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.