Real-Life Reading Inquiry

For my real-life reading inquiry I read with two of the kids I babysit. First I read (and reread) a few books with Sarah, who is four years old. Then I listened to Ian, eight years old, read for a while out of a shark book.

Sarah is in an "older fours" preschool class. It is obvious that they are working hard on the alphabet. She is picking up on letters she recognizes and calling them by name, usually saying "A, ahh, apple", if she notices an a, or "S, like me, Sarah!" if she finds an S. A month or two ago, she would mainly notice the illustrations of a story, naming things she saw or asking questions about what was portrayed. She still does that now, but also adds in more alphabetic knowledge. During this reading she pick out letters she knew and read some picture words (like seeing a stop sign and knowing it means stop).

Because of this, I would say Sarah is in the logographic stage reading. A handout from class on stages in children's development of word recognition describes logographic readers as "not yet reading the letters in the words but are trying to find any identifiable feature that will help them remember the words." In addition to what she pickup up on in the book, Sarah also knew the titles of almost all of the books on their bookshelf (there are dozens). This definitely fits in with the earlier parts of the logographic stage, where kids use images to identify words (like faces). She may be in the early, early, early stage of transitional alphabetic reading, where kids pick up the first consonant of a word. She does this when she notices a word from a line of text, then says a word she knows that starts with that same letter.

Next I read with Ian. He is in the second grade for the second time. Reading was a struggle for him previously, but the additional year has really helped him. Before he would become very discouraged if he didn't know a word, but now he uses strategies to get through the words. During this exercise he was reading out of a book about different kinds of sharks with many difficult words. As I watched him try to decode the words, I noticed many of the strategies chapter 5 of Classrooms That Work says good readers use. When he came across an unfamiliar word, he would reread it, look for familiar letter patterns (tion, ake, etc), and try to pronounce it. (He did not always reread the sentence to see if the word made sense)

I thought this activity was really interesting and helpful because it played out the things we've been learning in class, but in real life. I am a visual person, so actually seeing the strategies was very beneficial to me.  I babysit these kids a lot, but with four kids running around I'm not always on the lookout to see what reading stage they are in. This activity was great because it really let me apply what I've learned. It allowed me to be much more aware of how Ian and Sarah read.

This exercise relates to my future teaching because it let me study the differences between a preschooler and a second grader. Their levels span the gap of most of the stages of reading we have covered in class (logographic through orthographic). It allowed me to see overlaps between stages, which is something that will be present in all future students of mine. This activity also gave me a visual representation of the various stages of reading. From here, I will hopefully be better able to identify reading levels in students.