Real Life Reading Inquiry

For my read life reading inquiry activity I decided to interview a third grade teacher at Watauga Elementary School in Ridgetop, Tennessee. This teacher earned her bachelors of science in Education, certified k-8. She also has her Master's in Education and is a certified reading specialist. This is currently her 8th year of teaching. The county says that she is responsible for spending 90 minutes a day on reading. She spends a total of two hours. 45 minutes are spent just on reading and then she spends the rest implementing grammar and writing in with reading. Reading is also implemented in vocabulary and science. A piece of advice from her was that you've got to be in the marketing and entertainment business. She said if you are enthusiastic and excited about what you are teaching, your students will be that much more excited, you've got to sell it! She said that she uses different books and activities that she knows interest her students so they do enjoy reading in her class. They just finished reading a Magic Treehouse book called Emperor Penguins. The student's got to research the penguins and do activities involving penguins while reading about them. 

The teacher also had a word wall. The word "CAFE" was in big letters on the wall. C stands for comprehension, A for awareness, F for fluency, E for expanding vocabulary. This allows the students to be aware of what they need to work on when reading. Some days the students get to read to a partner, some days they read with the teacher,  etc. She says the best way to become a reader is to give the students opportunities to read." How true! She also said she likes AR because it gets kids into books. However, she did stress the importance of making sure that it is an appropriate reading level for the student. She has her students set goals and if the goals are met by the end of the year the students get a field trip to Incredible Daves, what an incentive. I found it interesting to see that she does book clubs in her class since we do book clubs in our class. She provides several options to let the students pick from. She stressed how important it was to teach with intention and read with meaning. When asked about level readers, she said her class rarely uses level readers because there is better quality in real books that students will be interested in. Authentic books are the way to go.

I found this interview beneficial because it took so many things that we learn about in class and put them into real life use. 

You can't see someones thinking...

understandmore.com

I really liked the article about Comprehension. It is so important to make sure that students comprehend what they are reading or it is pointless for them to even read it. Something that allows students to better comprehend something is a student’s background knowledge on the topic. When prior knowledge is being activated then connections are being made and students better understand the material.

A good way to activate prior knowledge is doing like what was talked about in the article, a KWL chart. This allows the students to think about what they already know for sure, what they think they already know, what they want to know, and what they learned once the lesson has been taught. I really like KWL charts. I actually gave one to my class a few weeks ago when teaching a lesson on Prohibition. It kind of stressed the students out at first, but once they realized they did already know a little bit of background knowledge they were much more comfortable with it.

Have you ever had experience with giving students a KWL chart? If so, how did they feel about it?

What are other ways that you have activated prior knowledge?

Not fast, but fluent.

teacher-resources-john-jay.wikispaces.com

Rasinski says there are three dimensions in reading fluency that lead to comprehending:

1) accuracy in word decoding where readers have to be able to sound out words

2) automatic processing as little mental effort as possible while reading so they can make meaning of the words

3) prosodic reading where they are understanding the grammar basically. Rasinski says that if they are not reading the text appropriately, such as pausing at commas, reading monotoned, ignoring punctuation, etc, then they are most likely not comprehending the text. 

He also talked about a rubric for rating reading fluency that looks at expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace. I think this is a great tool because it helps teachers know what they need to look at rather than just trying to hurry a student up. I agree that some teachers just hurry some students up and work on fast rather than fluent. I sometimes even catch myself now reading fast and getting ahead of myself and having to go back to look at what I actually read and then I have to understand it. Why not just slow down and get it right the first time? Do you ever catch yourself doing the same thing, too?

I like the ideas of pairing the students up, either homogenously or heterogenously, and letting them read to each other. Then they are only reading with one person instead of a whole class so they don't have to feel embarrassed if they don't think they are good at it. I also like the theatrical ideas. This seems fun! I think kids could really enjoy that and it would be really beneficial for prosodic reading. What were your favorite ideas to help fluency in reading?

“The fluent reader sounds good, is easy to listen to, and reads with enough expression to help the listener understand and enjoy the material.” -Charles Clark

Spel it Rite

personal.georgiasouthern.edu

When our spelling is perfect, it's invisible. 

But when it's flawed, it prompts strong negative associations.
-Marilyn vos Savant 

This article discusses the strong connection between spelling and ability to identify words in reading. Students engaging in invented spelling during writing helps them become better at decoding in reading. Children's invented spelling can potentially help a teacher understand what the students know and do not know and how the students are understanding (or not) the phonetic structure of words. At risk students could lack phonemic awareness so invented spelling would in no way be beneficial for these students. The beginning making words lesson seems like a beneficial activity to be included in the classroom. The students are given one vowel and several consonants and the students are required to use the vowel in every word. If the students are given a p,n,t,k,l, & r with their vowel, i, they could create several words: pin, tin, kit, lip, tip, lit, pit, nip, pink, link, rink, rip, and I'm sure there are more that I'm leaving out. This would be a great activity for a whole group instruction. I think it would be fun to do this activity on a reading carpet and if you had a smart board, or overhead, or just a white board, the students could take turns coming up to their board and writing out a word they think they can make from these letters. This will engage the students and get them active while learning something valuable. As the article states, this is an excellent time to inform the students how different letters sound together. i.e. how i sounds different in tin than it does in link. It is said that children that lack phonemic awareness can develop it through participation and practice. This activity aligns with reading and spelling, and writing, what more could a teacher want than practicing all three in one lesson?

Do you think that invented spelling may encourage a child to be more creative while writing since they could focus less on the correct spelling and more on writing what they want, or do you think that it actually hinders a child's writing?