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