Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Final Project

For my final project I created a pintrist account called "Reading Foundations". In this pintrist account I created five boards focused around some of the big ideas in our class;  Motivation, Fluency Phonological Awareness, Comprehension and Vocabulary. My goal for this project was to collect examples on how to incorporate each of these topics into a classroom when teaching. Often, we as students, get caught up in how to define these topics, but neglect incorporating these ideas once we actually begin to teach. All of the activities I posted are fun, easy and cheap so it would not be hard for any of us to use these when we are student teaching. Below I have included a link to my pintrist as well as my thought process behind each board as it connects to the readings we have done this semester.

http://pinterest.com/hatcher1539/

Motivation- As with all my boards, I tried to find a variety of activities to help motivate students to read. On this board I included lists of recommend books such as "100 best chapter books", and "Books for Boys", my idea behind this was to help teachers find a wide range of books for their students to choose to read that fits their interests. On pg. 56 Graves writes "Students need to have choices about what they read and how they respond to their reading. This does not mean that you never assign text (...) It does mean that you structure regular opportunity's for students to choose their own readings materials." Offering students choice is a great way to motivate students to read as well as inspire future learning and you don't even have to have an intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation debate!

Fluency- Graves defines fluency as "the ability to read rapidly, smoothly, without many errors and with appropriate instruction." pg. 224. Fluency is extremely important because of it's a affect on a student's reading comprehension. The majority of students who struggle with reading comprehension do so because they are not fluent readers. Their minds are so busy trying to decode and sound out words that they forget what they are reading. On my board I have included multiple activities to help improve students fluency in the classroom, which will then, in turn, improve their reading comprehension.

Phonological Awareness- Phonological Awareness is an umbrella term that covers Word Awareness, Onset and Rime Awareness, Syllable Awareness and Phonemic Awareness. I picked Phonological Awareness because I could include activities that cover all of these smaller skills. Most of my activities pinned focus on phonemic awareness, "the ability to hear somewhat separable phonemes in spoken words" Graves pg. 92, because I felt this was the most fundamental skill needed for building fluency skills, thereby, building comprehension skills.


Comprehension- Comprehension, the ability to understand what is read is the ultimate goal of literacy. Each of these boards, Motivation, Fluency, Phonological Awareness all lead to the end goal of helping students understand what they read. According to Grave comprehension strategies should be, conscious efforts, flexible, widely applicable, overt or covert, lead to higher level thinking. On page 328, he lists the key comprehension strategies to be establishing a purpose for reading, using prior knowledge, asking and answering questions, determining what is important, summarizing, dealing with graphic information, imagining and creating graphic representations and being metacognitive. The Comprehension board includes different activities to meet each one of these skills. I also included a pin on how to determine what is important in a text book book for older students, as well as pins applying these strategies to nonfiction texts.

Vocabulary- Vocabulary is tremendously important to a student's success and affects not only their reading comprehension, but also their reading fluency. Graves writes, "words that are not recognized automatically-not established-will thwart the process of comprehending text" pg. 254, and comprehension, which we know, is the ultimate goal of literacy. Some vocabulary words need to be directly taught, while many do not. I have included activities on the Vocabulary board, that use both as well as examples of how to incorporate vocabulary across content areas.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Creating Classrooms Where Readers Flourish

"Creating Classrooms Where Readers Flourish", served as a perfect example of offering choice to motivate students to read. The author of the article, a high school language arts teacher, admits she does not assign class-wide novel units anymore, instead allowing students to choose from a wide range of books to read that meets their interest and reading level. This serves as an incredibly inclusive strategy as it allows students to read books that interest them as well as meets the diverse needs of readers in her classroom.

I also like how she created time in her class for independent reading, which her students loved. When I taught at a summer reading program my students loved our 15-minute DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) Time, where they spent 15 miuntes reading silently of any book of their choice. They would get mad at me when I would cut it out of schedule if we were running behind or had a special assembly.

Some questions I had when reading this article is how this "choice reading" fits into the Common Core. When teaching history I had very specific events I had to cover as well as they fit into larger thematic areas, is this similar for language arts? Do teachers have to teacher specific books or is it more of larger, themes with more vague content standards that can be met through an array of books.

I was also wondering how one can measure student learning during silent reading. I have heard Dr. Konrad, a professor in the Special Education program, argue against silent reading because students who struggle with reading could sit and pretend they are reading, without actually reading. While I disagree with her in using silent reading, as I have seen in be a massive motivator for my students (all of whom were considered "at risk" readers) how can silent reading be used as effiectenly as possible to help, not only motivate special needs students, but also improve their reading skills?

Clay Chapter 5: Running Records

Running Records are a great tool to use as a classroom teacher when trying to pin-point a student's reading level, as well as a student's strengths and weaknesses when reading. When done correctly, a pattern can easily be indentified in what types of errors the students are making as well as what kind of decoding skills the student is using. I have found Running Records are extremely helpful when analayzing self corrections. Often I have been caught up in simply, counting a self correction as a correct word, without looking at what initial mistake the student was making or what clues the student used to correct.

I was surprised when reading the procedure section in Clay that Running Records are not a speed test, but simply a power, not having a set time the student has to read the passage in. It seems it would be helpful to do running records in one minute timings in order to establish the rate of words per minute and measure oral reading flunecy. For example, I have a student who I work with, who when I administer oral reading CBMs he does not error, ever. However, he self corrects A LOT and reads extremely slowly, sounding out many words. If I were to administer a Running Record to him, at first glance, he would look like he is reading at grade level, even though he is clearly not flunent. Also his gains on flunecy could not be as accurately measured because I do not have a set calculation to compare his speed, any information on that would be qualitative.

Is Being Wild About Harry Enough?

I think I have heard "enough" more since I began the Special Education Program at OSU than I have in the previous 23 years of my life.  We are told "make sure students get enough practice before you expect students to complete work independently", "make sure you collect enough data before making a hypothesis", "make sure you build in enough review for mastery", but really, what is enough?

That question, "what is enough?", continued to run through my head as I read "Is Being Wild About Harry Enough? Encouraging Independant Reading at Home". The article argued the Harry Potter craze was not enough to encourage independent reading outside of school, citing reading for pleasure drops from 43% at grade 4 to 19% at grade 8. This statistic seems to corrleate with the switch in curriculumn from learning to read vs. reading to learn. In grades K-4, teachers are instructed to make reading fun, give children choice in what books to read to help motivate them to become fluent readers. Once entering the upper elementary and middle school grades it is expected that students read in order to learn the content. They are no longer reading funny Dr.Seuss books, or nonfiction books over any topic that interests them, instead they are reading science and history text books and complex word problems in math class; no wonder they don't want to put down a text book and pick up their favorite fiction book in their spare time.

I am not arguing against the emphasis of academic reading, or the increased rigor of curriculmn, but simply asking is it really that surprising that a 7th grader is choosing video games over to Kill a Mocking Bird? When surveyed for class, the many of us admitted we did not read for pleasure, is it fair to hold our students to a higher standard? My question to you is, how do we get older students to read for pleasure? Is it even nesscessary that students choose to read outside of school if they are already fluent readers? Is it our job to inspire a love for reading in our students or is more important they can read various types of texts with fluency and understanding?