Organizing for Literacy

"Every child deserves excellent reading teachers because teachers make a difference in children's reading achievement and motivation to read." - International Reading Association

Excellent teachers are important to students everywhere in the world. Reading may be considered a basic task, but reading instruction is often overlooked. The complexity and details that must be focused on create a challenging, but rewarding job for all teachers instructing reading.

    1. They understand reading and writing development, and believe all children can learn to read and write.
It is so important for teachers to students and teachers to recognize that everyone has the ability to read. It would be very negatively impacting for a child to think of themselves as a "bad reader", because reading is used in all subjects of school and all around in everyday life. Reading is often looked at by students as a chore, and it is important for teachers to try to put this idea to rest and show their students that reading is fun and so important.
    2. They continually assess children's individual progress and relate instruction to children's previous experiences.
In order for children to understand unfamiliar text, it is especially effective to make connections to their personal lives. When students hear something that they have interest or previous knowledge in, new information is much easier to learn.
    3. They know a variety of ways to teach reading, when to use each method, and how to combine the methods into an effective instructional program.
    4. They offer a variety of materials and texts for children to read.
One of the most challenging aspects of reading instruction, is that every child progresses at their own pace. It is imperative for teachers to focus on each child as an individual so that they are not being pushed to fast or kept lagging behind. There are several techniques in reading instruction and different forms can be used for various types of students and readers.
    5. They use flexible grouping strategies to tailor instruction to individual students.
Similarly to above, it is important to gear the reading instruction to the particular students you are working with. Grouping strategies are very successful techniques for group of students who are learning and progressive at a similar rate. These students can progress together and ask each other about their learning processes as they go, giving them something to relate to.
    6. They are good reading "coaches" (that is, they provide helpful strategy).
The best reading teachers are supportive, patient and flexible in their teaching strategies. It is essential for teachers to be able to recognize the different leveled readers, and to push them appropriately, not too fast but not too slow. The best reading teachers know a good balance and serve as a positive and helpful position in the students process of learning to read.

It is important to make reading enjoyable and useful for students. For early readers, it is especially essential to give them a positive outlook on reading, and not become frustrated or disappointed in themselves. A good reading teacher will provide their classroom with appropriate resources and different strategies and techniques for teaching reading.

Assessment

Finding the appropriate level of text for beginning readers is an incredibly important task in demonstrating beneficial reading instruction. Students should be provided with text that is a balance between support and challenge. In other words, a child should be able to develop confidence while reading and understanding through comprehension, but it should be difficult enough to provide a challenge and require the reader to do some "reading work" to improve their skills. Grade-level approximations are frequently not suitable for all children in that perspective grade and should not merely be expected to read at one level across the whole classroom. Each child should be examined to determine the abilities that the student has. Instruction is said to be most effective when the reader can read about 9 out of 10 words and comprehend the meaning of the passage with little difficulty, this puts the students at successfully reading 90-95% of the words. More difficult text is said to be at a child's frustration level, which is not appropriate for learning or reading instruction. Giving a child text that is too challenging for them can damage their reading and their confidence, which would affect them negatively in various ways.

Three important aspects to keep in mind when establishing the correct text for a student are, the complexity of concepts and familiarity of subject matter, the degree of predictability of the text, and the proportion of unique or repeated words to familiar words. Each of these aspects provides different sections of a leveling system including vocabulary, size and layout of print, predictability, illustration support, and complexity of concepts.

Reading benchmarks are effective in early literacy and provide teachers with benchmarks for students to reach in their reading efficiency and success. Standardized tests should not be used for early reading assessment, but it is still important to collect data on the instructional reading levels of first- and second-grade students at two points in the year. The leveling process is improved and extended as research continues to be conducted, which helps teachers and reading instructors to be as successful as they can be for the students' success.

Guided Reading

Three Fundamental Purposes of Guided Reading:
     1. To meet the varying instructional needs of all the students in the classroom, enabling them to
         greatly expand their reading powers.
     2. To teach students to read increasingly difficult texts with understanding and fluency
     3. To construct meaning while using problem-solving strategies to figure out unfamiliar words that
         deal with complex sentence structures, and understand concepts or ideas not previously
         encountered.

