Assessment Blog

I really liked reading through chapter 10 of Classrooms That Work. This chapter had many assessment ideas that a teacher can observe a student’s progress.  The chapter talked about determining reading levels for each individual child. It talks about how important it is to know the reading level of each child so the child does not get discouraged with an assigned book too high for his or her reading level. Reading assessments are what help the teacher to determine the child’s reading level. The book mentioned that standardized tests should not be used to determine reading levels and I completely agree.

I also really enjoyed reading chapter 11 of Classrooms That Work.  This chapter is about differentiating Instruction for Diverse Learners. I think this is a very important for every teacher to know because every student is always going to be at a different learning level, especially in reading. This is the hardest aspect of the role of a teacher. The chapter discussed ways for the teacher to help all students by using a variety of collaborative groupings like literature circles and ideas like taking turns and reading and pointing. I did like the idea of partnering older struggling readers with younger struggling readers. I think this will really help the students collaborate and understand each other’s struggles but also have the older one help the younger one with problems he or she had when he or she was younger. A struggling reader definitely needs extra time and attention with getting help with reader; a child’s family, friends, teacher, and classmates are very essential with helping the child. 

Vocabulary

I really liked the article “Vocabulary Lessons.” It was very interesting to me because it talked about the fact of how learning morphology and stems is a very important aspect in a student’s vocabulary development. This aspect made me think of Chapter 6 of Cunningham & Allington. I thought it was extremely interesting to find out that for every so many words a student knows, he or she can make 700 more words. Vocabulary is very essential to a child’s reading development. I think it is very important for a child to establish their vocabulary independently as well as in the classroom. I love how they discussed that the dictionary is a major element to a child’s vocabulary. I want to make sure I teach my students how important a paperback dictionary is, not just the Internet. A dictionary helps a child look up the definition as well as how it is spelled and sounded out. As time progresses technology grows more and more. I think it is very important for all teachers to promote paper books and dictionaries and not have everything on electronic devices. 

Real Life Reading Inquiry

           I observed 6-year old girl twins reading. I had each of the girls read to me for fifteen minutes. I have a bookshelf in my house that has many different children’s books from my childhood.  I let the girls pick whatever book they would like to read, which they both picked a Dr. Seuss book, which is not surprising. The twins have grown up around the same settings and in the same home around the same people. Even though this is the case, the two read extremely differently. I am going to refer to the twins as TWIN A and TWIN B.

           Twin A read to me first in a quiet setting and did not have a difficult time. She read “The Foot Book” by Dr. Seuss. The girls are both in first grade. She told me that she has previously read that book, but only two times. She knew almost every word. Her fluency was very good throughout the entire book. As she read the book, I wrote down three words that I wanted to see if she could recognize on plain paper after she read the book. The three that I picked for her were quick, fuzzy and twenty-four; she pronounced all of them easily and correctly except for quick. She read the book fairly fast; sometimes she would read fast and confuse the words “food” and “feet” even though she knew them when I asked her to read that particular sentence again.

            On the other hand, twin B had more of a difficult time with a book that she read two times as well.  She read “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.” She would follow each word with her finger, and read quite slow. She saw the word “bad” in a sentence and automatically mad it mad. I asked her at the end of the book what that word was when I wrote it on a plain piece of paper, but she still said it was “mad” even though she knew how to sound it out.  I asked her why that was and she said because she gets confused when words all look the same like mad, sad, bad, had. She also had a difficult time with the words “where, here, there” because they blend together as well.  I did notice at some points she would try to read faster, but that is where she would read a word incorrectly. This made me think that she felt under pressure because she has read around her twin sister before and noticed how she read.

           I thought it was surprising that these two girls have been exposed to the same setting, but read extremely different. The two articles that relate to this experience are What can I say besides “sound it out”? Coaching word recognition in beginning reading by Kathleen F. Clark and One-Minute Fluency Measures: Mixed Messages in Assessment and Instruction by Theresa A. Deeney. Clark’s article really helped me to assist twin B as she was struggling with pronouncing different words. I did not want to keep asking her to sound it out, so instead I would have her reread it, or skip and see if she read the same word later in the book correctly. Deeney’s article helped to assess the twin’s fluency as they were reading. As I stated previously, I noticed that twin B’s accuracy, rate and prosody were all extremely different from twin A’s. Before this class I did not think to look into reading so deeply, but as I observed these girls reading I realized it definitely is. They both can read, but extremely different and one lacks in some departments that the other does not. 

