Month: November 2019

Supporting a Community of Readers

---

A literature-based program includes independent reading, sustained reading and writing, social interactions, and read alouds using literature, books, novels, short stories, magazines, plays, poems, and electronic books that have not been rewritten for instructional purposes. There are ling-term benefits implicit in bringing children and books tgether on a regular basis:

1. Reading expands children’s experiential backgrounds
2. Literature provides readers with good models of writing
3. Students learn to read be reading
4. When the prime purpose for reading is pleasure, children want to understand what they are reading and are likely to select cooks with familiar topics, themes, or characters
5. Wide reading provides opportunities for children to develop vocabulary knowledge

Students in the literature-based program had increased their fluency and comprehension skills. Literature-based programs create a community of readers. Students, in alliance with their friends and teacher, work together in classrooms in which school reading becomes like adult reading, where adults are motivated to read.

Selecting a Classroom Collection of Books

---

These books come from different sources – the teacher’s personal collection, the school library, the public library, and paperback book clubs. The core collection is permanent, mant if the borrowed titles change frequently, so there is always something new to encourage browsing.

Choosing Classroom Literature

---

Several strategies can be used to help choose classroom literature:

• Read and enjoy children’s books yourself
• Read children’s cooks with a sense of involvement
• Read a variety of books types
• Read books for a wide variety of ability levels
• Share how your students respond to particular books with others teachers
• Start by reading several books of good quality

Determining Good Literature

---

It is important to take into consideration students’ diverse backgrounds, academic abilities, and interests. Four criteria to use in building a balanced collection of books:

1. The collection needs to contain modern, realistic literature as well as more traditional literature
2. The collection needs to contain books that realistically present different ethnic and minority groups and nontraditional families as well as mainstream Americans
3. The collection needs to contain books with different types of themes and books of varying difficulty
4. The collection needs to include nonfiction

Multicultural Literature

---

Five reasons for multicultural literature in the classroom:

1. All children, and especially children of color, need to experience multicultural books. Students receive an affirmation of themselves and their cultures when their life experiences are mirrored in books. The infusion of multicultural literature in the classroom affirms and empowers children and their cultures.
2. Children perceive that members of their cultural group make contributions to the world.
3. Children derive pleasure and pride from hearing and reading stories about children like themselves and seeing illustrations of characters who look as if they stepped out of their homes or communities.
4. Multicultural literature offers hope and encouragement to children who face the types of dilemmas and experiences depicted in some of the books they read.
5. Children who read culturally diverse books encounter authors who use language in inventive and memorable ways, who create multidimensional characters, and who engender aesthetic and literacy experiences that con touch the heart, mind, and soul.

So, how do you select multicultural literature?

• Cultural accuracy
• Richness to cultural details
• Authentic dialogue and relationships
• In-depth treatment of cultural issues
• Inclusion of members of a minority group for a purpose

Designing the Classroom Library

---

Students will read 50% more books in classrooms with libraries than those who don’t have the same access to books. The classroom library should be highly visible and shows the importance of this part of the classroom. There should be comfy seating with about 5-6 books per student in the classroom. There should be multiple copies of favorite books. Also, books should include a variety or genres and reading levels.

Listening to Literature

---

When children listen to literature, they are exposed to stories and poems they cannot, or will not, read on their own. Often, once children are excited by hearing a selection, they want to read it for themselves. Through hearing stories and poems, students develop a positive feeling towards books.

Read-alouds can be used too. This is where the teacher reads for at least 10-20 minutes a day to students. Reading aloud needs to be incorporated into all aspects of the curriculum.

Helping Children Select Books

---

Teachers can tell exciting anecdotes about authors, provide previews of interesting stories, show videos about stories, suggest titles of stories that match students’ interests, enourage author searches on the Internet, share leveled book listings, or compile teacher- and/or student- annotated book lists.

Core Books: a collection of books at each grade that is judged to be age appropriate and of high quality. Students have little to no choice in the selection of core books.

Reading Workshops: a way to integrate the language arts around literature and provide an organizational framework that allows readers to demonstrate their use of reading strategies be responding to books and sharing meaning with others.