Guided reading has been proven to be one of the most effective instructional strategies in teaching and improving reading. According to Anita Iaquinta's Guided Reading: A Research-Based Response to the Challenges of Early Reading Instruction, "It is estimated that one in three children experience significant difficulties in learning to read." It is also said that "a child who is a poor reading in first grade is 88% more likely to remain a poor reading in fourth grade." In order to establish a good foundation in reading, it is important to have effective teaching strategies, which is where guided reading comes in. Guided reading is a beneficial tool for children at all ages and reading levels. It can be used by teachers at various difficulties so that it is geared towards a children's level and they are not struggling to keep up or too knowledgeable for the material. The goal of guided reading is to teach readers to self-monitor, search for cues, discover new things about the text, check sources against each other, learn new words and develop a more thorough thought process with reading. Guided reading provides the necessary opportunity for teachers to teach reading strategies at the students; individual levels, which is a key competent for successful reading learning and comprehension.

Building Vocabulary

How many words do you know?
I was stumped by this question when I first read it in Cunningham and Allington's Classrooms That Work. For what seems like such a simple question, it requires a lot of thought and is actually incredibly difficult to answer. For starters, I couldn't think of an estimate of all of the words I knew, then as stated in the text, what does it mean to 'know' a word. There are thousands of words that I have heard or seen once or twice, but I don't know the spelling or what they mean. I may know something about a word but not its entirety, so do I know those words? These questions are just some of the thoughts that enter which make it difficult to determine the size of someone's vocabulary.

One useful strategy Classrooms That Works describes that is easy and accessible to use for all elementary teachers is "Picture Walks". This strategy helps develops children's vocabulary by going through a picture book before reading the story, stopping on a couple of pages and identifying some new vocabulary words as shown in the images. This will grab the students' attention when they read through the book and will help them remember these new words.

There are several fun games and activities that can be used to promote broadening children's vocabulary. One of these strategies, as talked about in Blachowitz and Fisher's Vocabulary Lessons is a vocabulary "word wall". The idea is to have students add new words to the wall when they came across them in conversations, books, magazines, etc. The teacher can make this into a class contest by awarding the students points for adding a new word, talking about where they saw or heard it, and using the word in a sentence. This activity gives students a positive way to look for new words and learn the context and fully understand them rather than memorizing the definition and spelling.

Vocabulary is a huge part of successful reading, because in order to understand difficult reading levels you must understand the challenging words that are in the text. It is important to increase children's vocabulary in elementary school so that the knowledge translates into their writing and speaking abilities.

Comprehension and Think-Alouds

"For years it seems as we have tested reading comprehension, but haven't taught it."

         - Sharon Ruth Gill

Although there is a significant amount of research and information regarding comprehension, it has been said by teachers that it is hard to find. Maybe the information itself is not hard to find, but more that it is challenging to incorporate the readings into lessons and make sense of the techniques. It is one thing to read about comprehension and its' importance, but it is entirely different to be able to teach this important skill to a classroom full of beginning readers. The Comprehension Matrix provides an accessible framework of major aspects in teaching comprehension. This framework focuses on the three main aspects, the reader, the text, and the situation. Each of these focuses goes into detail explaining activities, techniques, and strategies used during different stages of learning to read, pre reading, during reading, and post reading. For instance, the readers interest, physical state, and emotional state are some of the key interests, therefore during pre reading, it is necessary to help the student attain interest in the text, build background information, and model strategies. This matrix is extremely helpful in breaking down the different parts of reading and what teachers should focus on with each step.

It is essential for teachers to start teaching comprehension from the beginning. Kindergarteners can learn comprehension strategies, and teaching comprehension incorporated with teaching reading helps it to be a natural skill that isn't overlooked. When comprehension is learned at a young age, there is much more room to improve and develop personal strengths and techniques. Making connections is one example of teaching young students comprehension, and is something that children of all ages can do. The idea is to get the readers to connect the text to their individual lives, to spot similarities and differences, giving them things to relate to. Making connections with texts allows for much better understanding. Comprehension strategies and techniques can be used at all ages, and it is imperative that they be introduced sooner rather than later. 