Comprehension Blog

In the article “Kindergarteners can do it too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers,” I was amazed by the idea that schemas should start to be used with children at such a young age. I loved that fact that these young readers knew what schemas were; I did not think they learned them that young. I think it really helps children make connections to what they are reading; it certainly helps the students comprehend the information of the text better. I know that if I read an article or book that I relate to, it is so much easier for me to remember the information later. This is extremely helpful for the students especially if there was an upcoming test or quiz.

 

 I have witnessed this in my Education 100 class when I was sent to an elementary school for a second grade classroom. Sometimes while I was at the school I was there during their reading time. The students were able to go to the library and pick what they would like to read some days, and on others the teacher would have the class all read one book. I discussed with the teacher if the students are better at reading what they like compared to what they are told they have to read. She assured me that the students are definitely more intrigued by their choice of book compared to what they are made to read.

Poetry Performance

Poetry Performance is using poetry activities to help students develop fluency.

Monday: The students should form small groups. They will go to the library and find a poem that all of the students would like to perform at the end of the week. An approved poem needs to be copied for each student in the group. The teacher needs to introduce and review the purpose and procedures for poetry performance. Invitations to the poetry party that will be on Friday will be sent home on this day.

Tuesday: Each student needs to read the poem individually then discuss the poem with his or her group. As the students read they will need to mark words that they do not know in order to discuss them with the group and add them to the word wall. 

Wednesday: The group needs to be responsible for assigning the role to each group member. The students also need to discuss the cadence and prosody throughout the poem. A rubric will be presented to the students for guidelines that they all need to follow in their performance.

Thursday: As the teacher circulates, the groups need to get together with other groups to practice performing their poetry.

Friday: Have a poetry party, turning the classroom into a poetry house, for all of the student to celebrate all that they have learned during poetry week. Invite parents to the poetry party to show their appreciation for the student’s poetry accomplishments. Have each group perform in front of the class following the rubric. 

RUBRIC: http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson78/poetrubric.html

Fluency

I really liked reading Chapter 4 of "Classrooms that Work." The main idea that I caught from the chapter was the word walls, just as we discussed in class on Thursday. I really enjoyed seeing the different ways to develop a word wall. I love the thought of letting the children develop to word wall instead of the wall being finished before the children arrive at school. They need to learn and recognize the words for each week the they will learn. I think this will help the students be more energetic about learning those words.

I also really liked that Chapter 4 talked about fluency. Everyone is very different in the ways they can read and how fast or how slow they can read. Fluency is very important to every reader, and he or she establishes it overtime. A reader becomes more fluent, the more he or she reads. How could someone learn how to read faster and comprehend what is going on in the text without learning to be fluent? I think it is very important that teachers learn different ways to build fluency. The article "Creating fluent readers" gave suggestions of how to have your student build their fluency. I love learning new teaching tactics through these articles and I cannot wait to help build each of my future students to be successful readers. 

Word Study Blog

This picture is a good game that students can learn in a fun way, they will learn throughout he repetition of saying and spelling it throughout the game. 

In the article, "Ten Important words plus: A strategy for building word knowledge," I noticed the encouraging aspect that it wanted us as readers and future educators to explore our own vocabulary. When I was younger I always asked questions. I was always interested in why certain things were called what they were. Why is a chair a chair--who gave it that name and why? It is very important, just as noted in the article that students are getting as much time to learn and be around vocabulary in different ways. It is very important to always set a way for learning new tactics in all different ways for all the different speeds of learning.  Repetition is a main way that has always helped me learn words as well as a rhyming technique. I really liked the fact of picking the ten most important words because I definitely think it helps the teacher to know more in depth of what the student needs help on. It is usually good if the student is choosing key words, but if they are not then the teacher needs to focus on helping the student learn the meaning of the vocabulary words.