Eleanor Powell - Dance Me to the End of Love

Guided Reading

Children read from the same text while teacher uses cues to help students make predictions about the text, figure out difficult words and establish fluency/comprehension of the text. Teachers do this through a guided reading process that involves before during and after interaction with the text.

Before Reading:
Teacher is prompting the students by asking questions. Students are answering prompts by using background knowledge, making logical connections and making predictions about what the text might contain. Teacher models specific word and letter sounds in the title of the book.

During Reading:
Teacher prompts students to look at the pictures for clues to words they might not understand. Teacher tells students to ask themselves if what they are reading makes sense. If not they go back. Students answer prompts and repeat after the teacher when they are cued on specific word and letter sounds.

After Reading:
Teacher does word activity with students based on important key words that were seen in text. Prompts students to remember what they learned in text to answer questions.

During the video the teacher used a lot of positive encouragement and was generally very excited and animated. This helps students feel positive about themselves and what they are learning. The teacher worked with each child briefly one on one and assessed strengths and weaknesses.

The website www.readinga-z.com has it all from free printables for teachers to common core standards links and activities. It also has a library for online leveled reading books.

Literacy Organization

The teacher’s job is to help students think critically to solve problems. They make quick decisions as to which instructional tools will help individual students find answers to their questions without making them frustrated or impatient. According to research there is a distinct methodology that seems to work best (Identifying Instructional Moves During Guided Learning, Frey, N. Fisher, D.) The teacher asks a question to check for understanding. If the answer is appropriate the teacher can then decide if it is necessary to elicit more information. If the answer is incorrect or shows lack of understanding the teacher uses appropriate prompts and/or cues to get the student to solve the problem on their own. If this does not work teachers should use direct explanation as a way of modeling the information that the student needs to comprehend the lesson. Successful teachers are always checking in with their students by asking questions that will show them exactly what a child comprehends and what actions the teacher should take to help scaffold a better understanding of the material.

A good scaffolding tool is a “Word Wall.” The Word Wall is used in the classroom to help students identify words that they are having trouble spelling. The student first identifies the correct letter that the word begins with and looks for that letter according to alphabetical order or the student identifies a word that rhymes with the word he or she is trying to spell. The teacher can use the Word Wall often throughout the day to encourage children to write and spell independently and also to increase the rate at which children are exposed to words. Other tools that teachers can use with pocket boards in the classroom are activities where individual letters are moved around to create completely different words, create words that rhyme by only changing the beginning letter and also find words within a mixed up set of letters.

Excellent reading instruction consists of:

1.       Understanding the development of learning how to read.

2.       Constant assessment of students individual strengths and weaknesses.

3.       Motivating students to read on their own

4.       Understanding multiple instructional methods

5.       Individual teachers that view themselves as lifelong learners

Guided Reading Article

The following citation is my chosen guided reading article located via JSTOR.

But I Only Have a Basal: Implementing Guided Reading in the Early Grades
Author(s): Parker C. Fawson and D. Ray Reutzel
Source: The Reading Teacher, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Sep., 2000), pp. 84-97

My article discussed the goals of guided reading strategies which are to assist children in becoming, independent, fluent and competent readers. One of the most important factors of the success of a guided reading lesson hinges upon the students access to large numbers of texts that represent a large variety of reading levels. This is important because young readers will demonstrate a wide range of abilities and they need texts that will reflect these abilities. It isn't easy for teachers to get their hands on the quantity and quality of reading materials they require due to lack in budgets across public school systems. Much of the burden of acquiring these materials is placed upon the teachers themselves. Basal reading programs are the biggest resource for providing early reading instruction and the article talks about ways that these basal readers can be adapted to fit the guided reading process.

Guided Reading Lesson Training Video

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