For this week, I chose to focus on the readings from Gregory (Kindergartners can do it too!) and Pardo (What every teacher needs to know about comprehension). After reading these articles, I began to realize how complicated the process of comprehension is. Luckily, Gregory's article provides ways to help teach comprehension skills to young children and Pardo's article takes a closer look at comprehension to help teachers better understand it to be able to teach it. Overall, both articles proved to be useful in providing methods of teaching reading comprehension. The key is to understanding comprehension is looking at the various components of it, such as the reader, the text, and the teacher's role in teaching the text. As seen in Gregory's article, in Mrs Hope classroom, we see a successful attempt of teaching reading comprehension to young readers. By focusing on comprehension strategies like: schema (what we know), visualization, making connections, asking questions, and infer when interacting with texts, comprehension can be taught to young children, just like older children.
Here is an example of a reading comprehension activity that can be used in a classroom:
What interactive/fun ways do you think you can teach reading comprehension in your future classroom?
Pardo's article mentioned Book Clubs as a way to promote comprehension in the classroom. Do you think this is a good method? What are some other activities you could use in your future classroom?
Cunningham defines fluency as "the ability to read most words in context quickly and accurately and with appropriate expression." (49). When thinking about the definition of fluency, one can infer than it means reading words quickly, yet making sense of the words. Fluency isn't necessarily dependent on the reading level of the reader, but more on the complexity of the text. One of the important things to remember when teaching fluency, is to introduce the child to material that they are interested in. Generally, most things we read are at a lower reading level and easy for us to read. By giving a child easy material that they like to read, ensures that they will by able to recognize most of the words, which in turn helps build fluency through comprehension.
According to the reading, "one of the major ways we become fluent readers is to read something over several times." (Cunningham 57). Fun ways that can incorporate rereading text are:
1.Easy Reading
2. Echo Reading
3. Choral Reading
After reading Chapter 4, I realized that my teachers practiced many of these fluency activities with me. One activity that stick out to me most is reading Dr. Seuss books using Echo Reading. Each day for about 2 weeks, we would all read "Green Eggs and Ham" along with the teacher. She would read the book first by herself, then we would all read the book a second time together. I felt that this was a very fun way to read the book, yet I didn't realize that this activity was helping improve my fluency!
Do you remember doing any fluency activities when you were in grade school? Which ones? Do you think you could incorporate these into your future classroom?
What are some way you practice fluency? (Reading magazines, reading the same books with children, etc)
This week's reading focused on the "Making Words" lesson. Before children begin to properly spell words correctly, they often invent their own way of spelling words. This made me think of classrooms that I have observed in. Last year, I was in a kindergarten classroom where the teacher always pushed for the correct spelling of words. According to Clark's research in the article, children who invented their own spelling for words "were superior to the others on measures of word decoding...". I was surprised by reading this at first, but when I thought about it, when children attempt to spell words, it shows that they have a clear understanding for recognizing what that word is, although they may lack the skills to spell it correctly. Personally, I feel that invented spelling is a good way to encourage early readers/writers to express themselves. The key is to use guided activities such as using Elkonin boxes with Reading Recovery.
Making Words seems like a great activity to use in the classroom. This activity can be used in a variety of way by incorporating many different spelling patterns. It not only teaches the child how to recognize patterns, but strengthens the child's ability to spell words. As the teacher guides the child through the lesson, they may be able to spell words correctly that they previously did not know how. In the article, an example used was asking the child to spell the three letter word "pie". Many of the students immendiately put "pi" but realized that there was a silent "e". By telling the students that it was a three letter word, many were able to chose from the remaining letters, and put the "e" at the end.
In the video below, a teacher guides her classroom through a Making Words lesson
