board or the bottom?”
It is important as a teacher to constantly remind ourselves that our students have 0 knowledge of these concepts. Asking a question about writing orientation may be silly to us, but it is truly helpful to students.
Understanding that the spoken language is made up of units of sounds, such as sentences, words, and syllables
understanding that language has rules that break it up into understandable sections
Understanding that spoken words are made up of individual phonemes (the smallest part of spoken language); being able to hear, identify, and manipulate those phonemes
The simplest thing can change a word completely. Pad, Pat....Bad, Bat...
need
they need review for as long as it takes for them to understand.
Discussions of new words that occur during the course of the day, for example in books
In a kindergarten class that I observed, every morning the teacher wrote them a letter on the board. They would read it during morning meeting and then any new words would be introduced. For example on Saint Patricks day the new word was leprechaun.
Beginning readers should be able to read easily 90 percent or more of the words in a story
Student who are given material above their level will not benefit or improve their level of reading. They must develop confidence in their skills and read effortlessly before moving on.
Print represents oral language Reading from left to right and top to bottom Spaces between words and sentences Standard text structures and organization, such as covers, backs, titles, and illustrations Specific genre structures and organization, such as table of contents and index Sentence structure How to hold a book, turn its pages, and shelve it
Most of these points are skills we take for granted becuase they are second nature to us. In preschool and k to 1st these are a primary focus to develop a foundation for reading.
Phonemic awareness is the recognition of distinct phonemes, or speech sounds, in words. For example, the word squished is composed of the phonemes /s/, /k/, /w/, /i/, /sh/, and /t/.
Definition and example of phonemic awareness.
Once they figured out what letter or letter combinations made that particular sound, we decoded practice words with our cool new symbols.
An improtant technique that shows for example, "th" and "ch" sounds as well as long a short vowel sounds with in words.
A]ll students, regardless of which language(s) is (are) spoken, must develop an awareness of phonology and syntax if they are to become literate. . . . The development of listening comprehension is also a necessary condition for reading readines
Being a student with English as a second language, I was put into a pull out program for reading and writting during my years in elementary school. In these classes we focused a lot on phonology, syntax, and comprehension.
This instruction begins in Kindergarten with the dictation of stories to correspond to children’s illustrations. The child first attempts to use the letters he or she is learning to label pictures independently. Then he or she moves on to early elementary grades, where he or she should learn sentence structure, parts of speech, and how to develop paragraphs with topic sentences and details on a variety of topics. Finally, in upper elementary grades, the child learns to complete full compositions of different styles targeted to different audiences.
Reading and writing must be taught along side each other. These are some axamples of different stages of writing.
Students need to be Web literate in the future—not simply as a literacy but also a fundamental human right.
It is also becoming a huge part of the job world, one they will eventually need to learn to navigate.
Individuals plot their own learning pathway, but use the map as a guide.
Again, something we should strive for in our classrooms.
“the Internet as literacy
I love the wording and idea of this
“I just figure out what I need to learn and then I go learn it,
We need to teach our learners to do this type of inquiry based learning in the classroom as well.
Furthermore, rarely is the core generator (e.g. the textbook or the curriculum guide) modified (“patched”) in an ongoing way based on student desires, pleasures, displeasures, actions, and interactions.
We may not modify the text book, but who is to say we don't modify our lessons to student interest. This is very presumptuous.
There are many different forms and routes to participation
very important in the classroom
Intensive knowledge is specialized, extensive knowledge is less specialized, broader, and more widely shared.
We want to know whether content organization and interactional organization reflexively shape each other in strong or weak ways, not just whether they do or not.
in other words how accessible and effective is our curriculum.
First, we can look at it directly in terms of content, i.e. what signs it has and how they are organized. Second, we can look at it in terms of how people interact with that content or with each other over that content.
If we apply this to the classroom, we could think of different content spaces as subjects, however when we think in terms of how people interact with the space, those processes may seem similar despite content area.
