Real-life Reading Inquiry

Making the Outdoor Environment Literacy Rich

For my inquiry, I decided to take a close look at how teachers could make their outdoor environments just as literacy rich as their indoor classroom environments. I found this topic very interesting because I feel that teachers often neglect the playgrounds. Instead of bringing the intentionality from the classroom outside with them, they just cross recess off as a time that they do not need to seriously consider or plan for. To discover activities and strategies I could implement while outside, I went to UT's ELC to observe both their indoor and outdoor environments and have also pulled many ideas from Natural Playscapes by Rusty Keeler and Designs for Living and Learning: Transforming Early Childhood Environments by Deb Curtis and Margie Carter.

 

     Though these avenues I have discovered many ways to purposefully included and encourage literacy while outside. One of the most interesting ways that I discovered was simply bringing books and writing supplies outside with you. I observed this at the UT’s ELC and many of the children chose to participate in these activities instead of sliding, etc. By bringing out a blanket and books the teacher put a new twist on reading and by supplying writing/drawing supplies the children were inspired by the outdoors to draw and write about a whole new array of interesting things.

   

  For older children I though the concept of teaching jump rope rhymes to your class before heading out was very interesting. (Curtis and Carter) Not only is it a way to encourage your children to play with and become more familiar with rhymes but it is also a great way to get them physically active.

     Another way to incorporate literacy while outdoors is to make a letter scavenger hunt. With or without cameras you could ask children to find each letter of the alphabet somewhere on the playground (whether it is how a branch is shaped or how the fence meets, etc.) If you decided to use cameras, you could then use the pictures to create you class’s very own alphabet book. (Keeler)

Some of the other ways I found to incorporate literacy while outside included labeling objects just as you do for you indoor environment, a sight word hid and seek game, creating stationery by doing rubbings, and acting out a story like We’re going on a Bear Hunt around the playground.

I feel that all of activities are great ways to make the outside environment literacy rich and that having them already complied will allow me “pull them out of my back pocket” when I need them during my future teaching. 

Running Records

In previous education classes, I had been exposed to the idea of taking running records for both reading assessment and behavioral assessment. When the idea was presented during previous classes, the focus was more on keeping running records for behavioral purposes. These records, where the teacher writes down every single thing the children is doing, seemed pretty overwhelming especially when I attempted to apply that same framework to keeping a running record for reading assessment purposes. After looking through the Marie Clay book, however, I feel I understand the process substantially better. Marie Clay is a name that I have often heard associated  with quality reading instruction and in this running record book she seems to include many useful strategies and tools. I particularly liked the different symbols and representations for common reading errors she provides. These seem like they will be easy to remember and mark even if the child is reading quickly. I believe this book will be a great resource for me in my future classroom.

Vocabulary

When I think of vocabulary, I automatically remember having to write out definitions to the vocabulary words within a textbook chapter in middle school.  I would literally spend a couple hours a week copying sentences from a textbook to a piece of notebook paper, and the only thing I cared about was that everything looked neat and tidy.  I now realize that our teachers thought that copying definitions would help build our vocabularies, but that activity probably didn't help us much at all.  From reading Blachowicz and Fisher's article "Vocabulary Lessons," I learned that there are many useful, yet entertaining, ways to help children build their vocabularies.  There are two key words that stick out to me when discussing vocabulary, and they are "fun" and "repetition."  One common theme in many areas of learning is that children learn better when the subject matter seems interesting and they are having fun, so it seems that playing games associated with building vocabulary is the perfect way to help children become interested in new words.  When I think back to middle school and how boring and monotonous vocabulary definitions were, I can't help but to think how my vocabulary knowledge might be different if we had actually enjoyed learning those new words.  The other word that comes to mind about vocabulary is "repetition," and this is based on information from the article, as well as personal experience.  When a child is exposed to something repeatedly, they are more likely to remember the information.  By reading to children and playing word games with them, they will be exposed to many more words and start to remember the definitions by simply coming into contact with the words.

Comprehending Comprehension

The Gill article, "The Comprehension Matrix" was a very interesting article.  It detailed on how many resources are available for teachers to use, however, what we often see is the resources collecting dust.  It is very important to remember that new and improved ways of teaching are always out there for teachers to use and we must continually update our information.  Comprehension is one topic that Gill says is extremely difficult.  Comprehension, according to Gill's definition includes schema theory, transactional theory, and constructivist theory.  Gill gives the comprehension matrix as a way to help students with their reading, they include: prereading, during reading activities, and post reading activities.  I really liked the idea of breaking the reading process in to these categories because I believe it makes the teacher address certain concepts in a more intentional way.  Although teaching comprehension can be a difficult task to take on, we can certainly master the task with these types of methods and ultimately have students who comprehend comprehension.

Poetry Performance

Poetry Performance is using poetry activities to help students develop fluency.

Monday: The students should form small groups. They will go to the library and find a poem that all of the students would like to perform at the end of the week. An approved poem needs to be copied for each student in the group. The teacher needs to introduce and review the purpose and procedures for poetry performance. Invitations to the poetry party that will be on Friday will be sent home on this day.

Tuesday: Each student needs to read the poem individually then discuss the poem with his or her group. As the students read they will need to mark words that they do not know in order to discuss them with the group and add them to the word wall. 

Wednesday: The group needs to be responsible for assigning the role to each group member. The students also need to discuss the cadence and prosody throughout the poem. A rubric will be presented to the students for guidelines that they all need to follow in their performance.

Thursday: As the teacher circulates, the groups need to get together with other groups to practice performing their poetry.

Friday: Have a poetry party, turning the classroom into a poetry house, for all of the student to celebrate all that they have learned during poetry week. Invite parents to the poetry party to show their appreciation for the student’s poetry accomplishments. Have each group perform in front of the class following the rubric.

Rubric to be Used 

Easy Reading

In our Cunningham and Allington text, I found the concept of "mandating easy reading for everyone" (p. 50) very interesting. In the text, they made the point that most of what we read on a daily biases is much to easy for us and falls with in our independent reading level (understanding 98-99% of the words). They also discussed that the best readers in your classroom also spend most of their time reading text that is very easy for them. "Your best readers become fluent readers by reading and rereading lots of easy books." (p. 50) Children with lower reading skills, however, spend most of their time reading things that are on their instruction level (understanding 90% of the words and 75% of the content) or above their reading level. This can cause them to become easily discouraged and frustrated. Implementing mandated easy reading gives each child a chance to secede at reading without having to struggle though it. They are then more likely to find the joy in reading and as we all know; the more you read, the better you get, and then the more you want to read, etc. I hope to be able to have "mandated easy reading in my future classroom.

Word Wonder

One concept I really enjoyed from our Cunningham and Allington text was demonstrating and instilling a sense of "word wonder" in your 
children. I believe that being enthusiastic and curious about words is an essential part of being a literate adult. Most people seem to stop actively expanding their vocabulary as the grow older and I think this is exceptionally sad; especially for speakers of the english language which has thousands and thousands of interesting, and often silly, words. I believe one cause of this may be that people often feel a sense of shame connected with the words, "I don't know" or "I don't understand." In many cases, instead of encouraging our children to say, "Tell me more" we model the action of pretending to understand when we really do not.


 I am very excited to share my passion and "word wonder" with the children in my classroom by not only introducing them to their regular vocabulary words but also new words that I discover or my new favorite word. Currently my favorite word is advesperating which is the word that represent the time of day right before sunset.