Theory to Practice

 

After completing this course I have had the chance to reflect on my own reading practices in the classroom as well as my philosophy of reading. After reading the article, “The Peter Effect”, really got me thinking about how I teach reading to my students. It is so important that I remain enthusiastic about reading with my students, especially teaching such a young age where our goal is for them to fall in love with reading. It was very eye opening reading this article and realizing that my love for reading needs to be shown explicitly throughout my teaching. Ruddell, also states in his article the importance of teachers modeling not only how to be fluent readers but modeling the joy of reading as well. This joy will soon reflect off on our students and they too will become enthusiastic about reading.  As teachers we need to be knowledgeable of the information we teach, but at the same time we need to make it engaging and rigorous for our students.

All of the articles and assignments we have had over the last few weeks really had me thinking about the reading process and how I implement it in my classroom. Carroll, states that there is not a set procedure to follow when learning to read. Students are all going to learn to read at their own pace in different ways. This is important for me to remember when teaching my students to read. Not every student is going to be able to grasp all of the strategies I teach. I have to remember to differentiate and not get fixated on a certain strategy if a student is not understanding, it is okay to move on and try something new. Students do not have to master a skill before moving on to a new skill. They should be learning them simultaneously.

One concept that has helped me leave this course with a better understanding of the reading process is the use of metacognition in the classroom. It is so important for not only my students to use metacogniton when reading and learning something new, but for myself as well.  As a kindergarten teacher I want to set the foundation for my students’ learning and thinking. This starts with modeling. I have always modeled reading strategies to my students, but now when I do this I am also going to model my thinking process. This will in turn show my students how they should be thinking when reading a text. They should be asking themselves questions and figuring out different strategies to use to decode a text. Another concept that has helped me better understand the reading process was the use of phonemic awareness.  The article, ” A Test for Assessing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children” by Yopp was  very beneficial to me as kindergarten teacher. It was helpful reading about the different strategies and activities used to teach phonemic awareness such as Elkonin Boxes and ” What am I thinking of”?

As a result of this course one method I want to try with my students is the Dialogic Reading Method using the PEER sequence. After reading this article and writing up my own lesson to teach to my students , I want to try incorporating these lessons into more reading activities. I  love that the children essentially become the storytellers of the book. This gets the students more engaged in the reading of storybooks even if they are unable to read all of the words. It is a great way to start conversations about a text and really dive deep into students’ comprehension.

I have learned a lot about the reading process and how to implement reading in my classroom throughout this course. I am excited to try new strategies with my students and expand my knowledge of reading with them. This course was very beneficial to me as a teacher and I cannot wait to share what I have learned.

 

Phonemic awareness is the capability to focus on and manipulate sounds in spoken words.  It is strongly related to success in reading and spelling achievement. Phonemic awareness is a more powerful predictor of reading achievement than nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, and listening comprehension. Students will not be able to learn to read unless they have phonemic awareness, it is a significant variable in both whole language and traditional classrooms.

Years ago, many researchers did not see the importance in phonemic awareness. Over the years teachers and researches have come to realize the importance of students learning phonemic awareness in order to become successful readers. It is essential that kindergarten and first grade teachers use tools and strategies to teach their students phonemic awareness and make sure they are successful in order to become successful and fluent readers.

There are many tools to assess phonemic awareness in students. The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation was found to be the most successful. This assessment measures a child’s ability to separately articulate sounds of a spoken word in order. Students are orally given a word such as cat, they then need to be able to segment the words into sounds such as /c/ /a/ /t/. The test has 22 items in which students are to tell the administrator the sounds they hear in each word. The appropriate response for this assessment is letter sounds, not letter names. It is necessary that the administrator gives feedback to the students and let them know if they are correct or not and provide the appropriate response. Teachers should expect a wide range of scores when administering this assessment in kindergarten. This assessment also allows teachers to take notes on their students’ responses in order to better understand their students and their needs.

As a kindergarten teacher this article was very informative and relatable to my teaching.  Phonemic awareness is a huge part of my every day teaching. One strategy that I want to incprporate in my classroom after reading this article is the guessing game, “What am I thinking of?” The teacher will give a category and then give the sounds in the word and the students have to guess the word by blending the sounds in together. I can see my students enjoying this game and at the same time practicing their phonemic awareness. In our district we use Reading Wonders program to teach reading. A big part of that in kindergarten is phonemic awareness and blending sounds together to make words. While reading about Elkonin boxes it reminded me of what I use with my students to teach phonemic awareness. I use a smart board activity where students have to drag chips (which have a sound) to a sound box, blend the sounds together, say the word, and then we spell the word in the boxes. I have found that this activity is a great visual for students when learning how to read and spell.  Mid- year I would like to try this assessment with my students after incorporating some of the different phonemic awareness strategies and activities.

