Solving words

This week, after reading a chapter on "sounding it out"  from Catching Readers Before They Fall, I  looked back at my time spent in a kindergarten classroom last year, and realized that I was helping students  blindly during their reading time. What I thought was the incorrect way to approach reading, turned out to be a great strategy. I thought this chapter was interesting because it explained the process  that emerging readers use while figuring out a word as they are reading.

I remember last year I was listening to one of the kindergartners read out loud to me, and while the student was decoding words she would sometimes invent words or just look at the pictures and not the letters. I remember how concerned I felt after seeing this child make up words while she was reading. I just assumed she was clueless and wanted to get the reading done with so she could go and play. I was also telling her to look at the letters and not the pictures because that is how she would "solve the word".  Now I realize how she was doing exactly what she should have been doing. Just like all emerging readers, she was using other information in the book to predict, decode, and solve the word.  It is in fact a useful tool for students to look at the pictures to help them make meaning, predict, and become familiar with repeated words in the story.  I now look back at this moment in my teaching career and wish I could go back and encourage everything she was doing.

*This picture book is a great example of using the pictures to predict certian words. For example if the student cannot read the word fish or Swimming, they can predict the word by looking at the illustration.



In the future I will make sure to encourage students to use all of the information that is provided on the page, including pictures! The way teachers can help students predict words or make meaning of a sentence is by modeling the sources for them. An example the chapter points out is a very authentic and simple way to show students how to figure out a word independently. The teaching model should not be overused, however when shown to students during an appropriate time it can be effective (especially for spelling). During a shared reading or writing block the teacher should be thinking aloud to demonstrate strategies while reading or spelling words. One example that I thought was great from the chapter was in a writing lesson where the teacher accidentally writes look instead of took. This is a great teaching moment for students because the teacher can think aloud by prompting students with questions such as "does that make sense in the sentence"? Once students realize that the teacher wrote look, this can open a discussion of how the ending of look and took are the same, and it teaches students to self-monitor their own spelling and reading. I think that modeling strategies such as this, becomes a great teaching moment because it is how we get students to think, question and learn from their mistakes.

Comprehension

In “Catching Readers Before they Fall”, the text discusses a variety of components that are a part of reading comprehension. Part of this recipe for helping children make meaning of their reading, involves teaching strategies, questioning, and visualizing. In order for the student to achieve a proficient level of comprehension they have to know how and when to “self- initiate” these various components.

As teachers we do not want to talk at, or spoon-feed students in how to do things. Our goal is to guide students by modeling and gradually releasing the responsibility to the student. In order to do so, we must constantly model, demonstrate, and guide practice.  The two strategies presented in the text are called spotlighting and heavy-handed. Spotlighting, involves the teacher talking about how the strategy will help the students understand a story, which involves more modeling on how to think through something. As opposed to heavy-handed, where the teacher “treats the strategy as the end goal in and of itself, as well as having the students do the strategy rather than emphasizing meaning making of texts”.  Some students may need more modeling and guided reading than others however students will eventually reach the end goal of being independent.

            

Questioning is another part of comprehension, for example in the text it discusses asking questions before, during and after a reading. I have noticed that in the previous elementary classes I have observed in students need the modeling of where to start asking questions before it becomes natural for them as they read.  Another advantage of questioning as you read is that it can keep the reader thinking on their toes. I know that when I observe teachers asking questions as they read or after they read, a student’s thinking may change or they can make meaningful new connections.

Visualization is one component that aids this comprehension. Illustrations and imagery in text is so important for readers because it allows them to enhance their comprehension. Making the picture in your head or being able to see an illustration after reading a text can help the reader make different connections that words sometimes cannot create. That is why it is so important to teach students to visualize what they are reading and have them interpret the story in their own way.

Backwards Letters (research article 1)

One topic of concern that many parents and teachers may have with young students learning literature, is appropriately addressing if a child is dyslexic. Knowing if a child has dyslexia can be confusing for many parents and teachers most of the time. I think it is important to understand as a teacher when to detect dyslexia when working with students. After reading the article "Backwards Letters: Could it be Dyslexia?" by Julie Williams, I started to grasp a better understanding of the many myths of dyslexia.

In this article the first myth discussed is,"you'll know its dyslexia when a kid flips letters or misspells a lot". I had always heard of this statement and assumed that was true, however I began to question this myth after spending time in a kindergarten classroom last year. I noticed that most of the students in the beginning of the year flipped the letters such as "b",  "d" and "P", but after the second half of the year I noticed a huge improvement in the students writing. There were still three or four students who continued to confuse writing the letters "b"and "d" however those students would pronounce the word correctly. Even while the student would write "bog" instead of "dog", they would still pronounce it with the "d" sound. I assumed because the student was still writing the letter backwards that they were  dyslexic. However, I learned from this article that "backwards letters alone do not cause worry...In Kindergarten, dyslexic kids will have trouble in several related areas, such as not making the all-important connection between letters, sounds, and the word meaning". As a result, writing words with backwards letters is not the only issue when looking at dyslexia. There is a combination of many factors that play into it.
Another common myth discussed in this article is "You can't really diagnose dyslexia until a child is seven or eight".  According to this article, it is best to intervene as soon as possible, "early intervention is key, the longer you wait the more problems grow".  This reminded me of the reading from "catching readers before they fall" because both articles emphasize how the earlier you intervene for writing and reading, the more teachers can prevent a student from falling behind. I don't think there is a specific time frame for intervention because it should be applied the first moment a student shows signs for falling behind.


Source:
Williams, Julie. 2008. Retrieved online. http://www.education.com/magazine/article/Kinder_dyslexia_warning_signs/

Learning to write

Dr. Rowe states in the "Voice of Literacy" podcast, "all kids wont walk into the literacy doors the same way...If they aren't a procedural learner then its fine, instead let them pretend their way into writing." For example if a child is playing "restaurant" and writing down an order, that is developing progress. This idea of children learning while they play is very interesting to me because children are doing it all the time. They are learning when they are not even realizing it. I believe it is so important to let young children learn through play, and for teachers to design play into their lessons. Again, as we saw in the "Donut House" article from last week, the idea of play is being integrated into children's learning and the teachers lessons.

Children are not only learning from invented play but they are also learning from invented writing. In the article, Teaching Phonemic Awareness by Rasinski and Padak, they discuss research behind invented spelling. After research conducted with a group of first graders "who were encouraged to show invented spelling were more fluent writers and better word recognizers than children who experienced a traditional spelling curriculum". While in the lower grade classrooms I think it is important to hold back from criticizing young children's spelling mistakes. Even if a child is spelling the word incorrectly at first it is still showing a great deal of learning.

After seeing the writing sample from the kindergarten student in the article Every Mark on the Page: Educating Family and Community members about Young Children's writing, it brought me back to an experience of my own last year in a Kindergarten class. I remember while I was helping out in the beginning of the year many of the students were becoming familiar with the alphabet and learning to write all of the letters. Many times I remember telling students the "correct" way of spelling a word as they wrote in their journals, however after reading about invented spelling I look back and realize that I should have just let the students continue spelling the words how they interpreted them. Another mistake I caught myself doing was reading a students writing and asking what they meant to write. After reading the article, a great way to figure out what a kindergartner is writing, can be to ask the student to read it out-loud. I think that overall it is important to encourage students early on in their writing, even though they make mistakes.
Another important way to help students write is by educating the parents. I love the idea of sending newsletters to parents informing them about different ways to incorporate writing at home.