Impontance of Collaboration

This week I read Every Child a Reader: What One Teacher Can Do by Gay Su Pinnell. I really enjoyed the part about teachers working together.  After reading the article I now understand how important it is, for us as teachers, to collaborate with each other.  I never thought about how much teachers must communicate and share with one another in order to create a healthy learning environment.  The article states, "Colleagues are a teacher's most important resource." I couldn't agree more.  By sharing one's own experiences and working together through some sort of professional groups I think a lot can be achieved. As a teacher, if we just stick to one certain way or program to teach our students how to read we can be blinded to many other amazing teaching methods. By sharing with other teachers we can begin to develop a more dynamic and rich learning experience for our students.

Leveling Books

This week I read the Rog and Burton article, Matching Texts and Readers: Leveling Early Reading Materials for Assessment and Instruction.  I really enjoyed this article.  It focused in on leveling books, which is a concept I had not given much thought to.  I guess I just assumed that the books would already be leveled…nope, wrong.  Even if the books come with a grade level on them, I learned I should level all books myself.  This article is definitely going to come in handy for my classroom.  The system they offer for leveling books is awesome!  One of the five things they considered while leveling books was size and layout of print. I have blogged about the importance of this in books before and I was so happy to see that it was an aspect of this leveling system.  I think it is so important to consider how a book looks to a child. If they think it looks too hard for them they can easily get discouraged.

Another aspect they considered was illustration support.  It was interesting to me that they focused on the pictures in books. They say, “Two factors can influence the amount of contextual support that illustrations provide: the extent to which the vocabulary can be associated with clear and concrete images, and the reader’s familiarity with the vocabulary.” I never thought that this aspect could be too important. Turns out it can be a big determiner of readability.

Here is a site that provides different level systems for teachers to reference!- http://classroom.jc-schools.net/pohlmanr/levelingbooks.html

Guided Reading

I love the idea of guided reading. My wiki was on guided reading so I really wanted to focus on a different aspect of guided reading.  So the article I chose this week was An Important Aspect of Guided Reading: Books Galore! Classroom Connections by J Lois Lanning and Rene LaMere. This article really focused on guided reading as one of the principal teaching techniques for a primary classroom and the need for a generous supply and variety of books.
The article talked about the importance of having a wide range of books that differ in readability, genre, and student interest. All of these kinds of books are necessary in the classroom because no student is the same. The article also talked about ways teachers can get books. I had never thought about how I would stock my classroom when the time came. I guess I just thought that the school would provide the proper materials. When the time comes, I am not going to have the funds myself the purchase all of the books I need. The article talked about how the school district budget or grant funds are a great place to start.
The article talked about how important administrative support can be. If the administrators see merit in guided reading, they can have an important role in securing funds for the purchase of books. It is our responsibility as teachers to show the administration just how important guided reading is. After getting the books the article talked about how a teacher must level them in order to use them in their guided reading activities. 
I felt like these were aspects of guided reading I had not thought about yet and just wanted to share what I learned! If you want to know more about guided reading check out our wiki here!

Making Words

I enjoyed reading the Cunningham and Cunningham article, Making Words: Enhancing the Invented Spelling-decoding Connection, this week.  What stood out to me in the article was the making words section.  I thought it was cool the way they took small parts of a word and had the children make other words.  

Believe it or not this reminded me of a Full House episode.  In the episode, the young Michelle Tanner can not read and gets very discouraged. Her older sister DJ sets her down and tells Michelle that she can do it. She writes the word AT on the board and Michelle knows that word. Then she adds a C in front and asks Michelle to sound it out. Michelle realizes it says cat. DJ then gives her a few more examples such as hat, bat, and sat. Michelle gets so excited because she realizes that reading is not as hard as she thought.

So, not only can this method expand a student’s learning but it can help boost a student’s confidence when beginning to read.

"I CAN read!!" :)

Pondering Comprehension

While reading Gill’s article The Comprehension Matrix, I realized I had never thought about how the text layout affects my reading comprehension.  Gill says there are “three major factors that affect comprehension: the reader, the text, and the situation.”  She goes on to say the spacing and white areas on a page can affect comprehension.  Now that I have thought about this, I completely understand and agree with what she is saying. I can remember reading books and if I turned the page and saw a really long paragraph with no spaces, I would get discouraged.  If I turned the page and saw short paragraphs or short and quick dialog that allowed for lots of while space on the page, I got excited to read it. 

I also really like the idea of during reading activities.  I had a teacher once that told me a story about when she was a young reader.  She said she despised reading so much that when it came time to read silently she would simply sit there, count to one hundred and then turn the page as if she had just taken the time to read it.  She said looking back it probably would have been easier to just read the book but she hated doing what the teacher asked.  I believe that taking part in during reading activities would fix this problem. I like the idea of having the students make predictions about the story based simply of the title and cover. Then have them read a small section and at the end of each section, ask the students if their predictions were correct. I think this would solve the problem of children pretending to read!

Vocabulary

I enjoyed the readings this week because it was about something I loved growing up, vocabulary. It might seem odd that I loved vocabulary as a child but it made sense to me.  I was and still am a terrible speller and have always been embarrassed by this fact.  When I was in elementary school, I would fail spelling tests but get good grades on my vocabulary tests.  I was always so proud that I could get a good grade on a test under the category of 'language arts'.
One of the readings this week, "Vocabulary Lessons" by Blachowicz and Fisher, talked about how "interacting with students, rather than reading as a performance, is more likely to build students' vocabulary."  I loved reading this because I got to witness this technique first hand while observing a kindergarten class this past week.  As the classroom teacher was reading a 'big book' for their reading activity every now and then she would come across a word that the young students might not know.  When she got to the word she would stop and say something like, "Sigh, that means to do this!" and she would then give them a cute example.  After they were done reading that page she had the children act out the actions of the bear, in this case the sigh.  It was so cute to see them realize they knew what a sigh was and use what they had learned. Vocabulary is SO important to reading and understanding!

Phonemic Awareness

As a child, I struggled with reading.  I remember how hard it was for me when I came upon a bigger word in my readings. Most of the time I would just skip over it or use a different word in its place. I think it is very important for teachers to spend one on one time with their students using the phonemic techniques demonstrated in Clark's article What can I say Besides "Sound it Out"? I also loved the idea of letting more advanced students use the techniques they know to help a struggling peer.  I think this would help both readers grow in their reading abilities.  I believe if I had received more one on one time with either a teacher or a peer that was excited to read it would have helped me tremendously.I would have learned proper techniques to help me figure out the words instead of skipping over them and losing the content of the story.