Too often in schools knowledge is not shared across the students, is not distributed so that different students, adults, and technologies offer different bits and pieces of it as needed, and is not garnered from dispersed sites outside the classroom
group work, turn and talk, buddy reading all come to mind.
Schools often try to teach kids to read and write, rather than read or write specific types of things like stories, reports, field notes, essays, or expositions. But, just like games, these different types of reading and writing operate by different principles and are used to carry out different types of actions.
I dont necessarily agree with this. We teach different strategies for different purposes and text structures. We also teach key elements of different types of writing, such as a story vs. an informational piece vs. a how-to vs. a letter.
The player gets a real sense of being in the game, even a sense of urgency, but can’t really lose, or at least lose at all early before having put up a very good stand.
Similar to guided practice perhaps.
We see the game as a system, not just a set of discrete skills.
Another thing we need to teach our readers.
Information is given multimodally (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001): that is, in print, orally, and visually
This speaks to the importance of incorporating multiple modalities in our instruction as well.
What has to come before is motivation for an extended engagement with the game.
extended engagement is what we are striving to bring out in our young readers too.
In the end, I hope to convince you that today’s young people often see deeper and better forms of learning going on in the games they play than in the schools they attend.
Could this be because with video games learners are learning through experience, with a series of trial and error of different techniques? Where as in the classroom learners at times learn through lecture, discussion or other means not directly through experience. The classroom also poses a social pressure to get things "right" and could inhibit some children from taking chances and learning via trial and error.
arning to read in a way that allows people more than a literal understanding, that does not fuel the fourth-grade slump and create poor readers, requires that people “play” in a domain in such a way that they can give situation-specific meanings to the styles of language associated with that domain.
Readers need to make meaning of what their reading by doing and playing an active role.
A variety of studies have shown that, in peer-peer discourse, children are less likely simply to defer to the authority of the other’s viewpoint, more likely to seek some rational way to deal with differing viewpoints and perspectives, and more likely to actually change their own viewpoint for reasons they understand
This is interesting and supports the need for students to work collaboratively, turn and talk, buddy read.
Perspective-taking and moral reasoning
After having taught several individuals with Asperger's syndrome, I have to disagree. Some of these students have been advanced readers, with great comprehension skills, however severely lack social skills, including perspective taking and empathy.
Later, in other interactions, or in thinking to oneself, the child can re-run such simulations and imitate the perspective-taking
Would this be something to address with students receiving special education services, specifically those with autism who struggle with perspective taking?
a) they are specially built and we make them on the spot to help us make sense of and act in specific contexts or with specific texts; (b) they are not “neutral,” but capture a given perspective or viewpoint, foregrounding some things and backgrounding others, though our perspective or viewpoint changes in different contexts.
We need to teach readers to do this when reading.
We build our model simulations to help us make sense of things. Sometimes this does not work all that well.
This must be how it is for our struggling readers.
thinking is connected to, and changes across, actual situations and is not usually a process of applying abstract generalizations, definitions, or rules
I like this, it shows how we use our background knowledge and visualize meaning, altering it as we think and make meaning.
learning to decode was not “decontextualized.” It was not, in fact, separated from meaningful and value-laden action
This is reminds me of a previous reading in which the author claimed that students had greater comprehension with real world texts (news papers, brochures, signs). If students understand the purpose for reading, it can help them comprehend and act as a motivator.
It is easy to believe, as the traditionalists do, that the best way to learn such skills is to practice them over and over again out of any meaningful contexts. However, many children learn to decode print as part of larger activities which do have deep meaning and value to the children.
This shows how children learn differently, and a variety of teaching methods are required to ensure all learners are being targeted.
I was simply overwhelmed with details, questions, and confusions
This is how our struggling readers often feel.
It is, outside the practices in the domain from which it comes, just as meaningless, however much one could garner literal meanings from it with which to verbally repeat things or pass tests.
