Assessment

For this week, I chose to read Lose's article: A child’s response to intervention requires a responsive teacher of reading.  This article stresses the importance of EIS (early intervening services) and RIT (Response to Intervention) to aid in the promotion of literacy in children who struggle with learning disabilities.  It provides many principles that support the RTI approach, and ways to provide intervention early.  For teachers, it is important for them to consider certain principles to ensure that struggling learners achieve success.  The following as especially important for the RTI approach:

• Children come "by different paths to outcomes" in literacy

• A child who has been provided with the intervention he or she needs will respond successfully, making progress daily and learning how to lift his or her own literacy performance with skilled support from a knowledgeable teacher

• To be successful, the most struggling child requires the most expert teacher

• Teacher expertise requires high-quality, sustained professional development

Overall, it is important to remember that emphasis should be placed on early literacy interventions to help the children who struggle with literacy learning.

• Why do you think it is important to focus on these principles to strengthen literacy in struggling readers?
• What other ways can teachers help students struggling with literacy?

Guided Reading

The article on Guided Reading I chose to read this week was "Guided Reading Procedure" by Anthony Manzo.  In essence, Guiding Reading is a method that allows the teacher to guide the student through text by using a series of activities.  In this article, Manzo discuesses various ways that the GRP (Guided Reading Procedure) is useful in the classroom.  The GRP is especially important because it "contributes to higher order comprehension skills and to goals of humanistic education" (287).  The GRP allows students to recall more information, especially through constant teacher-student interaction.  The article mentions that there are four subskills of the GRP: unaided recall, recognizing implicit questions, self-correction, and organization.  In my opinion, unaided recall is one of the most important skills need for overall reading comprehension.  Unaided recall is the ability to remember what you read without having questions to help you remember.  This shows that the has student comprehended what they read.  This article does a great job at detailing the GRP, and how to create a lesson by it.

• What do you think is the most important factor to Guided Reading?

• Do you think Guided Reading is a useful method to use in the classroom? Why or why not.

Real-life Reading Inquiry

This past week, I completed my Real-life Reading Inquiry.  For this assignment, I chose to observe a reading lesson with my younger brother, who is a 5th grade student.  The assignment he completed focused on fluency.  As we learned, fluency has many meanings, but most importantly it means being able to read quickly yet accurately while comprehending the text.  The activity chosen for him was a Webquest activity, which is a web-based activity in which the learner gathers most of their information from the web.  The particular Webquest he did was entitled "Fairy Tales and Tall Tales-Reading for Meaning and Fluency".  The format of Webquests includes a: introduction, task, process, evaluation, and conclusion.

Since this was a self-guided lesson, I limited the activity to an hour.  The task B (name has been changed) had to complete involved him first choosing a fairy tale.  A link on the "process" tab of the Webquest directed B to a list of Fairy Tales that he could chose from.  For this activity, he decided to chose the story of the "Three Little Pigs".  I instructed B to first listen to me as I read a paragraph, then he would read the next one.  Since B struggles reading aloud as an "expressive reader" I changed the format.  On the third paragraph, I read first, then I instructed him to repeat the paragraph as I did.  This reminded me of Chapter 4 of Classrooms that Work.  In this chapter, Cunningham states that "one of the major ways we become fluent readers is to read something over several times.  One way to do this is by practicing Echo Reading, which is what I demonstrated with B.  After I should him the proper way to read the text, he continued to read the story, but with more expression.  After B completed the story, he was instructed to complete a series of questions to check for comprehension.  To make sure B remembered the important parts of the story, he answered things like: "Who is the main character(s)?, Describe the setting, and What is the problem of the story?." In chapter 7 of Classrooms that Work, it mentions that a good way to check for comprehension is to ask questions throughout the lesson.  Asking questions helps the child remember important parts of the story.

To close the lesson, I told B to draw a picture of his favorite part of the story.  In his picture, he drew the three pigs in the brick house, with the wolf trying to blow the house down.  This seemed to be his favorite part of the lesson.  Overall, this was a very enjoyable assignment for both of us.  I was able to apply techniques from articles that I had previously read, and he was able to practice his fluency skills!

Vocabulary

For this week, I focused on the article Vocabulary Lessons (Blanchowitz & Fisher).  After reading about vocabulary, I started to realize how important it truly is.  Usually, people associate a strong vocabulary with being smart and educated.  Knowing this to be true, it is important to start early when building a child's vocabulary.  This article does a great job of giving suggestions for teachers to use to expand student's vocabularies and their overall reading comprehension.  The four methods listed in the article were: "Develop word awareness and love of words through word play", "Develop explicit, rich instruction to develop important vocabulary", "Build strategies for independence", and "Engage students actively with a wide range of books".  In class, we have already learned several ways to deploy these methods in the classroom.  The article mentioned that a great way to "Develop word awareness and love of words through word play" is to make a word wall.  Displaying and exposing students to a list of words that they encounter on a daily basis can help them better apply these words in real-life situations.  By reinforcing the learning of new words by winning points or a reward, this makes students motivated to learn new words

Source

The article also mentioned that a great way to "Engage students actively with a wide range of books" is through the use of book clubs and literature circles.  This reminded me of the literature circles we did in class, and the job of the "Word Finder".  By assigning this role to students, they are able to explore and find words that they may have not previously known, and adding them to their own vocabulary.

Source

• What fun ways could you teach vocabulary instruction in your future classroom?

• Do you think literature circles are useful in enhancing children's vocabulary? Why or why not.  Will you incorporate these into your future classroom?