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.