I understand that building experiences allows readers to build vocabulary and thus make meaning when they come across it in text, however, how do we provide students with further experiences within the constructs of our classrooms.
t may be somewhat surprising to learn that most researchers agree that although students do learn word meanings in the course of reading connected text, the process seems to be fairly inefficient and not especially effective
This is interesting. If words are not efficiently learned through drill or through contextual tex, how are they learned?
Here the report mentions the now well-known and much studied issue that from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the Black-White gap in IQ test scores and other sorts of test scores, including reading tests, was fast closing (Neisser 1998; Jencks and Phillips 1998). This heartening progress ceased in the 1980s. Clearly, these factors were, whatever else they were, powerful “reading interventions,” since they significantly increased the reading scores of “at risk” children. Though the matter is controversial (Neisser 1998; Jencks and Phillips 1998), these factors may have been closely connected to the sorts of social programs (stemming originally from Johnson’s “War on Poverty”) that were dismantled in the 1980s and 90s (Grissmer et al. 1998: pp. 221–3). However that may be, the test scores were going up at a time that integration was also increasing. By the mid-1980s integration increases ceased and the society became more segregated instead, a trend that continues today.
I never knew that, it is interesting to see how integration efforts closed the gap. I wonder what that looked like, and if there is anything we could take from that to close the gap today.
The teacher heard her as rambling.
While this is a beautiful and well written story by a little girl, I can understand where her teacher is coming from. The story should be appreciated for what it brings culturally and symbolically, however when this teacher is evaluated, or this child takes a standardized test, it wont be seen this way. This child can not write academically like this. Perhaps the teacher was trying to emphasize this and could have done a better job guiding her student. While I understand the plight of the teacher in this situation, I do sympathize with the child as well. This is a beautiful story, one I could see being made into a children's book. Society might need to adapt the way evaluates young writers for that to happen though.
Brian’s father had repeatedly encouraged this sort of talking and thinking about the design of the game.
This again shows how important a parent is to their child's literacy. Not all learning is done in school.
What is happening is that Jennie is learning to identify certain sorts of school-related identities with her primary home-based identity by forming an association between these two identities.
It is important that school is accepted in the home and children feel comfortable and supported while playing school, reading or even doing their homework. I think too many families have lost this and don't encourage their children to be excited about it.
Of course Jennie is no master of this sort of language.
She may not be a master, but she is showing a good understanding of the elements of a story!
can make a noun (like “growth”) out of a verb (like “grow”)
Word families
“syntax” means the internal structure of sentences
Should we consider a students prediction skills when considering syntax?Word prediction is often used by more fluent readers, if students are struggling with syntax, it could effect their fluency.
The “fourth-grade slump” (Chall et al. 1990) is the phenomenon where some children seem to acquire reading (i.e. pass reading tests) fine in the early grades, but fail to be able to use reading to learn school content in the later grades, when the language demands of that content (e.g. science) get more and more complex
The reading coach at my school says this constantly. She feels a lot has to do with the availability and interest of informational texts.
Learners observe masters at work. Masters model behavior (e.g. cooking a particular type of meal) accompanied by talk that helps learners know what to pay attention to. Learners collaborate in their initial efforts with the masters, who do most of the work and scaffold the learners’ efforts. Texts or other artifacts (e.g. recipes, cookbooks) that carry useful information, though usually of the sort supplied “on demand” or “just in time” when needed, are often made available.
This reminds me of guided reading and anchor charts
Whole Language advocates argue that this is how children should acquire literacy as well.
With so many drastically different approaches, it is no wonder students struggle as they are emersed in different programs each year.
phonemic awareness” (the conscious awareness that oral words are composed of individual sounds), then on phonics (matching letters to sounds), then practice with fluent oral reading (reading out loud), then work on comprehension skills.
That is, the child needs to learn with which of 44 sounds each of 26 letters can be associated. This system is pitifully smaller than the Pokémon system. That system is 150 (Pokémon) coupled with 16 (types) coupled with 2 (evolutions) coupled with 8 (skills) Yet, in the case of learning to read at school,
Perhaps if we embedded literacy instruction into some of these games and media, we would have an edge up.
