Real-Life Reading Inquiry

For my Real-Life Reading Inquiry, I decided to investigate how a student’s culture, home environment, and community affect their reading development skills and proficiency.  I visited Ms. J’s 1^st grade classroom at a local elementary school to observe a reading lesson and gather more information on this subject. I personally believe that exposure to literature at a young age is great for young learners and will help them significantly when they begin their formal education. 

The two readings from our course that inform my topic are “The Jones family’s culture of literacy” article by Johnson and “Building the Literacy Foundation,” which is the 3^rd chapter of our textbook, Classrooms that Work. Both of these readings discuss how it is essential for children to be introduced to reading at an early age. Parents can influence the children at home and when they start school, teachers can continue to help students develop a literacy foundation. 

I noticed many things while visiting Ms. J’s classroom. When I first arrived, Ms. J was telling her students about “Mouse Tales.” Every day a student would get to take a stuffed mouse home and journal about what mouse does. I thought that this was a very creative way to encourage students to practice their writing skills. Ms. J also has a very large word wall in her classroom. Throughout the lesson I observed several students referencing the word wall when they couldn’t think of a word or needed help spelling it. Ms. J also used interactive activities to keep students engaged such as “clapping” words to figure out how many syllables there were and “grabbing” a word to sound it out. After a general lesson, Ms. J spent time with students in small reading groups. While working with one group, the other students in the classroom were given the task to look for verbs in a book that the class had recently read as a whole. I noticed that Ms. J spent time going back over the lesson for that day with the lower level reading group to give them extra practice. After about 20 minutes, this lower reading group left the classroom to get extra help from specialists in the school. Ms. J worked with two other groups in the class, they read aloud, did partner reading and discussed the text. Other things that I observed in Ms. J’s classroom were multiple sections of books, lots of colorful posters, punctuation tips, several pocket charts, and flip charts.

When the students went to their special areas, I got a chance to interview Ms. J. She told me how she thinks that a literacy background helps a great deal. Recently, the demographics at her school have changed and ELL students have been integrated into her classroom. Instead of having an entirely separate curriculum, these students spend the majority of their time in Ms. J’s classroom and go to an ELL lesson for about 30 minutes a day. Ms. J believes that these students do make progress at school but when they go home they do not receive much help. Home environment makes a big difference and Ms. J can clearly see that with her students. In order to help these students get extra assistance at home, Ms. J sends a weekly newsletter to parents to let them know what their children are expected to learn each week.

This experience relates to my future teaching because I will have to work with students from various backgrounds and home environments. Ms. J definitely gave me a lot of insight on the challenge of working with students on so many different levels. She also helped me see that although it may be difficult, it is rewarding to know that you can make a difference and see the progress that students can make while in your classroom.

Vocabulary!

 

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“The Vocabulary Rich Classroom” provided some great examples of how teachers can encourage vocabulary knowledge. Students need to be exposed to words that they don’t know in order to develop comprehension. I really liked the activities that Ms. Barker and Ms. Rivas used in their classrooms. They were both great examples of how to get students to actively practice vocabulary. I thought that the way Ms. Barker changed the vocabulary she used with her kindergarteners to include more difficult words as the school year went on was a really awesome technique to promote incidental learning. Ms. Riva’s classroom descriptions activity during the morning meeting greeting was also a good way to challenge students to search for more difficult words. I especially think that this activity is great because the descriptions of their classmates help the students understand the meaning of words that they can associate with their classmates.

While reading this article, I thought about how my aunt always tells my little cousin to “use his words” when he wants something. Just like my little cousin, the only way that students can develop vocabulary knowledge is to use their words. Teachers can help students accomplish this goal by giving them tasks like the one’s mentioned in this article. 

• Can you think of another activity that students could do in order to increase their vocabularies?

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?