Children Need to Comprehend to Really Read!

As a teacher it is easy to focus much of your efforts on helping the children to correctly pronounce and decode words, but by doing that you are forgetting about one of the most important parts of learning to read, comprehension! Comprehension, which involves extracting the meaning from text, is something that good readers have. As Laura Pardo said in What Every Teacher Needs to Know about Comprehension it is a, "transaction between readers and the text." So, it is easy to see using this definition how the reader matters when it comes to comprehending material. Children need to be taught the skills as well as the vocabulary to do this. Teachers can help children learn this by using a variety of strategies.

Here are some ideas to help readers begin to comprehend materials from Pinterest:

1. Charts- (like the one below) Place in the reading area that the teacher references as she openly models them in relation to what is being read.

2.  Beach-ball Comprehension- Write questions on a beach-ball, and then have the children answer them using what occurred in a story that has previously been read. More information on this can be found on the blog I Can Teach My Child.

Hope that you find these helpful! Also, I am wondering what are some ideas that you readers have for  teaching children how to comprehend what they read? As well I am wondering if you can think of how to get parents more involved in improving their child(ten)'s level of comprehension?

One Minute Fluency Measures

From student teaching recently and from my professors I have learned that as a teacher you are just plain busy! There never seems to be enough time in the day, so you need quick ways to assess children's reading skills. In the article One-Minute Fluency Measures: Mixed Messages in Assessment and Instruction, Theresa Deeney teaches readers how to implement one minute fluency measures into the classroom. Doing these one minute fluency measures will allow you to provide the children in your class with the personalized assistance they need to develop to their highest potential level as a reader. Also, since it only takes a minute it will allow you to have the time to scaffold children as well. Here are some tips for doing these from Deeney's article:

1. Notice the number of words the child misses in a minute.
2. Pay attention to how many words a child reads in a minute.
3. Notice the rate that a child reads at.

Assessing children does not have to be a long, drawn-out process if you implement Theresa Deeney's ideas into your classroom.

Reading Fluency Factors into Reading Success

This week when I read the article Creating Fluent Readers by Timothy Rasinski (2004) I personally could not relate, because I have alway had a high rate of reading comprehension and fluency. However, as I read about Jonah I was reminded of my mother. She hates to read. She has always said it is because she can read the words over and over again, but it is like they just do not sink in, so she cannot tell you exactly what it is that she read. As Rasinski would put it she has not developed enough, "control over the surface level text processing," so that she can, "...focus on understanding the deeper levels of meaning embedded in the text" (2004).

Or in terms of the three dimensions of reading provided by Rasinski my mom like many struggling readings has accomplished the first dimension, but with the other two dimensions I am not so sure. Below are the three dimensions given in the article.

• Accuracy in Decoding Words- ability to sound out words in text with minimal errors.
• Automatic Processing- expending as little mental energy as possible as you read through the text by automatically recognizing the words on site.
• Prosodic Reading- the ability to phrase the text into units that are semantically appropriate.

To assess each of these here are some ideas provided in the Rasinski text.

• To tell if a person is reading in the first level of the dimensions calculate the accuracy of their reading by dividing the amount of words that they pronounced, or did not know by the amount of words read. If they are reading grade level material below an accuracy level of 90-95% they need help in this area.
• For this second dimension listen to how the child reads aloud. Ask yourself questions like are they rushing through the material to fast or slow.
• A way to tell that a person is in the prosodic dimension is the inflictions of their voice when they read. If they breeze through punctuation, and/or do not change their tone they probably are not here yet.

And once you know where a child is do practice with them to help them move forward to the next dimension! Below is a link with ideas for reading in the classroom readers:

10 Activities for Students to do in Reading Groups

So today I am going to leave you with these questions: 1. What would would you do to help someone who reads such as my mother, or Jonah? 2. How would you help you children who are learning to read to become more fluent? 3. In accordance with the dimensions where did you fall? Was it what you expected?

Reading's and Spelling's Close Relationship

In the past it was believed that reading and spelling were only kinda related, like third cousins once removed. However, in recent years it has been proven in multiple studies that children's spelling ability and reading level are very closely related, more like....siblings. The article by Cunningham and Cunningham (1992) that I read for class this week acknowledge this fact about young children's reading.

When I think about this fact I have kinda mixed feelings. On one hand it does not surprise me, simply because that just makes sense. However, on the other hand I am a little surprised whenever I hear this fact, because I am a horrible speller, yet have a very high reading level....so I am just like wHy CaN't I sPeLl?!?! Now I am left to wonder about how my teachers in elementary school may have affected my abilities. I have been trying to remember the lessons, and different things.

After reading this article one theory that I have come up with is that maybe I did not do enough work

that involved invented spelling as a child. Due to this I believe that I just may have memorized most words enough to recognize them, but not use skills build upon skills needed for spelling like phonetic awareness. This makes sense to me, because of how when write something down I will check to see if the words "looks right," instead of attempting to sound the word out.

For this reason as a future educator I believe that it is very important to incorporate activities that build phonetic awareness by allowing children to invent the spelling of words is important in the early elementary classrooms. So, here are some ideas to incorporate invented spelling:

•  Making Words: Children are individually given letters to create their own words using these letters that increasingly get bigger, starting out with two letter word and moving to six or seven letter words. This activity should take about 15-20 minutes. (This is from the Cunningham and Cunningham article (1992)) 
• For parents you could even do this at home with your children in a very fun way by making them spell words out of cookie shaped letter. Then, once they have finished you can pour a class of milk and eat up! (Inspired by an idea I found on Pinterest, which came from the blog Dirt and Boogers.)

• Personal Journals: Provide the children with their own journals, and give them some time at the end of the day to write freely. I would estimate that this activity would need about 20 minutes, but it could take less or more time depending on the topic and length of writing being asked for. The teacher can let  the children write about whatever they want, or a provide specific topic for children to journal about. Additionally, a teacher you can relate this topic to something that was done in another subject earlier in the day/week. This is a great way to integrate reading/writing in other subjects, which common core loves. ;]
• Here is Still Playing School's Introduction to Journaling with young children.

Today I am leaving you with two questions: (1.) Why do you think I might be a high level reader, yet a terrible speller? (2.) How would you incorporate invented spelling into the classroom?