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. 

What can I say besides "Sound it out?"

The first half of  the Clark reading focused on how important it is to use a coaching strategy while working with children on their reading skills. The article stated multiple times that this was one of the main characteristics of effective teachers. As I continued reading, I was surprised to learn that, "The teachers all said that....it was a technique they acquired after completing their teacher certification programs." (Clark, 2004, p. 446) I feel that same type of situation has occurred in other college level classes I have experienced. The class will cover the theory of the practice in depth and reiterate how important it is but won't provided you with an applicable way to use it in your future classroom or time to practice it.  I enjoyed this article because it semi-broke down the practice of coaching and also gave many example of how it was used in the classroom. These examples, however, felt a little repetitive because they demonstrated very similar things. I was hopping the article would have delved a little deeper into the application of coaching.  I hope we will get a chance to practice this essential skill in our 430 class.

Making it Meaningful

In the Bell and Jarvis article I found the example of Jael correcting her own reading by applying her knowledge of her classmate's name Soo Lin   a partially powerful argument against using a letter of the week method. I feel that this article and example frames the argument into a discussion on what is and is not good teaching practice. For children to truly learn they need to be engaged, interested, and motivated. Arbitrary reading and letter of weeks programs do not accomplish this. As the example highlighted, Jael was not able to make this correction in her reading because that week they had chanted S and made S themed crafts. Instead, she applied knowledge that was meaningful to her, Soo Lin's name. Since her friend's name interested her, was meaningful to her, and familiar to her Jael was better able to remember and apply that knowledge while also using a useful cue. Since we already know that this is a more effective method of instruction in other areas, the question then becomes how do we make letter sounds/phonemes/etc. meaningful to children. I thought a particularly interesting concept that this article presented was environmental print. This type of print is inherently interesting to children because they come into contact with it everyday and, in many cases, because millions of dollars have been spent to make it interesting to children.  It also very easily incorporated in the classroom and could potentially be a great way to get parents involved.

Reading Role Models

An aspect of encouraging reading in my classroom that I had never really considered before was presenting the children with an array of reading role models. Since most teachers are female, that is the most common model that children are presented with. As the Cunningham and Allington text discussed, it is important to expand this pool and also include male reading models in your classroom. As I considered this concept, I saw the value in not only focusing on male models but also on people with in the community. Demonstrating to children that reading is a life long skill that is used and valued not only by teachers but also buy firemen/electricians/grocers/etc. These modles would not only read to the children but they could also discuss the many different ways they use  their reading skills. This topic could easily transition into inviting 

 people who read daily for their job like movie producers/reporters/book editors/etc. to come share their passion for reading with your class.