Week 12 - Excellent Reading Teachers

Looking at the criteria that all Excellent reading teachers share is helpful to see what a compilation of success looks like. I do not want to be a good teacher as far as the school is concerned, I want to be a good reading teacher for my students. i want them to learn and i want them to love reading. I have never loved reading until I came to college and had teachers that gave me the opportunity to read things I chose and do activities that were useful and I learned from. I was shocked that one of the "criteria" that successful teachers had was that "...they believe all children can read and write well." Shouldn't all teachers believe their students can all read and write successfully? Also, are a lot of future teachers nervous that they will not be sufficient teachers? I want to learn all I can while I am in school, but I feel like there is so much to learn to be a successful teacher

Guided Reading Assignment

1. guided reading: I think that guided reading is a form of instruction where a teacher and a group of students read a story after a short lesson with the teacher about tricky words or concepts, with the help of each other.

•  a. elements necessary for guided reading lessons: 
• before reading: an introduction done by the teacher before reading takes place. this introduction can be done by a conversation with the students about the book. This is where students can make predictions about what the book is about, and teachers can go over some important/frequent words or concepts the students will encounter while reading this book. 
• during reading: then the students will read the book softly to themselves, this is where the teacher may listen in on how the student is reading and assist/support them as the read.
• after reading: the students and teacher discuss the meaning of the text and revisit parts as needed. This is also where a teacher can teach explicit lessons/points that he/she observed while watching students read.

2. guided reading graphic organizer:

Guided Reading   Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
·       The students went through and looked at the pictures with their teacher, and talked about each one. Like how flowers related to the weather because rain makes them grow. ·       The teacher prompts the students about what their prediction for this book is and they all say “its about kinds of weather’ ·       They put their finger on the title of the book and as she reads each word of the title the students put their finger on each word with her. They attempt to say the words the first time, but she reinforces their confidence and the second time around they all say the title word by word together. ·       Their teacher is very enthusiastic about reading, which I believe is making her students more engaged and eager to read.	·       On the first page they are talking about stormy weather. She tells the students how she feels about stormy weather and asks them what they think about it. She also makes them comfortable with giving their own opinion, like Danielle likes stormy weather and she is still just as enthusiastic with her. She tells the students how that type of weather makes her feel – showing them how to connect text to themselves. ·       She prompts the students by asking them what certain pictures are. She does not give them the answer, but she will point and ask them what they think that picture represents. ·       When they are ready to move to the next page she keeps everyone together by announcing that they are moving on. ·       She uses professional words like ‘text’ instead of book. ·       She reminds them to think about the text as they are reading ·       She has them put their finger under important/frequent words and asks them how to sound out that word. Ex.: cloud: how the C in cloud makes a K sound. ·       She talks about the words they may not know yet, like weather, and asks them what the beginning sound says, then she asks them to find that word by looking for the W word on the page. Leaving it up to them to find it! ·       She lets them turn back to pages to reference what they learned previously to help them. During Reading: ·       She is teaching them to look for clues in the photographs. ·       When they are talking about snowy weather she, again, is making a connection from the text to her students lives by talking about the weather that they actually have. ·       The children are pointing out words they know on the pages like weather, snow; and sight words like is and the. ·       The teacher points out that they know every word on every page ·       She continues to point out skills, like referring the pictures and words to understand or comprehend the story, as they are reading. Also looking at how punctuations work.  ·       She works one on one with a student who seems to be struggling with reading, but when she is working with him he looks like he is enjoying her aid. ·       The students are using their fingers to point out words as the read them.	·       While she is going around to every student as they are independently read – she has them reread the book as many times as they can until she finishes with every student. ·       She tells them that the sounds at the beginning of the word go with what you are saying and the sounds at the end of the word go with what we are saying, like winT and wind. ·       She went back through the book and showed the whole group words they had problems with like pronouncing what as wat. ·       She is trying to enforce that if what they are reading is not making sense to go back and sound out the words and reread! ·       She used a word work exercise at the end. They went through pictures and asked her students to say what each picture represented ·       Then an exercise matching beginning letters with the pictures from the previous exercise. Then the same with the last letters of the words

3. Video Response:

• I though that this lesson was a great example of guided reading. I like that we got to do this activity because it taught me a lot about how to actually instruct a guided reading lesson. I was also a bit confused about what guided reading was so this helped out a lot! She was very engaged and entertaining to watch, and I think that translated to her students enthusiasm about reading. She was able to keep my attention for the whole video, and she was very fun to watch. She gave students the opportunity to find out things for themselves and did not just show or tell them everything about the book. She was also very good at using everyones thoughts and answers to teach different points. There was not anything that stuck out at me that I would change. I thought this teacher did a wonderful job helping and instructing the students using guided reading. 

4. Reading A-Z Website

• I think this website would be very helpful for doing guided reading exercises in the classroom. It is obviously a site for teachers who want to teach reading, and offers many free printout instruction pieces. I typed in guided reading in the search bar and tons of materials came up. I like how many options it gave for multiple searches. The search for guided reading gave a lot of options that were benchmark assessment passages that students can read after having done proper guided reading pre-reading activities like talking about the passage and going over difficult words. I think I would use this website for materials in my own classroom by finding level appropriate materials from the site and by using the Raz-Kids managing system. Obviously I am completely sure this student manager would work, and I do not want to spend days and days on assessments, but I like the idea of the student manager. 

Week 11 - Assessment

As a future teacher I think that assessment is very important, but I do not want to get so caught up on assessments that I forget the point of doing them. Assessments of students should only be done to benefit and learn how to better teach them. I feel like I am someone who could definitely get caught up in the results of assessments, which can be dangerous. Every student learns differently and assessments can be used to learn how to teach every student in your classroom. The spelling inventory we did in class said SO much about the class I gave it to. I knew exactly which students were struggling and in what area they are struggling in. With assessments, I also think it is important that they are clear and appropriate on every level.  

