Multiple Reading Assesments

Lots of different factors influence a students score on reading assessments. Maybe the child gets nervous during tests that evaluate reading skills or maybe the child didn't sleep well the night before the test. Not only is a student experiencing different physical and emotional conditions from test date to test date but also different abilities and techniques are being discovered that will affect their performance. It is good practice for a teacher to use multiple reading assessments on each of their students so that they know where each student is having strengths and where each student is having difficulty. Jim Rubin's article, "Organizing and Evaluating Results From Multiple Reading Assessments" offers a step by step action reference for teachers to use in the classroom.

1. Draw a table with one row for each student in your class and one column for each assessment instrument you use regularly in your classroom.

2. For each assessment you use, create a guide that maps scores by range to each of three reading levels (frustration, instructional, independent).

3. Following administration of an assessment, record student scores in your table. Beside each entry, note whether the score indicates the frustration (1), instructional (2), or independent (3) level, using your mapping guide.

4. Review the scores for each student. Do any show a range across all levels? If so, dig deeper to determine why.

5. Calculate an average of the scores for each student, and use the composite scores to develop a class profile. Use the profile to guide instructional decisions concerning whole-class activities.

6. Use the individual and whole-class data to inform your decisions about reading groups and reading material that is appropriate for your students.

The Importance of Vocabulary

Incidental learning of vocabulary is an incredible and often overlooked way of integrating new words into the classroom! The teacher's job is to begin with words that a student is already familiar with and uses on a daily basis. For instance the daily classroom weather reporter can become the meteorologist. The student in charge of feeding classroom pets becomes the zookeeper and then later on becomes referred to as the animal nutritional specialist. This is such a wonderful idea and too often vocabulary is a forced classwork and homework assignment when it could be learned incidentally. Educators can also use exciting new technology based approaches to teach vocabulary to students.

1. Wordle www.wordle.com

2. Wordsift www.wordsift.com

3. Trackstar www.trackstar.4teachers.org

4. vocabulary.co.il.com

The following video talks about active and generative tasks so that vocabulary is comprehended not just memorized.

http://youtu.be/OetbzrP2QUU

Real-Life Reading Inquiry

For my Real-Life Reading Inquiry assignment I have been tutoring my daughter Janelle with her reading development. I have always read to her every night and now that she is in kindergarten we also work on her reading homework together. Kathleen Clark’s article, “What Can I Say Besides ‘Sound it Out?' Coaching Word Recognition in Beginning Reading,” states that in order to coach word recognition successfully you have to be able to generate appropriate cues and have specific knowledge of the child’s word recognition abilities.

Months ago when the assignment began I was stymied by her insistence upon memorizing certain books and refusing to read what she had not yet memorized. In this post I will discuss the ways I have coached Janelle into the Transitional Alphabetic stage and still further into the later stage of Alphabetic. My first obstacle was getting Janelle to explore reading words without having memorized them in a familiar book.

I decided to remove the book aspect of it since I felt she was being distracted by a need to feel as accomplished as her older brother who often reads aloud. In Hallie Kay and Ruth Helen Yopp’s article, “Supporting Phonemic Awareness Development in the Classroom,” phonemic awareness instruction takes the form of word games much like the ones demonstrated in the REED 430 course. They are also recommended for children as early as pre-k. I play the onset and rime game with Janelle often and she loves it. We also play the activities recommended in Yopp’s article. This showed her that parts of words have their own sounds.

She became very eager to read books and this time she was trying to figure out the words for herself. Her technique was to make the sound of each letter as she had been taught what that sound made according to the alphabet. My next challenge was to show her (without discouraging her) that sometimes letters make different sounds then what she was used to. Sometimes they don’t make any sound at all.

Words like you would throw her for a loop. She would sound out yuh oh uh I would explain it to her with the cues from Clark’s article. At one point she explained it in her own words, “The u in the word you is very bossy. It tells the other letters to hush!” Her reliance upon sounding words out based on each letter often makes her read the words in a nonsensical manner but in the Alphabetic stage this is to be expected.

Janelle's grasp of phonemic awareness is helping the process very much but she still gets frustrated because she isn’t at her brothers level yet. My job is to keep her from losing interest. I have encouraged her brother to participate and he is very helpful. He tells her often that it takes practice and she is doing great. My tutoring and observations have taught me to be sensitive to what motivates children and that having the knowledge of different word recognition strategies and activities is very powerful. These activities are helping not only Janelle’s reading ability but her brother’s as well.    

Comprehension is Key!

Adults face comprehension barriers just as children do. Just because we know how to read words on a page does not mean we comprehend what we are reading. Understanding things that inhibit and/or aid reading comprehension can help children grow and become readers that don't just know the words but also construct meaning. The construction of meaning is after all the whole point of words right? The following is a list of possible things to consider when teaching comprehension to children.

Do's

Make Connections
When a child is taught to connect words with ideas about things they already know or things they would like to know more about then comprehension is more likely to take place.

Ask Questions
Before and after reading with students get them to think about questions they have about the text. A good reader is always asking questions.

Vocabulary
Ask students to identify words they don't know and help them to define the word with concrete examples.

Mind Movies
This is a great way to get kids to use their imaginations constructively. In the Gregory article children use mind movies to visualize what is happening in the story and then to relate back and see if what they visualized was in the text.

Teacher Tipster (Power Phrase Hero Challenge)

Reading Theater

Reading Theater

So how do we teach fluency? Teaching reading is hard enough right!?! As I read the classroom articles and searched online for fun and concrete ways of teaching fluency I kept coming back to "Reading Theater" workshops. I think that this activity really captures students willingness to read with inflection and emphasis which is an activity that will increase fluency and subsequent comprehension. The above video is a fun example of a "Reading Theater" activity in a real classroom!