The Reason for Reading

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In order to comprehend, readers need to think while they read. Chapter 7 in Classrooms that Work gives us various comprehension strategies that teachers can use in their classrooms. I never realized how much thinking actually goes into comprehension. Teaching children how to comprehend while they read can be very complex but with the right techniques they can build a great foundation for future learning. Through activities such as literate conversations, think-alouds, story maps, and “doing” the book, children can fully understand what they are reading and why. It is extremely important for children to question what they are reading in order to comprehend. Otherwise, they have no idea why they are reading which gives them no motivation to read. According to our textbook, “comprehension is the reason and prime motivator for engaging in reading.” Without comprehension, reading is pretty much a waste of time. Let’s make sure that we teach our future students how to comprehend so that reading is a beneficial and enjoyable experience for them!

• Do you recall participating in any comprehension activities when you were younger, such as think-alouds, questioning the author, or acting out a story?

• Do you ever feel like you’re reading without comprehending? What kind of strategies do you use to make sure that you understand the text you are reading?

What does a fluent reader look like?

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Fluency is a very important skill for children to develop. Fluency is also very complex which makes it hard to measure. In the Deeney article, “One-Minute Fluency Measures,” we learn why one-minute assessments do not accurately measure fluency even though they can determine reading difficulty. One thing that I really liked about this article was the breakdown of the different components of fluency: accuracy, rate, prosody, and comprehension. As future educators, it is imperative for us to understand fluency in order to effectively and efficiently help our students who are struggling in this area. By taking a more in depth look at the fluency of children, we can learn more about how to help them improve their reading skills. This also gives us the opportunity to focus more on the specific needs of each child and make appropriate instructional choices. For example, a child may not be fluent because they do not understand the inflections and pauses that the use of different punctuation marks indicates. A teacher can then spend extra time with this child in that area to increase their fluency.

Unfortunately, one-minute fluency measures alone do not offer an explanation for why readers are dysfluent. They also don’t take into account a child’s endurance when reading longer passages. A child may stop short or slow down when reading a passage, however this does not mean that they aren’t fluent. Sometimes children just get tired of reading!

• What measures could you take to understand why a child is not a fluent reader?

• What techniques could you use to help improve a child’s reading endurance?

Jolly Phonics!

Making words is a great foundation for developing phonemic awareness. The interactive aspect of the activity really gets students involved and there are so many words that can be made! Constantly using this activity in the classroom ensures that students will have a lot of experience discovering sound-letter relationships and recognizing patterns in words. It is good to start using the making words lesson early and increase the difficulty of the words as students’ progress in their word knowledge. The Cunningham and Cunningham article, “Making Words: Enhancing the invented spelling-decoding connection,” also mentions using Making Big Words lessons for students who are in the intermediate-grades. This shows that making words can be easily modified to fit the students’ needs. 

Making words can be a really fun way to become familiar with how our alphabet works. Teachers can also add their own unique techniques to the Making Words lesson. In the video featured below, a kindergarten teacher enhances the activity by incorporating “jolly phonics actions” to a Making Words lesson. The students are actively engaged and easily identify which action and sound they need to produce when they see each word. 

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• What would you add to a Making Words lesson to make it even more interactive?