organizing for literacy

Pinnell made the point that reading is a right, not a privilege. I would even expand that and say that education is a right rather than a privilege.  As a teacher, that makes it my duty to deliver a good education to my students and a step in the right direction is organization.

Pinnell's eight principles sum it up beautifully:

1. Learn about learning
2. Put your theory into action
3. Establish inquiry as an integral part of your teaching
4. Use research-based practices and put extra energy into making them work 
5. Put your theory to work in the classroom
6. Take every opportunity to create community
7. Enjoy reading and writing with your students
8. Imagine a future and work toward it.

Don't stop reading articles, and applying them.

Take action; be a good teacher.

here are some websites that might facilitate that!

assessment

“Teachers often have little say in the administration of standardized tests, but they can feel empowered by their capacity to use alternative assessments.”

I have never been excited about assessment before, but this quote from the Rubin article certainly gave me some exciting things to think about.

I might not be able to control what standardized tests my students must take and be judged on, but I sure can come behind and give more assessments, different ones, that might give me a more accurate picture for what needs to be worked on.

Rubin made another good point in his article though, there are a variety of ways a new assessment method might not be entirely valid.

·      Student differences in preference for testing formats

·      Familiarity or lack thereof with processes

·      Performance variability due to affective factors

I can’t even tell how many times I have attempted a test or assignment in school and done it completely wrong, just because it was new, or wholly unlike anything I’d ever done before.

Assessments are wonderful tools for teachers, and they ought to be our best friends. It’s good to know that there is a plethora of options out there for assessing our students in ways that are most helpful for instructing them.

Guided Reading: A Research-Based Response to the Challenges of Early Reading Instruction

This June 2006 article by Anita Iaquinta from the Early Childhood Education Journal presented a clear expose of what guided reading is, what the teacher's role is, and what the children should gain from it.  I highly recommend it!


 "The goal of guided reading is to develop a self- extending system of reading that enables the reader to discover more about the process of reading while reading. "

Table I & II provide an entire page of teacher prompts. 
Table III explicitly provides the teacher's role before, during, and after the guided reading activity. 

This resource is ideal for preparing for a guided reading lesson.

The point of guided reading to get all students involved, at levels that work best for them (Zone of Proximal Development), in groups, to build their reading skills.

Question: what are the pros and cons of traditional versus dynamic grouping?

Building Vocabulary

When I was in elementary school, my parents bought these computer games for me and my siblings to play.  I don't think they told us they were educational games, and me and my siblings played the ClueFinders game all the time.  I had so much fun playing the game and solving the mystery, all the while growing in my math and language skills. The ClueFinders is what I was thinking about while reading Dalton & Grisham's article from The Reading Teacher. Technology in the classroom is a fabulous idea. This generation is bombarded by technology 24/7 anyway, it is unavoidable.  Why not throw some educational technology their way?

(this game... I would still play today)

Blachowitz and Fisher discuss ways to learn and use vocabulary. This is so important in reading instruction.  Especially if we agree that "a strong vocabulary is the hallmark of an educated person"

I recall in my elementary language arts instruction, being assigned to write poems about something specific, and to write the poem in the shape of the topic, with as many related vocabulary words as possible.  We always had lots of fun with this.  

what are more fun ways to practice vocabulary?

More on comprehension

Historically, comprehension instruction has been nonexistent.  Comprehension was tested and never taught.  I can sort of understand, as an adult reader, I don't need to explicitly tell myself to comprehend and I'm not sure how I learned to do it either.  Now that I have the skill, I just use it.  But new readers have so many other things to focus on while they read, such as decoding, that comprehension does not just come naturally.  Anne Gregory and Mary Cahill had some good things to say about teaching comprehension.

The Comprehension Matrix:

• the reader, the text, and the situation all affect the comprehension.
• Pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading activities can be employed to actively aid in showing children how to comprehend a text. 

This organization of teaching comprehension is a simplistic and helpful way to keep in mind everything we need to be aware of and teaching our kids to actively engage in while reading.

And who knew? Kindergarteners can do it too

The little ones can begin to hone comprehension skills too, as evidenced in Mrs. Hope's classroom in the article, it just looks different.  The Kindergarten children exercise comprehension in a more visible way (they used hand signals), but they were able to ask questions, tell stories that made connections, and even infer.

