Brown Book Club: Initial Post 1
Emma Newton
Generally speaking, I found the reading we did this week to be rather informative, and I enjoyed learning about all of the different ways that professionals in the education field today are thinking about reading and comprehension. However, while reading the first chapter I found myself feeling rather frustrated. I understand that being an "Active Reader" and making self to text connections is an extremely important part of reading and comprehension, but how can I be worried about that when more than half of my first grade students can not decode (read) the text. At first I was thinking, Well this chapter is rather irrelevant to my experience at this point in time, but now I feel completely different.
Although the majority of my students need to learn to decode text and read, we should still be teaching them (mostly through example, in my opinion) strategies to use while reading that will encourage them to be active readers that are making connections to the text that help them to comprehend. As the reading pointed out through the "story" at the beginning of chapter two about a teacher, Steph, and her second grade student, Alverro, sometimes when students focus so much on decoding (and often teachers too) students fail to remember what they read making it impossible for them to comprehend and make connections in their mind that allow them to learn through reading. I now understand we must take the time to encourage students to ask questions about the text and relate to it, even if we are concerned about their ability to decode text.
Furthermore, In my mind I feel this weeks reading pushed the importance of constructing relevant curriculum that the students are interested in and have prior knowledge about so that it will encourage and allow them to easily make connections and relate to it. Constructing a relevant curriculum I feel is extremely important in relation to the majority of the definitions of comprehension throughout the first four chapters of Strategies that Work. However, I also feel that is easier said than done. I hope to learn more about my students interests and prior knowledge so that they can relate and make text to self connections whether is be with a text they are reading or with something I am reading to them. I would also love to learn more about strategies that my mentor teacher uses to build a relevant curriculum.
Emma, I completely agree with you about feeling like some of the topics do not apply to first grade. While the information was helpful and thought provoking I could not see a place for it in first grade where reading is such a new task. After reading the text this weekend I kept my eyes open yesterday during school and I realized that my mentor teacher was actually doing some of the things that were in the book. She used a lot of explicit instruction when introducing the students to Reading Street, our reading curriculum. She also did a great job of modeling what some of the tasks would look like. She thought aloud and showed the students exactly what was expected of them. I think this made the activity go much smoother and gave the students a deeper understanding of the text they were reading. I agree with your last comment of your post about finding out more about how our mentors built their curriculums. The Kersten and Pardo article left me with some questions about how exactly one would have time to do all of the things the Celina and Emily did. I really like the way that they taught their reading and writing and they were able to incorporate so much to their instruction all at the same time. My question is how did they plan for all of that? How did they know the students would not be overwhelmed with everything they were learning at one time? Some of the examples from both the book and the article seemed a bit too perfect, but in the classroom on Monday my mentor seemed to pull it off to a certain extent. I would love to learn how to do this. I also did not realize how important modeling and explicit instruction are so I will be watching for my mentor to do this and will try to add it to my own instruction.
ReplyDeleteMy initial thought when I read chapter one was similar to yours. I kept thinking to myself that this isn't going to be useful information to me because less than half of my students can read. In my class, we test for comprehension during read alouds. After reading a book, we discuss what happened in the book to check for comprehension. We are really focusing on sight words and letter-sound relationships, so we are trying to work those into all of the books we read as well.
ReplyDeleteI also feel that it is so imperative to make our lessons relevant and meaningful for our students. If they are not engaged with what we are teaching them, they are likely to lose interest. We try and select books that we think the children could relate to or books that would be interesting to them. Before recess one day, we read "The Playground Problem", which is a story about some boys that won't let the girls play with them and decide at the end of the book that playing with them isn't so bad after all. This book also focused on the /p/ sound that we were learning that day. It also gave us a chance to go over our rules again and remind the students of the behavior we expect of them.
I feel that chapter 3 really broke down the five components of comprehension strategies. Teacher modeling is so important and it is something we do in our classroom every single day. Guided practice, collaborative practice and independent practice are also important things we do in our classroom. I would like to see my students be able to apply the strategies in authentic reading situations, but I feel like this will take some time for them to master.
It can be difficult to assess every single child on a regular basis, so I like how chapter 3 laid out other ways to check if readers are understanding what they are reading. Some of these include observing their behavior and listening in on conversations.
I am looking forward to learning different strategies that I can test in my classroom!
I am also placed in first grade and I agree with your feelings about the topics discussed in the chapters. Most of our first graders cannot decode text and can "read" books by looking at pictures in a book. However, I realized that my mentor teacher connects reading and writing to make her students be active readers. As Chapter 1 mentions, "getting readers to think when they read, to develop an awareness of their thinking [...] are the primary goals of the comprehension instruction" (p. 13, Harvey & Goudvis), my mentor teacher tries to bring out their thoughts related to the book. As an example, she reads out a book and would share students' thoughts and experiences related to the book. Then, she asks her students to go back to their seats and lets them draw and write words their thinking. We do not help them with spelling or help them come up with ideas. Lastly, when they are done we ask them to read what they wrote out loud. As they read their words, some of them eventually find mistakes such as letters that are omitted.
ReplyDeleteSo as they involve listening, thinking and writing (drawing and writing some words), they become a part of active readers.
However, I observed some students who lost their interests or motivation to write words since they feel like they cannot write a letter. Therefore, I think I still need to see whether there are things that can motivate all the first graders to be involved in reading and writing.