Controversies over reading should have less to do with debates about methods of instruction and more to do with understanding the links between poverty and (not) learning to read.
Amen!
But the majority are poor or come from minority groups whose members have faced a history of prejudice and oppression
Perhaps it is because many of these children's early exposures to sounds and literacy come from generations of oppressed learners. If the parent doesn't have a strong skill set, how can they teach their child to have one.
Most children learn to read, regardless of what instructional approach a school adopts,
If it doesn't particularly matter which curriculum we use, schools might want to focus on one curriculum, rather than changing every year.
geology textbook
I took geology years ago, and struggled to understand even the most basic of information. However, I still remember the term "taconic orogeny" because someone used a physical representation and described the term in a context I could understand.
Writers of narratives often omit the motives that drive characters to particular actions in a story on precisely the grounds that they expect readers to use their knowledge of stories, life experiences, and human nature to infer those motives.
In order to level the playing field for readers without that background knowledge, we need to first build it prior to reading the text. This can take a significant amount of time if it needs to be done for each text daily.
small groups of students form “idea circles,” in which students meet to discuss the same idea (e.g., a particu-lar adaptation for animal survival) as explored through different texts, each at the appropriate reading level of only one member or a subset of members of the group
Leveled reading systems as well as Reading A-Z often provide books on the same topics at different reading levels which can help facilitate this.
For these reasons, we suggest that much comprehension instruc-tion be conducted in small groups or individually based on students’ needs
This is why individual student conferences or conferring is so important. It also provides an opportunity to provide students with an individualized reading goal as well as monitor progress.
Working with eighth-grade students, she evaluated an integrated social studies and language arts unit designed to promote his-torical understanding and argumentative writing skills.
This is fabulous and necessary. However could be harder to do in the older grades as they are taught by multiple teachers and collaborative planning time is often hard to come by.
This insight suggests that instruction may be more effective when teachers integrate reading and writing experi-ences in the classroom.
This integration could also further integrated with science as students read to research, write to record and learn new science concepts.
Table 3.5. Questions to Guide the Discussion in Questioning the Author
These are nice because they can be used at any reading level. They can be used in a kindergarten classroom asked to students during a read aloud, or given to high school students to work on collaboratively or independently about a book they read independently.
Another important tool to support text structure instruction is the use of graphic organizers, such as story maps, Venn diagrams for com-pare/contrast, and flowcharts for problem/solution.
I still use these when I read to help me keep track and make meaning of new texts.
(a) that students learn that text is structured and (b) that they develop the ability to take advantage of any particular text’s structure in learning and remembering its key informa-tion.
Understand different text structures can also help students prepare before they read, so they know what they are looking for. For example if a student knows they are reading a comparison they will know to look for different views or similarities and differences.
A key find-ing of research on highly effective teachers serving high-poverty students is that they spend a good deal more time coaching (i.e., providing guided practice for) students—that is, being the “guide on the side” as students try out their developing facility to apply strategies in actual reading and writing tasks
Guided practice is so important. It helps us to ensure our readers are appropriately applying a skill and mold their way of thinking before they go off and do it independently. I wish classrooms were smaller so we could more effectively spend time with individuals throughout this practice.
When stu-dents read on the topic of reported interest to them, whether working animals or robotics, they employed a greater number and range of com-prehension processes. This tells us that if our goal is to stretch students’ comprehension muscles, we should provide them with texts of interest.
This also speaks to the importance of allowing students choice in their reading materials. Even if we allow students to choose between books of the same topic, they will feel greater motivation and ownership over their learning as they would have chosen their own book.
found that increas-ing the volume of texts in child-care centers led to increased engagement with texts and improvements in children’s early literacy measures
This has been known to educators for a long time now. The problem lies in accumulating these texts within student's homes as well as school libraries. Students with low socioeconomic backgrounds traditionally have fewer books at home, and even in their classrooms. Programs such as new haven reads provide books for students to build their home libraries, however these books are often old and unengaging to students. We need to find a way to put more texts in their hands at home and prior to coming to school.
