Assessment

Edward Fry's article on "Readability vs. Leveling" shows how these two formulas are similar and different and also provides some current large-scale uses of readability formulas. First off, it is important to know what each of these terms means. Readability is the ease of comprehension because of style of writing. Leveling is selecting books to match the competencies of a reader or writer. I particularly found all the factors that go into determining readability and leveling scores interesting. 

Readability, traditionally, is based on two measures: Syntactic difficulty, which is measured by sentence length, and Semantic difficulty, which is measured by word length such as syllables or the number of letters. I really found it interesting that readability formulas can be done by computers through typing in a passage or scanning in a whole book. Readability provides fairly accurate comparisons of books and helps to make a match between a text and the reading ability of an individual student. Overall, readability is objective. Leveling is less objective and involves several text support factors: content, illustrations, length, curriculum, language structure, judgment, and format. 

Here is a picture of what a readability formula on two different texts looks like:

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Of the two formulas, I feel that leveling is more appealing because I think that the text support factors it takes into consideration are more in depth than the measures of readability. For instance, leveling takes into account the background and experience of the reader whereas readability does not. As we have learned so far in this course, background information is extremely important when teaching students to read. 

While leveling does have it cons in comparison to readability, both of these formulas seek to help teachers to select books for their students. The use of either of these reading formulas will help students have a successful learning experience.

1. Which formula do you like the best?
2. Do you remember if your teachers used readability formulas in your classrooms or leveling formulas? 

Guided Reading

In my article I found this week on guided reading, I learned that the teacher's role in guided reading is to interest students in the story, relate it to their experiences, and provide a frame of meaning that will support problem solving. It is also important to note that during guided reading, the teacher will work with a small group of students who have been grouped based on similar reading abilities. In these groups you will call to your students attention words in context locating and noticing specific features such as beginning or ending. Guided reading is great because it allows you to tie the students' prior knowledge into the reading and it also allows you as a teacher to monitor each individual in the group for evidence of using reading strategies. The ultimate goal of the guided reading process is to have the students being able to read text independently and silently. One important factor to remember for guided reading is that you need to select a text that the students are able to read with 90% or higher accuracy. I really enjoyed that part in this article where it provides you with connections and extensions that can be used with guided reading. One of these extensions is after reading the story, going back through the selected text and finding targeted words. These targeted words can be words that end in -ed,-es,-ing, etc. Or these targeted words can be words that begin with certain sounds like sh,th,wh. With the class as a whole, you can write these targeted words on a chart and you can have each child read the sentence where these targeted words appear.

Here is the source of my guided reading article:
Guided Reading Source

1. What are some interesting things you have learned about guided reading?

2. How do you plan to integrate guided reading into your reading curriculum in the classroom?

Real-Life Reading Inquiry

Through my observation of a reading lesson in a first grade classroom, I was introduced to a new way of reading and I also recognized a lot of the concepts that we have been talking about in class this semester. I was introduced to something called "EEKK Reading". This means elbow to elbow and knee to knee reading with a partner that involves "I read, you read" and "choral reading". I thought this was a great name for partner reading. My overall reaction to the reading inquiry was that there is a lot that goes into teaching reading to students. In addition, I found it very interesting that a lot of what we have read so far this semester correlates with what I observed in my reading inquiry. It was great to see real world application to the concepts we have been talking about. My reading inquiry showed looking for vocabulary while reading, responding to the reading by stating who were the main characters, what was the problem in the story, and what was the solution to the story, high frequency words, pointing out the title of the book, left to right reading, top to bottom reading, sweep around, ending sounds to words, and reading aloud to the class. Overall my observation recognized that the class integrated reading and writing together and that combining the two together is very important for succeeding in being a great reader. In addition, the teacher knew the importance of reading aloud in many different ways including as a class, in small groups with the teacher, and with a partner.

The readings that relate to the inquiry are Chapters 1 and 2 of "Classrooms That Work" when it talks about how an effective classroom environment has a teacher that provides a variety of instruction like whole-class, small group, and individual instruction, which the classroom I observed definitely had. It also relates to the reading by Yopp and Yopp on Phonemic Awareness by showing that each word is made up of small units of sound. The teacher showed this in small-groups with students by writing out words and dissecting the words to indicate the sounds of blends, long vowels, silent letters, and short vowels. 

I noticed that the class used invented spelling quite a bit when writing sentences using the vocabulary words from the reading. The students would ask the teacher how to spell certain words and majority of the time she would tell them to write it out how they think it sounds and I thought this was particularly interesting because instead of just giving them the answer, the teacher made them have to think about what sounds make up the word. This allows the teacher to see where the students stand on their spelling capabilities while also getting to measure their actual comprehension of the story. In addition, I also noticed that the class was doing orthographic reading. Most interesting, I noticed that the teacher practiced phonemic awareness with the students in small groups, which goes to show just how important it is to being a successful reader and writer. I also recognized that the classroom was full of labels, signs, bulletin boards, etc. You name it the class had it. Therefore, the students were constantly surrounded by reading.  

This relates to my future teaching by showing me some great ways to integrate all the necessary concepts of learning to read into my teaching. I plan to use various ways of instruction to model my reading lesson around like reading aloud to and with the whole class, meeting in small groups with my students, having them read in partner groups, and individual instruction with my students. This also relates to my future teaching by showing me how important it is to have a classroom rich with text. This includes a plethora of reading books, signs, labels, intricate bulletin boards, etc. I want to surround my students with gateways to reading and writing. 

Building Vocabulary with Technology

I chose the article this week dealing with 10 ways to use technology to build vocabulary because I am a big fan of technology and am excited to integrate the use of technology in my classroom. The first strategy deals with word relationships within the text. The article talks about a great program I have used in a prior education class called "Wordle" that allows you to create a word cloud to show the frequency of words in a text. This a great tool to visually show your students the meaning, importance, and relationship of words in a particular text. Here's a word cloud I created showing the frequency of words in the passage "Is a Whale a Fish?"

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 Another great strategy is the use of vocabulary game websites that your students can do in small groups or as an individual during center time. These websites are a great way to stimulate the student's use of words and their meanings through crossword puzzles, picture-word matching, and word scrambles. However, the one strategy I really enjoyed and know I will carry on with me into my classroom is the last strategy which combines vocabulary learning with social service. Using the website www.freerice.com promotes the students' engagement with words while also contributing to the social good because each word that the student gets correct 10 grains of rice are donated to a country in need. How cool is that!? I love the idea of using this as an opener to a vocabulary lesson having the whole class participate and express the reasons they choose each answer. In addition this works with strategies such as recognizing words that they can eliminate from the choices and seeing if the root word gives them any clues as to what the meaning of the word is. Here is a screenshot of what the game looks like!

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1. What are some other ways you can use technology to help build vocabulary that are fun and interactive?

2. Do you think as a teacher you will use technology to stimulate learning in your classroom?

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"

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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.

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