Comprehension

Comprehension is a key factor in successful and meaningful reading, but is a complex skill that is often overlooked when teaching. Comprehension is primarily comprised of overall interest, background knowledge, and strategies of the reader, the style, organization, difficulty, and concepts of the text, and the situation or purpose of the reading. All of these focuses make up the Comprehension Matrix which illustrate effective comprehension in reading. As I stated, the three major factors of comprehension are the reader, the text, and the situation. Good readers are known to adjust their reading in different situations, for different purposes. The comprehension matrix focuses on pre reading, reading and post reading.

Some questions, from a teacher's perspective, that may help guide a student's comprehensive reading are

• What do my students know about this topic?
• How can I get my students interested in this topic?
• What strategies do my students need to learn?
• How can I help my students understand the vocabulary and contexts of this text?

It is important for teachers to preview texts and think about questions like this to help them determine what they want their students to get out of each reading assignment. 

Some strategies found to help students with comprehension strategies are Visualization and Mind Movies, Questioning and "I Wonders", Schema of background knowledge, and Inferring. Questioning and "I Wonders" promote students constantly questioning the text. This technique promotes a creative mind and thinking outside of just the text on the page, they are coming up with their own ideas and scenarios, based on what they have read. 

Working on comprehension at an early age is necessary to help provide students with groundwork to build on when working on more challenging reading situations. A short story is much easier to comprehend compared to a textbook. A student should start young so that they get into the habit of breaking down the text and really understanding it. This habit and formula will help them as they get into more complex reading and will provide the basics of comprehension strategies to help them. 

Word Study

It is a frequent phenomenon for kids learning how to read and write, to make up their own spelling of words. They write exactly what they hear, and because of the complex English language, their spelling generally makes no sense compared to the correct spelling of those words. While some may see this as children being careless or unintelligent, it is proven to be quite the opposite. In Patricia and James Cunningham's text Making Words: Enhancing the invented spelling-decoding invention, it is said that "In general, as children improve in their phonetic sophistication of their invented spellings, their later success in learning to read words becomes much more likely." After doing research, it is seen that children attempting to spell words increases their ability to read those words. Invented spelling seems to trigger something in the brain to recognize the words later and make sense of their phonetics, which will help children understand unfamiliar words in a challenging sentence. Instead of seeing children's invented spelling as simple playfulness and naive, we should recognize this as a step in their learning to become more sophisticated readers and writers. Invented spell in is a beneficial and healthy thing.

Knowing a word, really knowing a word, can be a difficult and thorough process. To fully know a words, in the eyes of Beck and McKeown, "requires a long process that involves multiple exposures in may contexts." There are some words that we know the definition, spelling, usage, etc., while other words we have simply heard here and there and recognize them when we hear them in familiar context. However, those words are not included in the words that we actually know. One extremely useful way to help children discover and learn new vocabulary is the "Ten Important Words" in which a student selects 10 important from a reading. This helps students connect words with a topic, and they then discuss and define the words to determine their meaning. Other beneficial strategies to learn new words are identifying where you might hear a word, listing synonyms and antonyms, draw pictures that depict the meaning, create a semantic map, act out the word, or find other sentences using the same word to figure out the meaning. Each of these strategies gives students exposure to new words, with alternative ways to remember the meaning. It is important to get students to engage with the text and not simply skim over words they are unfamiliar with, but rather, define and explore new words to broaden their vocabulary.

Poetry Performance

Purpose: To have students learn the importance of varying the pitch, rate and volume of their voices. Emphasizing different words will alter the meaning of the poem that the students are reading.

Exercise #1:

1. Use the following poem by Bruce Lansky for this exercise.

My Baby Sister

My baby sister’s
really swell.
I love her smile,
but not her smell.