Words are not the point of words; ideas are.
This is beautiful.
This means that the inquiry component of science and the strategy component of reading are mutually reinforcing and synergistic, in that what one learns in the one improves the other.
This shows that good reading skills can be related to life skills. Inquiry and prediction are not solely academic skills, we do this everyday in our lives.
IDEAS (in-depth expanded applications of sci-ence) model replaces literacy instruction with a two-hour block of inte-grated science–literacy instruction. Students receiving this instruction have consistently outpaced students receiving regular language arts and science programs on national norm-referenced assessments
This speaks to the importance of integrating content areas and not simply teaching core subjects in isolation. Students would also benefit from literacy instruction during math and history/social studies.
Skilled readers are also more motivated and engaged readers, reading more actively and more voluminously, thus further developing their knowledge and skill
This is why the gap continues to widen for some students
This cycle has a down side, in that some readers do not come to the task with a knowledge base, inferential capacities, motiva-tions, or dispositions sufficient to enable comprehension
This is often the case with our struggling readers
we use our knowledge along with our perceptions of what we think the text says to literally build, or construct, mental representations of what the text means.
This makes a lot of sense. It also shows why it is so important for our readers to think about the text and visualize it as they are reading, not just decode.
The evidence for this role is impressive. In one study, some teachers of first-grade students in a high-poverty school district got 80% of their students to grade level in reading comprehension by the end of the year, while others in the same school district got only 20% of their students to grade level
How? If we knew the differences, perhaps we could employ them more widely and more effectively close the gap.
Two promising pieces of national legislation to advance knowledge in this area are the Children and Media Research Advancement (CAMRA) Act and the National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund. The currently pending CAMRA Act would authorize long-term funding to establish a coherent research program on the many forms of electronic media and the myriad ways they affect children, from their developing brains to their developing bodies.
This is great, but if it is only in the research phase, how will it help all of the children currently struggling.
In school we often value words more than images and action. We often want to put a good deal of reading ahead of a learner’s opportunity to get images and actions (
good point
With the enormous growth in English Language Learners in the United States, how do we teach English academic language in the larger context of English language and multilingual language development?
Especially when our learners come to us from various backgrounds, speaking various languages we are not familiar with.
In carrying out quests like these in various units,
These Quests sound similar to units taught in some of our magnet schools.
DIBELS
They should make the program adaptable to different reading leveling systems. My school does not use DIBELS any more, however with things such as these coming up, I can see parents demanding it.
JUMP into reading for meaning (JUMP) program
We need more programs like this!
the ages 6 to 11 — is absolutely crucial. It is during this time that children are making the transition from learning to read to reading to learn and, we now hope, reading to discover
The reading coach at my school says this constantly. I can't wait to share this with her.
Not only are we failing to educate millions of young people in basic literacy and numeracy, but we are also failing to educate them in important 21st-century skills. “21st-century skills”
The constant push for students to acquire more information, rather than more pertinent information often means time is taken from activities which would have instilled other necessary life skills.
Create “a place in every community”: New literacies technology centers
This is a great idea for families without computers or internet access. I think libraries have such outdated technology, and offer little computer literacy guidance. It would be nice to see a multitude of technology such as ipads and ereaders incorporated. I wonder how they will finance it though.
The most accurate predictor of school success is the size of a child’s vocabulary at age five of “book” words (words more likely to appear in written texts than in spoken language). This breadth of vocabulary is created by parents talking to children, answering their questions, reading to them, modeling their own pleasure in reading, and offering their children a wide variety of experiences in the world.
If this is the most accurate predictor, which occurs before a child even enters school sometimes, why are we still blaming teachers? We should place more importance in preschools as well
“How can emerging media help children learn?”
We should really be capitalizing on this more as a nation.
By providing linguistical-ly rich programs in which both the content andthe form of language are examined we are sup-porting literacy development in the fullest sense.
teachers should avoidrigid adherence to a sequence. It is not the casethat teachers should engage exclusively in rhymeactivities for weeks before they engage in sylla-ble activities. Likewise, we do not believe thatchildren must “pass” one type of operation (e.g.,matching) before having experiences with an-other (e.g., blending). Phonemic awareness de-velopment is not a lockstep process
More teachers should know this!
Yo u m a y a l s o c r e a t e a c e n t e r w i t h p l a s t i cfoods and lunchbags. Children will play withthese items, retelling the story and creatingrhymes as they have their peers guess what theyhave in their bags. A copy of the book should beavailable at the center.
I love this! i read this book all of the time but I have never used this activity. jackpot! I just got a whole unit of ideas that I can develop in my learning centers.
p h o n e m i c a w a r e n e s s c a n b estimulated in many students in large part by pro-viding them with linguistically rich environ-ments—ones in which they are exposed to richvocabulary, syntactic complexity, and decontextu-alized language as well as ones in which languageitself is explored and experimented with deliber-ately.
We b e l i e v e t h a t p h o n e m i c a w a r e n e s s c a n b estimulated in many students in large part by pro-viding them with linguistically rich environ-ments—ones in which they are exposed to richvocabulary, syntactic complexity, and decontextu-alized language as well as ones in which languageitself is explored and experimented with deliber-ately.
activities that arechild appropriate (International Reading Assoc-iation & the National Association for the Edu-cation of Young Children, 1998). Adams andBruck (1995), for instance, submitted that songs,chants, and word-sound games are ideally suit-ed toward developing young children’s sensitiv-ity to the sound structure of language. Beck andJuel (1995) posited that time spent on word play,nursery or Dr. Seuss rhymes, and general expo-sure to storybooks contribute to phonemicawareness. Mattingly (1984) encouraged class-room teachers to provide their students with lin-guistic stimulation in the form of storytelling,word games, rhymes, and riddles in order to fa-cilitate phonemic awareness. Yopp (1992), de-scribing developmentally appropriate activitie
Young children love music and movement. I can expose my children to the same lesson spoken or chanted with music and they respond more positively to music.
phonemic awareness instructionshould be deliberate and purposeful. Althoughsome teachers have engaged their students inplayful language activities for years, they mayhave done so without knowing the full value ofthese activities.
Therefore, it is much too simplistic toidentify a hard-and-fast order in which opera-tions should be presented. Nevertheless, we pro-vide a possible order of what appears to be easierto more difficult operations for many children,given that the same types of sounds, the samenumber, and the same location are the focus ofattention. This information is offered only tosupport the teacher in making thoughtful deci-sions about potential sound manipulation activi-ties and is not intended to be prescriptiv
eachers played the essential role of facilitator or guide (Rogoff &Gauvain, 1986; Vygotsky, 1934/1986), with the scaffolding provided by theteacher diminishing in proportion to the students’ increasing knowledge, interest,and strategic abilities in a particular area (e.g., Alexander, 1997b; Brown &Palincsar, 1989), so that students could develop self-direction and autonomy(Deci & Ryan, 1991
One of our main goals as an early childhood educator.
A further consequence of this view of the learner as actively engaged in theprocess of learning has been a rekindled interest in strategic processing. In con-trast to the habituated skills of earlier eras, the effective use of strategies is un-derstood to require reflection, choice, and deliberate execution on the part of thelearner (Alexander, Graham, & Harris, 1998). Strategy use by its nature callsfor engaged learners who are willing to put forth effort, and who can knowl-edgeably respond to the demands of a particular situation. The body of literatureon learning strategies, particularly reading comprehension, has grown in recentyears in response to this new view of the engaged learner (P
Students who are interested in what they are learning will be more engaged in their learning and retain more information.
Mothers cook without written recipes most of the time; if ( \ they use a recipe from a written source, they do so usually only after confirma!lon and alteration by friends who have tried the recipe,
I understand the author is referencing the absence of literate sources used by adults, but I am not sure this is very relevant.
authority which books and bookrelated activities have in the lives of both the preschoolers
authority? I prefer reverance