Week 9-Common Readings

B&M 10-Comprehension

Comprehension cannot be isolated, it must be taught in context and in consideration with engaging content. Students need exposure to experiences, oral language, visual representations, writing, and reading that goes with a challenging curriculum. Teachers in the elementary grades must segue between listening comprehension and reading comprehension. This includes finding a balance between decoding, phonics, and fluency and working toward determining meaning. Comprehension instruction must start early, even before students can by themselves. This can be easily done with young children who are familiar with different types of media, as comprehension skills are transferable across media.

Table 10.1 has a comprehensive list of evidence based practices for comprehension in the early grades.  I have reorganized them by strength of the practice.

·         Teachers should teach students how to use comprehension strategies (strong)

·         Teach students to identify and use the text’s structure to comprehend, learn, and remember content (moderate)

·         Establish an engaging and motivating context in which to teach comprehension (moderate)

·         Guide students through focused, high-quality discussion on the meaning of text (minimal)

·         Select texts purposefully to support comprehension (minimal)

Comprehension Strategies:

ü  Targeted activation of prior knowledge leading to purposeful predictions

ü  Identification of narrative and expository text structures

ü  Visualizing

ü  Questions: answering and high-level questions

ü  Taking stock: summarizing and retelling

ü  Generating inferences

ü  Monitoring and applying fix-up strategies

B&M 12-Real Books, Real Reading

Fluency combines many aspects including: accuracy, automaticity, prosody. These all contribute to the construction of meaning. Achieving fluency is important, but it must always be down with interpreting meaning as the end goal. Teaching must teach the elements of fluency and guide the instruction toward comprehension. The automaticity aspect involves being able to recognize words, but this should not be done without use of a text: it should not be done in isolation. Prosody helps to bring a text to life, which causes it to be deeply tied to comprehension.

Strategies:

ü  Oral Recitation lesson

ü  FOOR/Wide FOOR- Fluency Oriented Oral Reading

ü  Repeated Readings

B&M 13-Writing

Young children are usually fascinated with writing, and will make various attempts. However, sometimes students need extra help when learning to write. It is important to “get the pen in the child’s hand .  Young learners take in information about print from their environment and the constantly test their hypotheses about writing.  There are different varieties of marks that students make as they progress, which can be telling about their development. Significant information can be learned from the verbal meanings that students dictate. This can be related to the content and the quantity of information provided. The FISSIS model guides teacher interactions that motivate students to write. The steps include finding common ground, invitation to write, suggestion/ask about the message, support, invitation to read, and sharing with an audience

Overall strategies:

ü  Adult read aloud

ü  Think out loud

ü  Reciprocal Teaching

ü  Transactional strategy instruction

I am touching on some vocabulary- please feel free to add to or revise my meanings. Some will be defined/ used during our discussions.

Vocabulary:

o   (V& F)-Critical Literacy- Critical literacy-a frame through which learners participate in the world that the world is a text to be viewed critically. So, the issues of the world become the themes for which we build our educational curriculum; critical literacy brings in current technology (as a tool) and cultural issues. It challenges learners to critique and reform. It helps students to understand how text functions in real life.

o   Deeper levels of vocabulary-applies to word meaning that is not just definition, but refers to knowledge of related words and different contexts

o   Automaticity-automatic word recognition

o   Accuracy-accurate decoding

o   Prosody-oral reading prosody-reading with prosodic elements such as intonation, proper phrasing, and pacing that reflect meaning

o   High level discussions-High level discussions are discussion that address text themes, personal connection, and making inferences on a deeper level

o   Motivation and engagement-Motivation is the reasons students try to learn. Engagement is how students are influenced to connect with a text or lesson.

What I wish I’d known as a novice teacher:

What I wish I’d know was how to set up a classroom. Through my observations and student teaching, I never got to go to the first days of school. I really wish I had seen someone set up procedures, rules, building a classroom environment, physical set up of the room.

Also, I wish I’d known how hard it is to teach comprehension better. I think I get bogged down with asking questions, and feeling like that’s more of an assessment than a tool. I struggle with how to teach kids how to think.

I wish I’d known more about strategies, I feel like I am learning a great deal from this class that will be very helpful .

Questions:

1.)    What do you wish you had known as a novice teacher/if you have been teaching, what advice would you give now?

2.)    What are the essential elements of a comprehensive comprehension curriculum? How do you teach comprehension in your classroom/ what is important to remember when teaching younger students?

3.)    How do/would you approach fluency in your classroom? How do you/would you generally approach the conundrum of reading out loud?

4.)    How do you build your classroom environment so that it is conducive to writing?

5.)    Choose a strategy from these readings, explain the background and thought behind it and explain how you could use it in an elementary classroom. (No repeats)

6.)    What does critical literacy mean to you?