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?

Making Words Counts!

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The reading for today focused on how good readers use phonics and their previous knowledge to help them learn to spell and pronounce words that they have never seen before. Chapter 5 in Classrooms the Work offers many different lessons that educators can use to help students recognize patterns in words. Students can then take these patterns and use them to decode other, more difficult words. The activity that I find most interesting is ‘Making Words.’ I like this activity because it is a great way for students to develop reading strategies and put them to use. The Making Words lesson is definitely something I plan to use in my future classroom. I also like how this activity is equally beneficial for both struggling readers and advanced readers. Each child has an opportunity to participate and because the activity is hands-on and gives children the chance to figure things out independently, they will be more likely to retain what they have learned. 

• What are some strategies that you use when you come across a word that you don’t recognize?

• Do you remember your teachers using lessons similar to the ones mentioned in Chapter 5 when you were in elementary school?

Emergent Literacy/Phonemic Awareness

 

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The main idea in today’s readings centered on the importance of some form of reading instruction in early childhood. The “IRA/NAEYC joint position statement” was really interesting to me and I like the point it makes about how in order for children to become competent readers, all of the adults in their lives need to work together. Children are active learners and they develop their sense of the world from experiences. Because of this, it is also important to use things that children are familiar with in order to teach them new concepts, such as phonemic awareness. In the Bell & Jarvis article, the authors describe how they used things that their students already knew in order to teach them how to read. I thought it was really awesome how Bell showed all of her kindergarten students that they could read on the first day of class by simply holding up a McDonald’s or Burger King bag. I think that we often forget that reading isn’t just about sounding out words; reading can be recognizing symbols as well. Literacy really is everywhere and we use it in many different ways. The Yopp & Yopp article definitely emphasized the importance of teaching phonemic awareness and offered many examples of how teachers could incorporate these lessons in their classrooms. The readings also expressed how it is okay to let children use inventive spellings, or write in various ways (drawings, scribbles, etc) because this shows that they have an understanding of the way we communicate. 

• In the “IRA/NAEYC joint position statement,” it was mentioned that in most states, you only need a high school diploma in order to be a child care teacher, what do you think of this fact?

• Should all early child care providers be required to teach phonemic awareness?