Comprehension....

Comprehension

    So far with everything we have talked about in class if a child can understand all of those things then we can piece them together and comprehension can begin to start.  Not only do those things affect a child's ability to be able to comprehend something but their world around them can affect it as well.   It is important to know where a child comes from and their environment at home because that can really affect how much the comprehend and how quick they do.

Another thing that really affects a child's comprehension ability is what the teacher does in order to help a child comprehend.  Like the article states some important steps to building comprehension are: teaching decoding skills, building fluency, teaching vocabulary, actively pursuing prior knowledge, engaging the students to have personal responses with the text and most importantly motivating the students.  

I think one of the most important aspects of comprehension is engaging them with personal responses.  By allowing them to connect to the text they are able to comprehend it and interpret it into their lives.  The more you invite them to compare readings to themselves the more they are going to want to read because it make sit more related to them.   By relating it to them they will also see themselves as readers and become more confident in their ability.   

Questions:

1. How would you engage them in making those personal connections?

2.  Do you think that it is important to have them make those personal connections and responses.

Word Study

       I completely agree with the article that knowledge of words is very much related to comprehension.  If you didn't know the words that you were reading then it would be nearly impossible to comprehend what was on the page.  It is also vital to your overall abilities in school and life.  I also agree that it should not be restricted to one time.  You should be learning it throughout the day and it should be incorporated with every subject that is taught. By allowing them to hear these words they can find out so much more about a word.  They can tell the connotation behind it and how it is used in everyday life.  That is sometimes more influential than just reading it in a book because you may not get those cues. Like the article states a child doesn't need to know every word perfectly but having a basic knowledge of some words and knowing others that are more important very well can really help a child early on in the educational system.  Another thing that can help a study is knowing prefixes and suffixes so they can breakdown and decode a word rather than trying to look at it all at once.

Some ways to help a child remember words can be by acting it out or asking them where they might see this word.  The child will be able to remember it more easily because the action will stick out in their mind.  We did this in a classroom that I was in and the children were really involved and loved being able to be active in class while learning.  

Questions

1. What are some other ways that you have seen Word Study Practiced in the Classroom

2. Do you think the generic word study notebooks are enough to help a student learn or do you think that they are just busy work?

10/6/14 Instructional Activities- Shared Reading 
http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/shared_reading

Definition:

• Teachers reading: Nursery Rhymes, Giving voices to characters, Thinking aloud while reading, crafts to follow-up reading, Predictable texts and talking about the text after the reading 
• Shared reading is an instructional approach in which the teacher explicitly models the strategies and skills of proficient readers 

Demonstration of Shared Reading:

Fluency: Accuracy and Speed

The first article was about one minute fluency test.  I know that from experience this can be daunting tests.  You are given a passage that you have never seen before and are expected to read it aloud to your teacher and while you do she sits and write on her clipboard.

That was probably the most stressful part about it because you have no clue what she is writing so it only makes you more nervous than you were before.  She is also timing you to see how quickly you read the passage which is also something that can make you nervous.  So you just read the story as fast as you can and don't really comprehend anything that you are reading.  At the end sometimes the teacher asks you questions on the basic theme or summary of the text and students sometimes as a hard time remembering what they were because they were reading so quickly.  I think that instead of timing students you just should allow them to read and see what they know.  I also think that a teacher shouldn't scribble while you are reading and should remember what the student messed up.  By having the teacher engage with you while you are reading the passage may make it less nerve wrecking and anxious.  I think another thing to help students is by making a chart so they are able to see how much they are improving because that could help with the confidence of the reader too.

The second article talked about ways to judge fluency and how to create a more fluent reader.  They also stated just because you are a fast reader does not mean that you are a fluent reader.  It is so much more than how fast you can read.  It is about how you read, the smoothness of your reading and the pace at which you read.  If you can be fluent in your reading you are more likely to comprehend what you are reading rather than just worrying about the words on the page.  If you know the words and signals you are able to think about their meanings.  This is something that is a building block for later learning and it is not learned over night.  

Questions:

1) What are other ways besides one minute fluency tests that can test a child's fluency?

2) Do you think that fluency and comprehension go hand in hand?