Here is Kitty Connector,

Not sure what the cat has to do with anything, but these are great questions to ask.

What would be good strategies to use in a social studies lesson, that would help the children focus on comprehending the social studies text for the day?

What's the goal? To get the gist.

Allington & Allington's chapter 7 "Developing Thoughtful Comprehenders" begins by putting away the myth that children "just can't think".  That is just no excuse.  The purpose of reading--the goal, is to comprehend the text.  As Laura Pardo put in her article, they need to understand the gist.

What helps us understand most of the text we read?  Largely, our expectations guide us in our reading.  Consequently, we must help children learn to examine genre, illustrations, and context to gather some expectations about what they are reading.  Along with proper expectations, we need to help them acquire a variety of tools that aid in information organization.

Organization

Venn diagrams, graphic organizers, KWL charts, timelines and story maps are all great tools children can be given to aid in finding and grasping more meaning.

Modeling

I do, you watch
I do, you help
You do, I help
You do, I watch 

(Allington & Allington)

With reading comprehension, it is critical to use these steps to help students understand what you mean by "discussing the text" without interrogating one another.  You need to show them how to have a conversation about a text!

Even putting on a quick production from a story can aid students in comprehension.  They must use rereading and comprehension skills to reform a story into a play!

How might you include a struggling reader that is under the majority of the classroom's reading level in the play?

play with your words, not with your food.

hmmm... makes sense, that when children don't understand the words in a text, they don't comprehend the text as a whole. I can read my sister's Pathology textbook all day long and the fact of the matter is, I comprehend nothing.  That's because I don't know what 80% of the words mean! (Let's be honest, I don't even know how to pronounce them).

Word study is crucial because their oral vocabulary is much bigger than their written repertoire, and they need to know what words look like and associate the meaning with that spelling. Children know lots of words, but they don't know how to spell them.

What to do?

• making words games
• studying Latin and Greek word roots
• grouping based on spelling patterns
• grouping based on rhyming patterns

play with the words!  Word study can be like playing with Legos; letters can be combined in countless ways to make all sorts of things! 

"Making Words is a powerful activity because within one instructional format there are endless possibilities for discovering how our alphabetic system works.  It is a quick, every-pupil-response, manipulative activity with which children get actively involved."  -Cunningham & Cunningham

How will you seize the opportunity to make word study fun and build students' vocabulary?

Coaching Reading

Chapter 5 of Classrooms That Work made an interesting point about fluent readers coming across unfamiliar words.  Triremes means nothing to me, I've never seen it and I don't know what it means. Children learning to read have similar experience with new words, but their experience is uniquely different. They have a large bank of words that are familiar to them in spoken language, but unfamiliar in print. They are in a strange position to face a foreign word, take time and "sound it out" and then all the sudden they know what that word is, they know how to say it and they know what it means! I sounded out Triremes but still had no idea what it meant. I wasn't exactly reading because I wasn't getting any meaning.

Before reading and writing was automatic, someone taught you, or coached you. It took tons and tons of practice. What games can you remember playing in class with manipulating words?  I remember clapping out syllables, finding rhyming words, and categorizing words that have the same endings.  I remember doing these tasks over and over and over.

"Word recognition is a necessary but insufficient condition for comprehension: it alone does not guarantee comprehension but without it comprehension cannot occur"

-What can I say besides "Sound it out"? 

According to Kathleen Clark, there are many other things to say.  In the first two transcribed interaction from the classroom, "sound it out" wasn't used even once. 

what are some other good phrases to say instead of "sound it out"?

fun with phonemes!

Literacy development in preschool through first grade is strange.  I don't remember before I was a fluent reader when I would have sounded out words: ppp- eee- ttt. pet! 
I don't remember manipulating words, but I certainly did it.  My dad showed me a composition book full of my own work on phonemic awareness. what I do remember, is playing games! Tons and tons of games. All very much like the ones described in Yopp & Yopp's article. I loved school when we played games all day! Little did I know, I was developing my literacy.

And all of these strategies and techniques are great, but they aren't all there is.  The IRA and NAEYC statement reported teachers noticing increasing variation in the children in their classrooms. There can be up to a five year reading level difference in any given kindergarten class!  So, good teachers are the ones that incorporate a variety of methods to encompass the diversity found in their class.  Just as Yopp & Yopp brought attention to in the "cautions" section of the paper; teachers need to be watchful and notice when some strategies aren't working, or children need extra help or perhaps a different approach.