Week 11 - Guided Reading

This week, we are bringing in our own articles on guided reading. I found a lot of different articles that provided a lot of information about this topic. One of the articles I read was titled "Teaching Comprehension and Critical Literacy: investigating guided reading in three primary classrooms" by Annie Fisher. This article is very informative and taught me that guided reading is a good thing. I agree - I think guided reading shows that students do not need to be taught analytical comprehension strategies. Read aloud and guided reading can help students learn how to comprehend. It takes out some of the hard parts of reading for beginners like coming across words they do not know yet. Students can be more focused on the meaning of words, using context clues, instead of being on the spot about how to pronounce them.
One of the guided reading activities I found on Pinterest is called "Five Finger Retell". This would be a great activity for students after everything they are reading. You could do this as a class and students can also do this independently and write down their responses to each finger's question! This would be a good thing to blow up and hang in the classroom because it is fun and creative.

Week 10 - Vocabulary and Read Alouds

Vocabulary knowledge has been long connected with reading comprehension, and this is why vocabulary lessons are oh so important with new readers. Since we use vocabulary in almost everything we do it enables us to actively participate in society. We need vocabulary and we need to teach it well. Vocabulary, for me, has always been an indicator of education. You seem to think you know how well educated a person is by the words choices they use. For the most part this is true, but you always run into those people who just choose to use the 'easy' words and not strive to show their literacy through their speech. This is very common around Southern Appalachia. People will often use the word seen instead of saw, this drives me inherently NUTS. Most of the people I come into contact with that speak this way know better they just do not see anything wrong with saying the same word in a tense that does not relate to the sentence. I think vocabulary is a vital part of elementary students' education, and it is also something you can make VERY fun!

Do you think some cultures have their own language and vocabulary? Like the South and the word Y'all, or Northern states that have their own sayings? I think it is so interesting that vocabulary changes by region in almost every country in the world.

This vocabulary activity I saw on Pinterest looked very fun, and you use it with Read Aloud's!

As the teacher read her students Read Aloud's, students would listen for words they were not familiar with. When they came across unfamiliar words, there would be a couple designated students that were in charge of making a gum ball for that word. On each gum ball there was the unknown word and the definition they looked up in the dictionary. This could also work for individual readers, as they come across words they do not know they can make their own ball and fill it out and stick it on the gum ball machine.  

Week 9 - In Class PowerPoint

This is our in-class powerpoint on activating and connecting background knowledge! 

Week 10 - Real Life Inquiry - Words Their Way Spelling Inventory

I believe that knowing spelling stages of individual students can help a lot in the classroom. Knowing where each student stands will help me teach each student to my best ability. I did my inquiry with a fourth grade classroom in Knox County. I gave the class the elementary spelling inventory from Words Their Way.

In the Journal of Child Development, Whitehurst and Lonigan wrote an article about emergent literacy and the proposition that emergent literacy consists of two distinct domains: inside-out skills (like phonological awareness and letter knowledge), and outside-in skills (like language and conceptual knowledge). It claims that these two domains come into play at different points during reading acquisition, and inside-out skills includes emergent spelling with letter knowledge and phonological awareness. Letter knowledge and phonological awareness are what spelling helps to produce. Phonological awareness is a term that refers to the understanding about words and sounds in words. Spelling can help students understand that sentences are made of words and words are made of syllables, which are constructed by letters.

I do not believe that weekly spelling lists help students become better spellers, but I do believe there are ways that we can use lists to our advantage as teachers. By using the spelling inventories in Words Their Way we see what stages of spellers students are. Our students will not all be on the same spelling level no matter how many spelling tests we give, so these inventories give students the opportunity to tell us what they understand and which patterns they have mastered. One of my favorite spelling quotes I have heard is “We do not make every student try out for the basketball team every week, so why should we make every student try out for the spelling team every Friday.” We, as teachers, need to find out what patterns students are struggling with, and give them proper instruction to bring them up to grade level.

For the most part, the classroom I gave the inventory to was pretty consistent. Once I graphed all of the students on the Classroom Composite sheet given in Words Their Way, I was able to clearly see the patterns of all the students. There was only one student in the classroom that missed a considerable amount of basic skills like digraphs and blends. If I were the teacher, I would give this student some supplementary materials to help with these patterns. I was also able to see that this class probably has not covered Harder Suffixes and Bases or Roots because almost every student missed these skills.

 According to Farrall, spelling and decoding are two sides of the same coin; they both rely on the same underlying skills, thus connecting spelling and reading further. (Farrall, 295.) This chapter says “While spelling is more challenging than decoding, most children with weak decoding skills are also impaired in their ability to spell words with accuracy.” If teachers become more familiar with their students spelling patterns – they will have the ability to further understand difficulties in reading. Another thing that connects spelling and reading that this chapter talks about is the concept of sight reading, which is a process by which letters and letter combinations are mapped to sounds.

Spelling lists test more of a student’s memory, than if they truly know how to spell the words. The spelling inventory I gave has continued to tell me that we need to teach our students patterns and not rules for spelling. I definitely want to use this inventory in my future classrooms so I am able to help and teach each student in ways that aid them most.

References

Farrall, Melissa Lee. (2012), Reading Assessment: linking language, literacy, and cognition. Chapter 14, Pgs. 295-297. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Print.

Whitehurst, G. J. and Lonigan, C. J. (1998), Child Development and Emergent Literacy. Child Development, 69: 848–872. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998.tb06247.x