Comprehension

When it comes to comprehension, there are two important parts to the puzzle that all teachers should know: the reader and the text. The most important of the two, as stated in Pardo's article, is understanding the reader. As teachers, we will know that each of our students have unique differences. So you may ask yourself the question how do we cater to each of their individual needs in order to ensure that they effectively learn reading comprehension? This article does a great job of showing that in order to best support your students in becoming competent comprehenders you must teach them decoding skills, help them build fluency, build and activate their background knowledge, teach vocabulary words, motivate them, and engage them in personal responses to the text. Of all of these skills, the one that stuck out to me as the most important is the reader's background knowledge. I feel this might be one skill extremely over looked by teachers today and it's interesting to learn that the more background knowledge a reader has that connects with the text being read, the more likely that reader will be able to make sense of what they are reading. 

READING COMPREHENSION DATABASE 

This link provides a great web database from the Virginia Department of Education and gives numerous videos on ways to teach reading comprehension.This site will be excellent to come back to when I am in my own classroom in the future. 

What I loved most in Gregory and Cahill's article was the section about visualization and mind movies. This involves students listening to the story being read and visually imagining detailed mental pictures about what is happening. The students will then draw out what they visioned in their mind. This was so unique to me because what better way to get children engaged than allowing them to use their creativity! Through doing this, because it helps students to understand what they're reading by allowing them to draw out something to represent their understanding. This is also a great way for teachers to gauge the comprehension skills of their students without having to pull teeth. I will definitely be using "mind movies" in my classroom and could even create a center in the classroom dedicated to making mind movies! 

Below is an example of mind movies using the book "Sideways Stories from Wayside School"

(Link for both pictures)

What activities can you use in your classroom to engage students in reading comprehension?

Fluency

Assessing students' fluency capabilities through the one minute fluency test provides us with a limited view of fluency that only measures students that can't read accurately or quickly. While this information is useful, we need a deeper understanding of why students are dysfluent and the effects of time on students' reading. This requires us to take deeper approaches to fluency assessment which includes: getting the most from one minute measures, including fluency with other assessments, tying assessment to instruction, and assessing endurance. Endurance is an important part of the fluency equation. The reading provides several techniques for instructing fluency and endurance. One of the techniques that stuck out to me was increasing expectations. I found this interesting because it dealt with how many struggling readers avoid reading altogether because the effort and attention needed for reading simply exhausts them. This can be fixed by first lowering the text level and then gradually increasing your expectations of the reader through a set number of pages to be read or another "must do" assignment and gradually extending it over time. I think it is important to do this because many students get lost due to reading avoidance and thus have a hard time catching up to the rest of the class. Creating a deeper understanding to reading fluency is vital because it helps us, as teachers, see that readers struggle and why they struggle. 

Can you think of any other ways that teachers can create a deeper approach to fluency?

As a teacher, how would you motivate a student who struggles with reading avoidance? 

Making Words

This week's reading on making words dealt with an active, hands-on, manipulative activity in which kids discover sound-letter relationships and learn how to look for patterns in words. This is a great activity that allows children to see how words change when you add different letters and helps them understand the importance of where in the word letters occur. The Making Words activity should be used hand-in-hand with invented spelling. Studies have shown that children who participate in invented spelling are superior to others on word decoding. To me, this was extremely interesting because throughout my schooling emphasis was always placed on spelling the word correctly and never on spelling it the way I thought it sounded. This makes me wonder how many students in my class struggled with reading and writing because of this. The neat thing about the making words activity is that it provides you with a variety of ways to discover how the alphabetic system works. Think of how interested your students will be while doing this activity and think of how great it is that while they are entertained they are also learning fundamental strategies that will help them become strong readers and writers. This article is just another example of how intertwined reading and writing are.

When you were in school, did your teachers focus on spelling words correctly or did you use invented spelling? 

The video below shows a great example of using the Making Words activity. Here the teacher does a great job with showing her students that just by adding letters or changing around the order of the letters you can make different words. She also helps them listen for all the letter sounds in the word and where the vowel sound appears in the word.

(source)

Spelling Patterns

     This week's reading was really interesting. I especially liked the information provided in Chapter 5 of "Classrooms that Work" on teaching phonics and spelling patterns. If you think about it when you read and write words, you don't even realize that you are identifying or spelling these words because you have seen or written them so many times before that it has become automatic to identify them and spell them. However, as a teacher it is important to realize that your students will come across words they have never seen before and therefore it is important to teach them spelling patterns so that they are able to make use of words that are "familiar-in-speech" to them and create a meaning for the "unfamiliar-in-print" words. I really enjoyed the different lesson formats that this chapter provided because they all contain a variety of interaction between the students and the teacher. My favorite lesson was the "Using the Words you Know" lesson. I loved this lesson because it teaches students how to use words they already know to spell and decode other words. I liked how it involved separating familiar words in different categories based on spelling patterns and allows the children to practice writing each word after they have seen it written and also allows them to use these spelling patterns to help them spell words they hear without seeing it written down first. 
     The lesson formats provided in this chapter all focus on the importance of modeling as the most direct way to demonstrate to your students what to do when they encounter an unfamiliar word. We use modeling constantly in our day-to-day life to teach a variety of skills. It is much easier to show how to do something rather than explaining it. This is especially important in helping students recognize spelling patterns so that they can apply meaning to words that are unfamiliar to them.

What were some of your favorite lesson formats provided in this chapter?

Do you remember any particular lessons your teachers used to help you learn to spell or create meaning to words that were unfamiliar?

Here is an example of "Using the Words you Know" to recognize spelling patterns.

(source)