Becky
3/30/2012 11:20:44 pm
Cunningham and Stanovich (1998) state "reading has cognitive consequences that extend beyond its immediate task of lifting meaning from a particular passage. Furthermore, these consequences are reciprocal and exponential in nature. Accumulated over time-spiraling either upward or downward - they carry profound implications for the development of a wide range of cognitive capabilities" (p. 8) Since so much of reading acquisition relies upon students having a solid basis in phonemic awareness, sight word recognition, and vocabulary, being able to read fluently will be the step that students need to master in order to ultimately understand the text they are reading. What are some thing we are currently doing as teachers to encourage this process?
Jamie Eising
3/30/2012 11:30:00 pm
As a kindergarten teacher, some things that I do to help kids with reading are; learning letters and sounds, word families, rhyme, rhyme supply, and word wall words. If a child struggles with this concept we get them all of the extra help that they need because these are some of the building blocks of reading. I also spend a lot of time on basic concepts. Many of the children enter my class with smaller vocabularies than their peers. I do a lot with vocabulary.
Becky
3/30/2012 11:40:28 pm
Since most "vocabulary is acquired outside of formal teaching, the only opportunities to acquire new words occur when an individual is exposed to a word in written or oral language that is outside their current vocabulary" (Cunningham & Stanovich, p.10, 1998). This is a very important point and a very important skill for us to teach to our particular student population as there is very little vocabulary and reading support when our children go home from school. The District we work in is rural with a free and reduced lunch population of about 75% which unfortunately for our students translates into a home life where there tends to be less enriching oral conversation. That means that we are solely responsible for increasing our students vocabulary.
Jamie Eising
3/31/2012 12:22:07 am
We decided to pilot RTI (response to intervention) in my classroom last year. I have 6 children in my class that receive speech services. The speech pathologist ran a center where every child in the class came to her. She noticed how so many of them had very small vocabularies. From that point forward vocabulary enrichment has been a big piece of my curriculum. I assess them three times a year and then use the results to focus my instruction. I bring in video clips of animals they don't know, we do songs that identify body parts, we play games that use words like "near" or "far."
Becky
3/31/2012 12:38:46 am
Jamie is one of our Kindergarten Teachers who is working hard to build our students vocabulary pool, while at the same time building letter sound, rhyme, and blending sound skills so that as her students progress "in the processing of units, words, and connecting text their congnitive ability will be released to think about the meaning of the text" (Chard, et. al., p.386, 2002). Our students also participate in a reading series during their Kindergarten and First Grade years that includes "Repeated Reading with a Model" 2-3 times a week (Chard, et. al., p.392, 2002). Our school has a large volunteer population who meet with all of our students for what we call "Guided Reading Sessions". This gives our students a chance to hear what a passage should sound like as a model for their own reading skills. As kids pass into the 2nd Grade we have an intervention for struggling readers to help them with their fluency and comprehension called Read Naturally. This intervention involves having kids pick a passage topic which will first be read to them through a recorded voice. Next the kids read along with the recorded reader and finally they read the passage themselves and the time it takes them to read the passage is recorded. This process is followed by a comprehension quiz to see if they understood the passage they just read.
Jamie Eising
3/31/2012 01:02:23 am
I personally have had my own children receive Read Naturally services because they were behind their peers in vocabulary. Read Naturally has a feature that allows students to click on any word they don't know, and have visual definitions. They were also exposed to new concepts prior to the start of reading. I felt like the practice of repeated reading and the ability to look up difficult vocabulary words in the passages was a great enrichment exercise for them to experience.
Becky
3/31/2012 01:58:03 am
In looking to the future after reading through all the Module 6 information on Fluency instruction I believe our school should institute the Response to Intervention that Jamie is currently carrying out during her center time in all of our Kindergarten classes. It is always good to have consistency in our curriculum practices. At the Upper Elementary level I think that continuing "Guiding Reading Sessions" up through the fifth grade. We would definitely need more volunteers, but these sessions could also be peer led. We do currently have a "Reading Buddy" program that pairs struggling readers in the lower grades with high level readers from the upper grades. Expanding this program would be a benefit to both the struggling reader and the high level reader. I also think that our Accelerated Reader program is helpful because it involves a lot of silent reading practice, but for kids who struggle with fluency and comprehension having no one "modeling oral fluent reading" can create a deficit (Hudson, et.al., p.708, 2005). We have been working on getting our teachers to work wiht struggling readers and their AR books when it is time for silent reading so that those kids aren't left to work through a book all on their own. Leave a Reply. | AuthorI am a huge book lover and am always open to new book suggestions:) Feel free to contact me at:
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