Metacognition is thinking about one’s thinking. It is the process used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. It includes a critical awareness of one’s thinking and learning as well thinking of oneself as a thinker and learner. Metacognitive practices increase students’ abilities to transfer and familiarize their learning to new strategies and tasks. Students do this by thinking of themselves as learners and how they would differentiate for different classes and learning situations. When students are aware of the different problem solving strategies and how to implement them in in their learning they are more likely to use and practice them. In turn, students then start to become aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Many students are unaware of how to use these problem solving strategies in their learning and are not using their metacognition. These students then begin to struggle in school and a do not become aware of their strengths and weaknesses. As Dunning, Johnson, Ehlrlinger, and Kruger state, ” If people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s are right or wrong.”

As teachers we need to teach students metacognition and to be aware of their own thinking. We can do this by modeling when reading. As a kindergarten teacher I do this all the time when reading aloud to my students. I always tell them that good readers stop and ask themselves questions as they read. As I read with my students I will stop and ask myself questions about what the author is trying to tell us, make predictions, or discuss a particular vocabulary word that be in tricky. In turn I hope that my students are watching me and then use these strategies when they are reading at home or on their own. Everything we do in class I make sure to model before to not only show my students how to do it but also to show them the thought process that goes into it.

Throughout my teaching whether it be in reading, math, science, writing, etc. I always ask my students ” how did you figure that out?” Especially in math I tell my students it is great that they gave me an answer but the answer means nothing unless you can tell me how you got it. It is so important to ask students questions all throughout their learning. While reading we always stop and talk about the story. I will ask students questions about the characters and events happening in the story. This shows me if they are using the strategies taught in class and really comprehending what is being read. It is important that students start thinking about their own thinking starting in kindergarten and expand their metacognition throughout the years.

The article, Raising Urban Students’ Literacy Achievement by engaging in authentic, challenging work  by William H. Teale and Linda B. Gambrell discusses the achievement gap of students in urban schools compared to those students in higher income families. Those students in lower- income families are performing lower in reading and writing. This is due to funding inequity, poverty, high student and teacher mobility, a home-school “disconnect, and a lack of adequate teacher preparation.

The authors analyze the results of a literacy curriculum innovation, I2B, developed by Nina Zolt. This program discusses the achievement gap and was implemented to motivate students in grades 2-5 to read, think, and write by matching them up with adult pen pals.  Students receive five carefully selected grade level books in different genres or domains such as fiction, social studies, biography, folktales and science. Most students found these books engaging and were excited and motivated to read them.  Teachers also receive these books as well as other curriculum resources for planning purposes.  Teachers are also provided with professional development in order to teach this program. Students are then matched with adult pen pals who are also reading the same books as they are. The students are to write and discuss the books they are reading with their pen pals. The pen pals are coached on how to respond to the students by making connections, asking open ended questions, and making personal connections with the students.

The results of this innovation show that students whose teachers implemented this for 3 or more years performed higher than those students who had teachers who only implemented this program for a year or two.

I love how the article talked about the students’ engagement in this curriculum. Students were engaged and motivated to write to a live audience rather than just writing to their teacher for a grade. I think this is so important to think about. Students do get tired of writing only to their teacher just to receive a grade back. No wonder there are so many students who do not find writing enjoyable. It is much more enjoyable to write when you are getting a response back and can have a conversation with someone about your writing without worrying about a score.

I also liked how the article talked about how students were engaged because of the texts that were chosen. The books were carefully thought out based on five characteristics: quality, cultural diversity, range of levels, featured children solving problems, and uplifting tones. The books that were chosen were catered to students and their interests. When a student is interested in a topic they are more likely to be engaged and want to learn more. The children were excited to go home and read these books, they were excited to talk about them with their pen pals and could have meaningful conversations. It is imperative that teachers think of their students and their interests when choosing a text they want their students to engage in.

This article really got me thinking of somehow incorporating pen pals into some of my lessons in the classroom. I think it is important for students to not only communicate their writing with their teacher but with an authentic audience who can respond and ask them questions about their reading and writing. It is always important for students to be educated on cultural diversity and this would be a perfect way to do so.   This is something I am going to look into this year for my students.

The article,  Role of the Reader’s Schema in Comprehension, Learning, and Memory by Richard C. Anderson explains the schema theory and how it relates to learning and comprehension in the classroom. Schema is a person’s prior knowledge based on their past experiences. Schemata goes hand in hand with comprehension, not only of a text but also of new concepts being learned.  Anderson states, ” In schema-theoretic terms, a reader comprehends a message when he is able to bring to mind a schema that gives him a good account of the objects and events described in the messages.” Students are only going to be able to comprehend what they already know. Students are going to be more engaged in a text if they can relate to it and have some prior background knowledge to the topic being taught.  Anderson gave a lot of great examples throughout the article of different sentences and passages that would only make sense to a person with some schema about the topic. If a student does not have any background knowledge on a text that is being read it is going to be harder for them to construct and interpret what is being read. As a teacher we need to activate schema to help students better understand a text. Students are going to comprehend and remember what they read if they are interested in the topic as well as have some prior information on the topic in which they already know.

Schema is also based on culture. Every person’s schemata is going to be different based on where they grew up, their religion, their occupation, race, etc. Some people may read a passage and get a completely different interpretation of it than another person just based on their past experiences and perspectives.  This is why it is so important as teachers that we get to know each and every one of our students and understand their backgrounds. This is going to help us as teachers become better teachers in being able to have our students activate that prior knowledge. If we are unaware of what our students know and don’t know we are not going to be able to help them succeed in the classroom.