(Note: All poems used in this study guide are copyright by Bruce Lansky.)

2. Have students take turns reading the poem emphasizing one word over the others. For example the first student reads it emphasizing "My" and the second student reads the poem emphasizing "baby," and so on until the last student has read the poem emphasizing the last word "smell."

3. Reading the selected word with emphasis means to say it louder, slower and more dramatically than the other words in the poem. If you emphasize "My" it means my baby sister as opposed to yours. If you emphasize "baby" it may mean your baby sister as opposed to your older sister.

4. Discuss how the meaning of the poem changes as different words are emphasized.

5. Teach your students that as they practice other poems to present in class that they can decide which words to emphasize. They can underline these words so that they can identify these words as they practice their poems.

http://www.poetryteachers.com/poetclass/performpoetry.htm

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/poetry-lesson-plan

Fluency

"Fluency i stye ability to read most words in context quickly and accurately and with appropriate expression", as defined by Cunningham and Allington in Classrooms That Work. 

When a reader doesn't have fluency they might experience:

• Lack of important information, because of lack of comprehension
• A headache because it is so difficult to concentrate on following the words
• Etc.

It is easier to read something with familiar text and/or content. When you are reading on an unfamiliar topic, you may have to look up or decode words and phrases, which slows down reading and fluency. Fluency is not reading one word at a time (i.e. hes--si--ta--ting), but rather putting words together with a "normal" expression, as if you were speaking the words. Fluent reading can be achieved by everyone, it is something that can be practiced time and time again, helped to improve each time. 

One indicator of fluency is reading rate, which is the average words per minute a person can read. Average reading rates increase throughout grade levels. Grade 1 = 60-90 wpm, eventually leading Adults = 250-300 wpm. 

Choral reading is one way to model expressive oral reading with fluency. To do so, you assign groups of students to different roles and let them read the parts of the different characters. Reassign the groups parts and read the story several times. This helps students get comfortable with reading words aloud, and is not as intimidating because they are reading in groups. They have heard these words or passages before, they are just repeating them again and again. 

As described by Rasinski's Educational Leadership, "Students need to hear what fluent reading sounds like and how fluent readers interpret text with their voices." which is who instructional efforts like assisted readings and repeated readings have proven to be especially effective. Fluency requires practice, and it will be hard to do correctly if the student has no idea what the words mean, therefore when a student first hears someone else say it and they repeat it, it is much easier and more effective for the student. Fluency is something that readers are always improving on, into high school and even beyond. It is an important skill in reading and comprehension that needs a big emphasis when instructed, because it affects the way a reader processes information and works through the words. 

Scholastic has 5 listed strategies to improve reading fluency, all of which I agree are effective and beneficial for students, especially in the early years of schooling:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/5-surefire-strategies-developing-reading-fluency 

Let's Get Kids Hooked On Phonics

In Classrooms That Work, Cunningham and Allington put a very strong emphasis on the importance of students being able to use their phonics knowledge to read. This knowledge not only helps readers understand words they have not seen before, but also enables them to write. They say that good readers look for patterns of letters they have seen together before and then search their mental word banks, looking for words with similar letter patterns.

Cunningham and Allington's opinion on strategies that good readers use to successfully decode unfamiliar words:
  1.   Recognize that this is an unfamiliar word, and look at all the letters in order
     2.  Search your mental word bank for similar letter patterns and the sounds associated with them
     3.   Produce a pronunciation that matches that of a real word that you know.
     4.  Reread the sentence to cross-check your possible pronunciation with meaning. If meaning 
         confirms pronunciation, continue reading. If not, try again.
     5.   If it's a big word – “chunk it”

    Recognizing patterns in words is one of the most important aspects of phonics and reading. When looking at short words, students need to focus on onsets -- commonly called big letters, and rimes --spelling patterns. When looking at big words, students should focus on morphemes -- prefixes, suffixes, and roots -- patterns that allow readers to quickly decode an spell longer words. Spelling and word patterns help readers gain meaning, and is especially important when reading polysyllabic words. One lesson in teaching phonics, is the Wheel of Fortune game. This helps students learn to identify patterns in bigger words and is an enjoyable and engaging game for the classroom.

