Week 8

Comprehension and Think-Aloud

The article Kindergarteners Can Do it, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers was inspiring and so creative. Mrs. Hope taught heavy comprehension strategies to such young children. She taught them how to be smart readers by breaking down the text. They learned what schema are, how to continually ask questions while reading, and also how to visualize and then express the mental images they have while reading. Mrs. Hope explained these concepts explicitly and on a level that the little ones understood and embraced. The kids were taught how to raise their hands to represent what they wanted to share. I think that idea is awesome and can be applied to all instances when a child raises their hand in class. They could use a "B" in sign language to ask to go to the bathroom and not interrupt class. I really took away a lot from this article. I had a "wondering":

• Does anyone remember clever ideas like this that their teachers used to introduce BIG concepts to you when you were very small?

Real-Life Reading Inquiry

This past Wednesday, I spent time in a kindergarten classroom of an elementary school located in downtown Knoxville. For my inquiry, I chose to focus on a reading lesson that covered rhyming. The lesson itself was actually taught using the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence", which was great because it was something that we've read about previously. Using nursery rhymes are great to use for small children because they rhyme (obviously), are familiar, and they are funny. I know that the teacher of this class introduces a new poem at the beginning of the week, they place a copy of the poem in their "poetry journals", and each day they reread the poem together (rereading has also been encouraged in multiple places in our past readings). One day they go through and find their letters of the week, the next day they look for the rhyming endings, and so on and so forth until the poem has been dissected completely by the end of the week. Typically, the kids have it memorized by this point too. 

This activity kept them engaged and they were happily singing the rhyme together. Seeing it implemented in person was very helpful for me, and if I end up teaching little ones like that in the future, I will most certainly use this activity. The rhyme was written in large, clear letters on a huge notepad that was visible to all of the students. As the poem was read, a pointer tool was used to point to each word as it was read to help the kids follow along. The teacher made her return sweep exaggerated as well. All of these techniques that were used to read the poem were necessary because these children could not read and would just be looking at the text blindly if the teacher had not modeled how to read the poem. To further the kids' understanding of the nursery rhyme, the teacher opened up the interactive website called Starfall online, and played the video version of the rhyme. I though this aspect essential because kindergartens have no idea what things like "sixpence" or "rye" are, and adding a visual helps them put it all together. In addition, the video was funny and had the children laughing, which I think should be something that happens all the time...making learning fun. 

Week 7

Fluency 

Before this week's readings, I knew that I was a fluent reader, but I did not know the exact characteristics that defined a fluent reader, nor did I know specific activities to create fluent readers. Fluency, according to Classrooms that Work is fast, expressive reading. In the article, "Creating Fluent Reading", fluency is comprised of four elements:

1. expression and volume

2. phrasing

3. smoothness

4. pace

To be a fluent reader, one must possess all of these skills PLUS comprehension of whatever was just read. From the readings I chose three activities that I plan to use in my classroom to improve fluency in my students... 

1. I will use poems, dialogues, jokes, and riddles as fun pieces of work to have my students read aloud to their classmates. 

2. Coral reading is something I remember from school. You divide up characters in a book and assign their parts to students in the class. This encourages the children to read creatively using different voices for different characters.

3. Echo reading is a great idea to use with younger-aged children.

 This is an example our text gave as a good book to be used for echo reading.

What I would like to know is...What memories do you have of becoming a fluent reader growing up? Did your teachers have you read poems or be the narrator of the story you were reading as a class?

Week 6

10 Important Words

This article explaining the activity called 10 important words made some great points. There are many words that we can identify and ones that we know in context, but there are much less words that we use daily and the types of words that we use change depending on the environment that we're in (with friends v in the classroom). The more experiences with written language, the better because that type of exposure develops vocabulary more than conversation can. Ten Important Words is an activity that can be used in the classroom to help students permanently acquire new vocabulary. This activity is so successful because it requires students to be interactive with the ten words they select from any text they read. The class as a whole creates a graph of all the words each student selects from the text. The class talks about the words using questions like, "What do these words have to do with the topic of the text?" "Why do you think these words were selected?" I really liked the extension of the strategy that requires the students to break off into groups based on colored cards. The activities the students have to do based on what color card they receive, help solidify the word to memory and its meaning, and also how that words works in the context of the story. The students have been actively engaged in each of the words selected, so they will most likely remember them.

taken from Google