Assessment

This week I read the article, “A Child’s Response to Intervention Requires a Responsive Teacher of Reading”.  IDEA offers U.S. schools confronting rising enrollments of students with learning disabilities two options for individuals with disabilities. The first option is that local education agencies can use as much as 15% of their special education funds to pay for early intervening services and to support professional development and literacy instruction. Second, offered by IDEA response to Intervention that can be used to provide early interventions with labeling students at risk for school failure as learning disabled.  The article then goes into the fundamental principles of the RTI Model. The main principles are ensuring identification of a struggling child, provide effective intervening services, and monitor the child.

Overall, it is pretty evident that a struggling child needs an expert teacher.  A teacher needs to be trained and know how to work with children who are lower-performing learners. Given the federal requirement for evidence-based interventions, the most reliable source for teachers, administrators, researchers, and policymakers seeking effective reading interventions is the What Works. TheWWC’s mission is to provide “a central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education.” The article offered some good information on RTI and the requirements of a teacher who is teaching a struggling student. 

Real Life Reading Inquiry

I observed my five-year old niece, Keelyn, for my Real Life Reading Inquiry. Keelyn is in Kindergarten, and from what I have seen, it seems that they are stressing reading a lot more in Kindergarten than I remember. She comes home every day from class with a letter assignment; they randomly go through the alphabet and pick a letter for that day. Then the assignment requires them to pick objects or toys from around the house that begin with that letter, and that are small enough to fit in their backpack. It seems that her teacher is really building a great foundation for these children to start reading on.

I went to my parent’s house to observe Keelyn read, and she knew I was coming so she wanted to show off her new skills, so she already had all the books she wanted to read out on the floor. The first book she read is titled “I am Going” by Mo Williams. The book is extremely repetitive, but seems to focus on some basic first words that are important for children to learn when they first begin reading. She was extremely proud of herself that she could read the whole book by herself, but after a few minutes of listening to her I started to realize a few things about her reading. Although, she was reading some words, it was almost as if she had the book memorized. After talking to mom, I learned that both my dad and mom read that book to her numerous times that week.

After this book, we moved on to a few more books; “Biscuit Visits the Big City”, “Flat Stanley and the Haunted House”, and “Mac and Cheese”. Since these books were a little more difficult compared to the first book she read, I could she her frustration setting in. If she didn’t know a word, like the word never, she would say the word no instead. She recognized the n, but didn’t know the rest of the word. When I corrected her, she would get frustrated and would want to quit reading. I let her finish reading the books and she would ask me for help on at least every page.

From observing Keelyn read, I would say she is in the logographic stage of reading. She acquires small sight vocabulary or written words, and according to the handout from class logographic stage is, "not yet reading the letters in the words but are trying to find any identifiable feature that will help them remember the words." I think she can read some words, but she is still at the stage where she is reading from what she remembers, and recognizes a lot of words.  Regardless of her stage of reading, I think she is the smartest, cutest five-year old out there!

From the books we read, we finished her Thanksgiving class project. It required you reading a certain amount of books, and each book title would be written on a feather. When you are done reading all the books, you put the feathers together to a make a turkey!

Guided Reading

The article I read is titled Guided Reading for ALL students. It states that guided reading “is the process by which we can help students to be strategic in their reading- and improve their skills at getting information from books”. The article says that during Guided Reading students actively participate in the group reading process – by listening and making their own conclusions about the text. The author believes that Guided Reading is never about passively listening as a book is read – it is about each and every student actively listening to the book and participating in the discussion after it has been read. An important part of Guided Reading is repeated reading of a text – every day for a week – and setting a different purpose each time the book is read. The articles says that the purposes need to be broad and encourage the students to listen to the whole book…

If the book being read is “Where is the Green Sheep? ” by Mem Fox , broad purposes would be: “Read the book to tell me your favorite color sheep” or “Read the book to discuss the funniest thing a sheep does”. It says it is best to avoid narrow purposes, such as “tell me two colors of sheep” as many students would only listen for the first two colors and then their focus would move to remembering “the answer” rather than listening to the whole text. Narrow purposes also tend to be more obvious – so they don’t encourage a student to process a whole text and problem solve.

The article also addresses student with disabilities, one of the concerns she gets about guided reading to children with disabilities is that people feel the students can’t participate in guided reading because they don’t understand what is expected of them. Her response is that until we expect them to understand, and give them the opportunity to participate, then they won’t be able to do it. We need to see the students we work with as readers and writers – we need to have an expectation that they CAN succeed. I believe this statement completely, we do not know what each student is capable of until we include them and see what they are capable of.

http://sealbark.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html  - Watch Me!

This video is awesome! It shows what children with disabilities are capable of reading, and we should not judge them off their disability, you have to treat them the same as any other child that is learning to read, and help them in the same ways.

-Do you have any tips on guided reading to children with disabilities? I searched and searched and couldn’t find too much on the subject. 

Vocabulary

Paparazzi- that is what my five-year old niece told me I should be for Halloween when I asked her last week when I was trying to plan a last minute costume. She told me she heard that word earlier that day at school when all the parents were taking pictures of the students in their Halloween costumes. At that point, my niece had no idea what the meaning the word paparazzi was, but that just proves that a child can pick up a new word after hearing it once, and even add it to their vocabulary. I explained what the paparazzi is to my niece, and within the past week she has used her new word every time she has seen a camera.

The article I read this week, “Vocabulary Lessons”, made me think of the example of my niece and the new word she learned.  Children can hear a word once and automatically add it to their vocabulary. The article explained the importance of a good vocabulary and provided some ideas and tools to teach students new words while enhancing their vocabulary.  The authors stated that…

“Playing with words enables students to develop a metacognitve understanding of how words work. When learning is fun, students become interested in words and see them as objects that they can use and examine”.

 I think that is the most important part to the article, because children need a fun way to associate things when they are learning anything new. Great examples are using word walls to introduce new words or letting the students act out a new word. Another important thing to teaching vocabulary is providing strategies for independence, so when the student is stuck on a word they have the means to discover the definition.  A great way to do that is teach students the importance of a dictionary and how to use one, and then provide them with one so that they are able to independently look up a new word.