As much as I bring baggage into my classroom from my own literacy history, my children also bring with them "metaphorical backpacks" full of what their family and cultural upbringing has taught them.

Kiki Jones came from a home that valued literacy and employed various avenues for practicing this important skill. Not all homes emphasize literacy, however.

Chapter 3 of Classrooms That Work had quite a bit to say about addressing how to teach children who  come at all sorts of different levels.  These are a few that I liked:

• Create a library of books full of important vocabulary words with pictures that can be read during independent reading time.

• Keep a variety of writing mediums and utensils for the children to use.  Mixing it up encourages creativity and increases desirabililty to write.

• Make plenty of opportunities for children to use reading and writing in the make believe play center (i. e. restaurant, house, office). this will help them see the usefulness of literacy if they haven't learned this concept at home.  

"Children's attention is better if you

 make sentences about them" 

Get to know the children! Attention will come easier if the subject concerns them.  Use their names to study the alphabet and phonetic awareness. 

What are some other ways that teachers can apply to all levels of learning readers?  How do teachers keep the advanced students interested, but not go over the heads of the students starting from scratch?

A classroom that works, instruction that's effective, and remaining calm.

           I don’t want to be responsible for a classroom that does not work.  So I’m pretty into this textbook, Classrooms That Work.  The first chapter, Creating classrooms that work provided an exciting introduction to a topic that I’ve been waiting three years of college for.  What first grabbed my attention was the pervasive theme of “excellent teachers” contrasted with not excellent teachers.  Effective classrooms versus not effective classrooms. uhm... I couldn’t live with myself if I were on the wrong side of that contrast.  So, as I read, my motivation is, how do I become one of the excellent teachers?

            Classrooms that work is a broad title.  A lot goes on in a classroom.  In the lens of a reading education class, the theme seems to be literacy.  Reading lots of books, reading lots of different types of books, textbooks and fun books.  Reading comprehension; the plot of a fantastic story or the main idea of the science textbook chapter.  Reading does and will and rightfully ought to find itself in nearly every minute of the day.   Followed by writing and speaking.  Effective teachers did not put science or social studies on the back burner in favor of language arts all the time, rather they integrated these studies, and they complement so well.

            Chapter two of the text calls for creating enthusiastic, Independent readers.  Most helpful and ironically most obvious is the idea of acknowledging students differing interests and providing plenty of books to suit those interests.  Boys like different things than girls, as I observed first hand this summer and recently verified from my readings.  I have four younger siblings, all between the ages of 6 to 11.  Over the summer, for one week they all came to Knoxville and stayed with me in my tiny college house and we had a blast.  We went to the library and checked out some books.  My sister Emma picked out a fantasy chapter book (typical girl) and also a lengthy, picture-less historical fiction chapter book (surprising).  My brother Gabriel picked out a large informational book about bugs, spiders, and snakes, with plenty of pictures (typical).  I also took summer classes and it happened to be finals week when I had the kids.  For my children’s literature class I had to read Clementine, an easy kids chapter book with a  few sketches here and there.  So I decided to read  it aloud to them to kill a few birds with one stone (benefiting their interest in reading, studying for my class, snuggle time…) the boys could not have been less interested though!! My sisters loved it and would sit and listen.  The boys did not.  Lesson: kids like different sorts of books!  I’m glad we went to the library and found something Gabriel would enjoy.

            Richard Allington’s article, What I’ve Learned About Effective Reading Instruction was suspicious at first.  Really?  What you learned about effective instruction fits neatly into six T’s?  Seems unlikely…

I was surprised!  What good things he had to share that added to what I’m learning about effective reading instruction!  Disheartening though, from what he had to say, the excellent teachers taught against the grain.  They rejected the neat and outdated techniques of assign and assess.  Textbooks are not “one size fits all”. Classrooms need tons of all sorts of reading materials that are not otherwise provided.  The excellent teachers spent their time and money fighting to effectively teach their students.  It sounded like a lot of “fighting the system,”  I don’t want to have to fight the institution.  I want to teach.  But how can I teach well in a setting that is not helping that cause?

can I keep calm?