In Clark's What can I say besides Sound it out article, the strategy of "Coaching" is highly recommended in reading instruction. 

Steps of Coaching

     1. Review the reading process

     2. Elaborate on coaching

     3. Present examples of coaching

     4. Share elements to consider when preparing to coach

     5. Discuss implications for practice, and offer conclusions about the nature of effective coaching

Coaching is said to promote thought, and helps foster students' ability to become strategic and independent readers. By giving cues to students and helping them along in the process, while having them to the primary thinking and explaining, you are causing the students to think in different ways that they would have previously. Also, by demonstrating this process, the effects will rub off onto the kids and they will start picking up on cues just as the "coach" is. I think coaching is an especially effective strategy in teaching phonics and reading, because they readers are repetitively walking through the process and explaining the reasoning behind why a word is the way that it is. 

The Literacy Club

Everyone is literate. Kindergartener's coming into their first day of school can read, regardless of their background culture or previous learning experiences. Donna Bell and Donna Jarvis' "Letting Go of 'Letter of the Week'"exemplifies the importance of valuing every child for their intelligence. They explain that all children should know they are valued as literate human beings, and are members of the literacy club. This appealing description of readers is one of the first ways to portray reading as an enjoyable activity, and something to be proud of. Their stance on reading which they tell students, and which I completely agree with, is that "reading is about making sense, not about calling words or sounding out". It is essential that students know that they are learning how to read, so that they can understand the world around them, not just because it is a a task in school. 

The IRA/NAEYC joint statement expresses their goal of helping children learn to read well enough by the end of third grade so that they can read to learn  in all curriculum areas. It is necessary, not only to be able to sound out a difficult word in a textbook, but to understand the meaning behind it and relate it to the topic at hand. The goal to help children learn how to read proficiently also focuses on helping them find interest in reading and writing "for their own enjoyment, information, and communication". As they pointed out, students are coming from more diverse backgrounds with different experiences than ever before. At the same time, basic proficiency in literacy has a higher standard than ever before, with comprehension and analysis, and it is only going to increase further.  

Both Donna Bell and Donna Jarvis, and the IRA/NAYEYC joint statement, put a strong emphasis on phonic awareness and different phonic strategies. Hallie Kay and Ruth Helen Yopp also focus on phonics in the classroom. They have multiple strategies of incorporating phonemic awareness in engaging ways for young children. 

I also especially like Donna Bell and Donna Jarvis' "Phonic Strategies":

1                  1. Look at the beginning letter or letters. Are they like letter in any words you already know?

2         2. Look through the word for familiar chunks. Are there nay chunks in this word that are like     

               chunks in words you already know?

           3. Read through to the end. Does the word end with letters that are in any words you already know?

   

   The overarching theme of these three articles, supports the idea that children are literate, and valued, at every age. It is important to establish strong literacy teaching, especially in the crucial learning period from birth to age 8. Teaching children that they are more than capable of becoming proficient in reading and writing gives them a positive outlook on the subject, and providing them with engaging instructions and activities in the classroom make learning much more enjoyable. 

Reading Is Fun!

One of my biggest goals as a teacher is to try to help students genuinely enjoy learning. Reading is the core subject of this goal, because when I was a student I hated reading. I saw reading solely as a task that had to be done, with books that I had no interest in.  I want to provide my students with options for reading materials, in hopes that their opinions will help them find something that they like and will want to continue learning about.

