Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Real Life Reading Inquiry

For my Real-Life Reading Inquiry, I took notes while tutoring a 3rd grader that I work with multiple nights a week. For the purpose of this blog, we will call her Susie. Susie is in third grade at a private elementary school in Knoxville. Most days, Susie has some sort of reading homework. Susie brought home with her a reading project. As Susie’s tutor, we worked on the project together after she had finished reading a mystery book of her own selection. The teacher made up a project relating mysteries to puzzles. After reading the book, students were to create a puzzle with clues about the story they read.

(This is the book she choose)

 In my opinion, this was not the BEST project to discover mysteries, but Susie enjoyed reading the book. I think it is an engaging activity to develop reading comprehension though. I do not favor the project because if all the children are not reading the same book, how would they have any clue how to put together someone else’s puzzle pieces? As shown in my pictures, we divided a poster board into 9 pieces.


( the instructions)




 Each piece of the poster board puzzle was assigned a different topic from the book to be written in. These pieces are defined in the picture I took of the assignment. I do think it was good practice for Susie to work on locating things such as: the main character, the title, the author, setting, climax, and sequential parts of the book. She also had to discuss with me what main characters vs. secondary characters are. Puzzle pieces 5-7 were where Susie summed up the beginning, middle, and end of the book. This was good practice on how to summarize and show comprehension of what she had read. I had Susie tell me about it, and then we worked on making bullet points about what she summed up from the three sections. Susie is an intelligent girl that loves reading; she does not always need my help, other than to stay focused most of the time.
As Cunningham, P.M., & Allington, R.L. say in chapter 7, pp 183, Classrooms That Work: “Story Text Lessons are a good way for children to understand story structure and develop independent story comprehension strategies.” Overall, this project helped Susie with comprehension skills. She broke the book into parts of a story and summed it up in the designated parts of a story puzzle pieces. This project allows for students in the classroom to share their understanding of different mystery books they read. Susie explored the book further by telling me about the different parts of the story that were to be explained in each puzzle piece. I think this helped her to better understand the story because she was forced to think more about what she read. If Susie wanted to write specific things about the book, I had her go back and look for it in the book. She was able to more easily find specific details by knowing where that information would have been presented in the story: beginning, middle, end. For instance, she had to go back and look for three clues that helped solve the mystery. The final puzzle piece let Susie give a personal reflection of the book. She enjoyed the book so much that she let me borrow it. (If only I had time to read it) This project would be a useful project for all of us to use in a classroom. The instructions for puzzle pieces could be altered to fit different abilities. The level of books read could also be altered to best fit reading ability. 

                                                (Some pieces had prompts to draw pictures)
Drawing pictures also helped to show comprehension of reading. Susie likes to add pictures to stories to help visualize. 

Monday, March 26, 2012

Guided Reading

I read: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/guided-reading-primary-classroom


All of the strategies we are learning to pre-assess students and figure out their level of understanding, will come in handy when trying to prepare your classroom for Guided Reading. Students will learn reading strategies that help them to become better readers through Guided Reading. The article I read had three parts to guided reading:

"Before reading: Set the purpose for reading, introduce vocabulary, make predictions, talk about the strategies good readers use.

During reading: Guide students as they read, provide wait time, give prompts or clues as needed by individual students, such as "Try that again. Does that make sense? Look at how the word begins."

After reading:
Strengthen comprehension skills and provide praise for strategies used by students during the reading."

I didn't paraphrase these steps because I thought that they were great instruction that we should all follow in the classroom when doing guided reading.The Before, During, and After steps in any lesson are the main things to key in on. Have a plan before engaging in guided reading. Be able to differentiate for all your students so that you are giving useful learning opportunities. Also, have a variety of different texts for children to read. These are books that children do not already know well, but then they are to read and reread the books so that they have repetition in reading.

 

Monday, March 5, 2012

Think Alouds

Be sure to read the inserts in Chapter 7. The inserts for English Language Learners are great tips to have in the back of your mind for helping students learn to read. Smaller group talks for ELL's is easier on their nerves when it comes to think-alouds. I would like if we practiced a think aloud in class. There are also good inserts about how to best facilitate a think aloud. I might be the first to say this, but I just do not like KWL charts... I have never personally found them to be helpful. Dr. B even said that in her classes, they rarely went back and filled the L part at the end. I do like story maps though. I will use KWL charts in my classes for those kids that may benefit from them though.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Building Vocabulary


I found this chart that highlights the vowels in red. This is a tool an used in Making Words. You can print this page out and use these more commonly used letters in your Making Words activity. I absolutely love the making words activity. When I first started reading the article, I was not too enthused. As I read examples along with key things to point out to students, I found the activity to be extremely engaging and educational. Kids actually learn from the activity and you are not just telling them boring facts in front of them. We read in the books activities where you introduce a word in a lecture and the kids repeat the spelling. This activity makes the kids form words and use their reasoning and prior knowledge to actively create new words with letters.

I think that children should become very aware of words. Through reading literature, and writing,  children enhance their word consciousness. The Ten Words activity is a good way to facilitate group discussion about reading and new words. I think that the activity with note cards is the most engaging part of the activity. They can learn synonyms and explore usage.




I know this picture doesn't go along with our readings, but it made me laugh.