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.