Got the Blues??

If you EVER have the blues or are feeling in a bad mood…WATCH THIS VIDEO!! It will immediately brighten your day!

So many books, so little time…

My semester is FINALLY winding down and I am now able to start reading for pleasure again! The only problem is that I have so many options of books to read that I don’t know which one to choose! So I need everyones help…

Reciprocal Teaching

I have always been a big fan of this style of teaching for many reasons. The first is that it holds every student in the class accountable for what they are reading. Students can often get away with not fully reading or comprehending a class reading because they never get called on by the teacher, but this style of teaching requires that every student fully engage in the classroom reading. The second is that it allows for students that tend to have great ideas but are overshadowed by louder, more outspoken students, to have their voices and ideas heard by not only their group of classmates but also their teacher.

In both of the articles, there is a discussion leader, someone who, obviously, leads the group discussion. There is someone, either the challenger or questioner, who makes the students justify or defend a statement that they have made. There is also someone that is going to connect everything that has been discussed in the group back to what was originally posed as a topic of discussion.

Words within words

Teaching children vocabulary is one of the more important things to be done while they are in school. It allows their conversations, writings, and readings to become so much more intelligent because they know words that express a more exact feeling of what they mean. The way to teach children to decode vocabulary is to teach them that most, if not every, word(s) hare made up of more than 1 morphemes.

If students are able to look at a word, such as rededication, they can see that there are 3 different morphemes. RE- meaning again, DEDICAT- meaning to dedicate, and TION-meaning the process of doing something. This knowledge allows students to decode unknown words faster and comprehend what they read at a much higher percentage.

I loved how the article incorporated the Spanish speaking students into the vocabulary instruction because there are many instances in which different languages like Spanish or French, and while not spoken, Latin, can help vocabulary instruction.

Bringing it full circle…

Implementing Instructionally Appropriate Materials in the Classroom

Reading Dr. Frye’s article on the importance of appropriate instructional reading material, this whole semester is starting to take shape for me. So many things are starting to make much more sense in terms of what needs to be done in the classroom to assure that students are getting what they need to be getting…ALL students.

A large majority of the time, struggling readers are cast aside as students that will always have trouble reading and can’t really be helped. The truth is that most teachers are either too lazy or too unsure of what to do to make sure the student gets what they need. If they only knew how simple it was.

The reading assessment that we will be doing with a student later this semester, is the jumping off point. It provides a basis as to who to gauge what instructional level the child should be reading on. From there, children can be grouped accordingly and different reading groups can be designed to fit each of the different levels of need in the classroom.

The Multi-text study can come in the lineup next. The different reading groups can engage in the multi=text units that you have created. The best part of this is that it gives you chances to get one-on-one with truly struggling readers in your classroom.

Shared Readings

The article, written by Fisher, Frey, and Lapp, focused on the four main categories of shared readings; comprehension, vocabulary, text structures, and text features.

Comprehension

When students read aloud, they instinctively come up with their own questions about the text. It is important for the students to see that there is more than one way to comprehend a text. Teachers don’t find one only one meaning in a text, so why should they not model that for their students? The point of a shared reading is to share the experience with the class so that everyone can get as much as the can from the text.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary is one of the most important things about reading. If a child is spending a large amount of time on trying to figure out what the words mean, they won’t have any chance of comprehending the passage that they were reading. I was glad to read that the teachers did not simply give the definitions to the students, but rather have them decipher what the word means using inside and outside clues. Inside clues refer to things found within the word, including prefixes, suffixes, and endings. Outside clues refer to the context clues found in the passage.

Text Structure

The text structure refers to the way in which the readers organize what they have read. The structures are usually logical because they are created to help the reader best comprehend what they have just read.

Text Features

Text features are the things that we usually don’t pay much attention to, but tend to carry a lot of meaning. They are the bolded words, the graphs, the charts, and the captions throughout the text. I think that it is very important to bring attention to these things so that the students will know to read them more carefully than other text.

ARGH!

After reading the articles on the “piratical study,” it became very clear to me that you could use this lesson design for almost any subject in school. I loved the idea that the students were immediately immersed in the lesson as they walked into the classroom. The method of letting the students gather all of the information about the information allows them to come to conclusions that we, as teachers, may not otherwise have thought about.

The reading of twin texts was also something that would be immensely helpful in the classroom. Besides the fact that it integrates reading and language into the lesson, it also allows students to begin thinking about how to critically look at both primary and secondary sources about a certain topic, in this case pirates.

I also loved the idea of letting the students create an illustrated dictionary of nautical terms that they are going to be seeing in the texts that they are going to be reading. It allows the students to look back when they come across a word that they don’t know and decipher the meaning for themselves rather than having the definition just given to them.

It was very clear that I, as a teacher, will be needing to find great ways such as the “piratical unit” to integrate many disciplines into one unit. It was great to see an example of how to successfully do that.