When I thought back about my experiences with learning how to read, a couple people in particular stuck out in my mind. My family played an important role in teaching me how to read. I am the youngest of three girls, so I always wanted to be able to do what my sisters could do, including reading. Both of my sisters read to me and with me often, along with both of my parents. I am fortunate that I had many people close to me helping me along, including my 5th grade teacher. In 5th grade, although I had already been through foundations of reading and knew how to read, my teacher helped bring out the pleasure of reading. After learning how to read, until 5th grade, it was my least favorite thing to do in school. I dreaded everything about reading, due largely to the fact that I had a very hard time comprehending what I read because I was a slow reader and felt that I had to rush to keep up with the rest of the class. My 5th grade teacher put a big emphasis on reading, and right away I had a new outlook. I was started to actually enjoy reading and doing so on my own at home, something that I rarely did before. From my experience, I have learned how important reading is to the foundation of learning and education. I want to find a way to make learning the most enjoyable and beneficial that it can be in the classroom. I want to have different choices of books, all varying genres and levels, so that each student will be able to find something suitable to them. I, like my 5th grade teacher, want to put a big emphasis on reading.

 

Similar to the Jones family, my environment made a big influence on my educational experience. The community I grew up in was large, but supportive and cohesive. A vast majority of parents were frequently at the schools volunteering, visiting for lunch, reading to classes, etc. This encouraging community gave me a healthy and positive outlook on school, especially at a young age when learning to read. I remember more than one of my classes having "Mother's Day Muffins" or "Dad's Donut Day", in which your parent would come and have a snack with you and other classmates families, and afterwards the class would read aloud the the parents in sections. These special occasions made students look forward to reading while incorporating families in the school, creating a motivating atmosphere. These are some things that I would like to bring into my own classroom in the future, as I remember only good experiences with them.

Did your schools have similar "Mother/Father Reading Days"?

What other ways can a community promote fun reading?

The Right Way to Teach Reading?

I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember, however, taking courses that apply to my major and career goals put things in a new perspective. In my opinion, teaching children how to read is one of, if not the most important lesson for a student to master. Reading is the foundation of education in all areas, as you read about every topic and have to understand different types of text and genres. After reading Richard Allington's What I've Learned About About Effective Reading Instruction, I am so much more interested in the teaching of reading that I was previously. As a student, I was not the best reader. I dreaded getting assigned books to read in class and had a very hard time understanding analyzing what we were reading, which made me very frustrated. This dislike of assigned reading transferred into any type of reading. I felt as though reading was never a "choice" for me, but rather that is was a dreary task that I had to complete regardless of if I enjoyed it or not. This article does a great job in showing the simple, yet necessary aspects of teaching reading, using the 6 T's: Time, Texts, Teaching, Talk, Tasks, and Testing. No one "T" could be as effective without the rest of them. It is important to recognize the conclusive instruction of teaching reading using these six T's and to recognize what importance each aspect carries. I loved the way Allington spoke about theories and the need for great teachers. It is absolutely true that knowledge of successful theories are needed in a classroom, but it is even more essential that a teacher understands the depth of a theory enough to put it into practice. A teacher's role is to convey information not just by talking in the front of a classroom, but by actively teaching and getting involved. 

Reading can be seen as a task to a lot of students, instead of an enjoyable leisurely activity. One main goal of teaching students how to read, is to try to teach students to actually enjoy reading. In Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write, Cunningham and Allington point to the importance of a wide variety of reading. Reading is a comprehensive subject that should be taught through a variety of materials, formats, and instruction. It is also said that higher-level thinking is a key part of learning to successful read. Jobs in every field require high levels of comprehension, and this understanding begins with learning how to read. Again, a variety of reading materials is essential in learning to read. A student should be reading and writing independently and in group settings, they should be examining books in different subjects, they should be assessed with critical thinking and not just a "right or wrong" answer. It is also important to have an open line of communication with students about their reading and to give them choices. Each person is different and has varied preferences and interests, therefore everyone should not be limited to one type of reading. Independence in reading will hopefully show students that there are multiple ways in which you can read, different genres, etc. The freedom of choice gives a more positive outlook to reading and would hopefully be enticing and make students more excited about reading. In accordance with independent reading, reading logs or profiles are beneficial to help keep track of a students progress and interest in what they are reading. All in all, reading is a building block to education, and learning how to properly teach a student how to read is with the utmost importance. Comprehensive views with a wide variety of theories and outlooks will lead to successful reading instruction.