As teachers it is important that we ask questions that will activate students’ prior knowledge. Before reading a book in guided reading, we always make a prediction based on the front cover and go for a “picture walk” and ” sight word walk”. This helps me determine what words and information students already know before reading the text. This also helps diminish some students’ anxiety about reading when we have talked about the pictures and some of the words. This helps students make text to text and text to self connections.

Another strategy that I like to use with my students is the use of a KWL chart before starting a new unit or discussing a new topic. I think it is important for me as a teacher to see what students already know so I do not have to spend as much time on those points and then see what students want to know, which are things I will spend more time on.

Using schema in the classroom is so important for teachers. We need to get to know our students and where they came from. This will help us better instruct them to be great readers and great learners.

 

The article, Learning About Literacy: A 30- Year Journey, by P. David Pearson and Diane Stephens takes us on a journey of literacy through the decades and how it has changed over time through the different perspectives such as linguistic, psycholinguist,cognitive psychology, and sociolinguistic.

In the 1960s reading was considered very simple and straightforward. There was no difference between oral and written language comprehension. Reading was considered a perceptual process versus a language process. The methods of teaching during this time involved phonics and whole- word instruction.

Theorists then started to take interest in the reading process and linguistics came into play. Noam Chomsky believed people were born to “acquire” language skills in the community where they were raised. The article then goes on and discusses the  Pyshcolinguistic, cognitive, psychology, and sociolinguistic theories. Goodman talks about a three cue system to make sense of a word: syntactic, semantic, and graphophonemic. These cues were meant to help students increase word identification and comprehension. Then in the 1970s Frank Smith came out and said that reading is not taught, but one learns to read from reading. Smith stated that skilled readers make use of their prior knowledge in order to become better readers. The Schema theory was then developed in the 1980s where we are encouraged to have students use their prior knowledge ( or their memory) to help them learn new reading strategies. It is so important for students to make connections to their own lives in order to better understand a new topic being introduced.

The psyscholinguistic theory had us rethink the relationship between teaching and learning. A quote that really stood out to me while reading this article was ” Instead of asking, “What can I teach this child so that she will eventually become a reader?” we began to ask, ” What can I do to help this child as a reader?” ”  This is how teachers should think when teaching their students to read. Every child is a reader, it is a matter of what you as the teacher are going to do to help them succeed as a reader. In my classroom I encourage reading at all parts of our day.

Reading has come such a long way through the years through all of these theories.  I am sure in the next few years there will be more research and theories to come. Reading is no longer just memorization of words and translating letters on a printed page.  Reading is anything but simple. There are so many different strategies that go in to teaching reading. In my classroom I want my students to be excited about reading. Many of them are just being introduced to books and reading. It is so important to me that my students want to read and do not see reading as being forced upon them. I am going to give my students opportunities to discuss texts with their peers as well as relating the texts we are reading in class to their own lives. I think it is important for students to talk with their peers about what their thoughts are on a certain topic instead of just listening to what the teacher has to say. As I  have said before, my goal is for students to love coming to school and love reading. It does not matter if they are the best reader or a struggling reader, I just want them to find joy in reading.

I am a kindergarten Teacher in the Downingtown Area School District. This is my third year teaching kindergarten and I absolutely love it. My favorite thing to teach my students is how to read and write. Kindergarten is such a crucial time for students when it comes to reading.  It is amazing seeing the growth of my students throughout the year.

A lot of students come into kindergarten not knowing how to write their name, recognize letters, or sounds. By the the end of the year these same students are reading books on grade level. There is such a huge jump from beginning of the year kindergarten to the end. There is also a huge range of academic levels which is why it is so important to differentiate my instruction for my students.

I differentiate my instruction in many different ways. I group my students according to academic levels during our center time. Each center will be working on a different reading or writing activity based on their academic level. We also do RTII in my school. What this looks like in the beginning of kindergarten is as a whole we teach Fundations to all kindergarten students. By mid-year we look at our students and decide which students still need the instruction from Fundations and which students are ready to move on. We then group students based on their reading level and academic needs and we have small instructional groups led by a teacher or aide. Those students who still need that Fundations instruction will meet with our literacy specialists during this time for this instruction.

In the article, ” The Nature of the Reading Process”, Carroll ( 1985) talks about teaching students to read and how there is not a ” one size fits all” approach. All students are going to learn to read at their own pace using different strategies. This is why I group my students based on their instructional needs. Some students are going to need practice with their letter names and sounds while other students are going to be working on comprehension questions. Carroll ( 1985) states that reading skills should not be taught one skill at time until the student masters that skill. It is important to teach students multiple skills that they can use in their reading.

I think it is so important to remember that every child can learn and it is our jobs as teachers to help these students learn in the best way for them. Right now in the beginning of the year I am in process of getting to know each and every one of my students and figuring out how they are best going to learn and succeed in my classroom. 

 

 

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton