Week 7- comprehension and think-alouds

I really enjoyed reading "Kindergardeners Can Do It Too!". It describes and explains a variety of ways to teach comprehension to young readers.  I think that this is such an important topic because it raises a great question, how do you teach something so abstract to people so small?

What I took from the article is a solution to that. Mrs. Hope makes the process of comprehension less abstract and more tangible. She...

• uses charts and posters to map questions and thoughts 
• allows the students to 'click' on their brains
• lets them use physical representations of connections, questions, & ideas 
• lets students represent their ideas in illustrations. 

All of these things make the concept and skill of comprehension more concrete to the students, something they can strategize and accomplish.

I think that these strategies are great for kindergardeners because they are aimed at their developmental level.  As 5 and 6 year olds, these kids are in the pre-operational stage, where they like to use symbols, letting something represent something else.  They are also in the logographic stage of reading where they like to have pictures and images represent ideas.

1. What are some other ways to encourage reading comprehension in young readers?
2. Did you work on comprehension as a kindergardener? 1st or 2nd graders?

Week 6- Fluency

Although I know that fluency is crucial, before reading Creating Fluent Readers I didn't fully know what fluency meant.  Rasinski's 3 dimensions of fluency made the concept more clear:

       1. Accuracy in decoding- ability to sound out words / phonics 

       2. Automatic processing- little effort in decoding so they can focus on meaning

       3. Prosodic reading- use of expression, emphasis, punctuation, etc

I think that the third dimension is one that is often ignored. I remember reading our textbooks aloud in class and listening to how some students completely ignored punctuation, just reading and reading like it was all one sentence. 

On the other hand, I was babysitting a 6 year old boy who was reading Junie B. Jones an wanted to read it aloud to me.  As he read (30 pages..) I was so surprised to see how he changed voices for different characters, used inflection, and detected emotions and altered his voice to reflect them.  Although he often made mistakes, he would always go back and re-read the sentence, adding the inflection, emotion, pause, etc to the sentence.  He knew how it was supposed to sound and was practicing. 

I think that the difference between these two cases is exposure. The young boy's mother was a teacher, and she read to him all the time. Rasinski says it is important for children to "hear what fluent reading sounds like and how fluent readers interpret the text with their voices."  In the other situation, those children may have not received the same modeling. 

Other ways to help encourage fluency that I liked were:

        -having students perform speeches/scripts/dialogues/jokes

        -having students read along with the book on tape

        -teacher reads, then follow along silently, then read as a group

1. What are some other ways to encourage fluency?

2. What are some setbacks/flaws in schools teaching literacy?

Week 5: making words

I really enjoyed reading the Making Words article.  It describes a fun, interactive classroom activity that teaches students about building words and learning word patterns. Each child is given a set cards with letters printed on them. With the teacher's directions, they manipulate and arrange the cards to form multiple 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-letter words. At the end, the teacher goes through all of the words the class has made, highlighting letter patterns and sorting words that have similarities. I've listed some examples of things a teacher might discuss with her class after the activity:

1. Words that rhyme often have the same spelling pattern:   

 ride/side       pies/dies

2. Find the words that begin the same:

bag/bad/band

3. Find the words that have 2+ letters before the vowel (blends):

snip/spin/spring

4. For words with 2 vowels sound different than the vowel alone:

bat/sat  or  bet/set 

 beat or seat

5. Some words' letters can be rearranged to make new words:

nip/snip/pins/spin

6. Changing one consonant sound can change the word:

ride/ripe/rise

I think that this activity would be really beneficial to students because it puts them in control of making the words- letting them experiment and use different strategies to come up with the answer. It also teaches them about letter patterns, which is hugely helpful in learning to spell. A big part of this is getting students to realize that changing or adding a different letter makes words change in predictable ways. The more aware students are about these patterns, the better they will be able to read and write new words. 

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1. What is a way to make this game more advanced for older students?
2. Do you think there are any flaws or negatives about this activity?