Literature Circles: are small, temporary discussion groups that have choosen to read the same story, poem, article, or book. Each member prepares to take specific responsiblities in the upcoming discussion, and everyone comes to the group with the notes needed to help perform that job. The circles have regular meetings, with discussion roles rotating each session. Teams are formed by choice of reading material, not ability level.

Encouraging Responses to Literature

---

Lead students in classroom experiences in which they analyze their personal reactions to what they have read. This can be done through book talks, free response and literature journals. Reader-response theory is a theory that states that the reader is crucial to the construction of the literacy experience.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

---

I love all of the strategies and techniques for setting up a classroom library. The tips on incorporating multicultural literature will be especially helpful because I feel like this is an area that I struggle because I choose books that I think student will enjoy, not always thinking about multicultural literature.

Relationships Between Reading and Writing

---

Students should write about what they are reading and should read about what they are writing. Supported by new knowledge about literacy development, today’s teachers recognize that when students are engaged in writing, they are using and manipulating written language. In doing so, children develop valuable concepts about print and how messages are created.

Writing and reading abilities develop concurrently and should be nurtured together. Children write first and read later according to Carol Chomsky. Children acquire letter and word knowledge through invented spellings. Teachers need to understand that the reading and writing connections for students from diverse backgrounds ought to be based on the roles reading and writing play in the social lives of people of various cultures.

• Reading and writing processes are correlated; that is, good readers are generally good writers, and vice versa.
• Students who write well tend to read more than those who are less capable writers.
• Wide reading may be as effective in improving writing as actual practice in writing.
• Good readers and writers are likely yo engage in reading and writing independently because they have healthy concepts of themselves as readers and writers.

Creating Environments for Reading and Writing

---

There are 8 suggestions for encouraging classroom writing:

1. Use students’ experiences, and encourage them to write about things that are relevant to their interests and needs
2. Develop sensitivity to good writing by reading poetry and literature to students
3. Invent ways to value what students have written
4. Guide the reading personally
5. Write stories and poetry of your own and share them with your students
6. Tie in writing with the entire curriculum
7. Start a writing center in your classroom
8. Create a relaxed atmosphere

When a teacher encourages students to write, they engage in reading activities in varied and unexpected ways.

Connecting Reading and Writing

---

Dialogue journals emphasize meaning while providing natural, functional experiences in both writing and reading. Students and teachers use dialogue journals to converse in writing. A teacher’s response to students’ entries may include comments, questions, and invitations to children to express themselves.

Buddy journals are similar to dialogue journals except instead of the teacher writing back, another student writes back.

Key pals are similar to pen pals except that students write back and forth through email or other electronic technology. Key pal correspondence creates opportunities for students to communicate with other students from around the world, learn about different cultures, ask questions, and develop literacy skills.

Double-entry journals provide students with an opportunity to identify text passages that are interesting or meaningful to them and to explore, in writing, why. Students fold paper in half lengthwise to create two columns for journal entries. On the left side, readers select quotes from the text (could be a word, phrase, sentence, or more) that they find interesting. On the right side, the reader enters their personal responses and reactions to the text.

Reading journals provide students with more structure and less choice in deciding what they will write about. The teacher often provides a prompt to guide the students’ writing after a period of sustained reading.

Response journals are different from reading journals because of the amount of prompting the teacher gives. Response journals invite readers to respond to literacy texts freely, without being prompted.

Writing notebooks are used to gather observations, thoughts, reactions, ideas, unusual words, pictures, and interesting facts that might later spur them to write. Unlike journals, the notebooks are meant to provide students with a place to collect thoughts for future writing.

Multigenre projects or paper is a collection of genres that reflects multiple responses to a book, theme, or topic. Students are given choices about which genres to use and they experiment with writing in a variety of ways.

A Plot scaffold is an open-ended script in which students use their imaginations and creative writing in a playful way. The open-ended scripts include characters, a setting, problem, and solution with spaces for the students to write additional descriptions and problem-solving dialogue. There are 7 elements to plot:

1. The book
2. The problem
3. Backfill
4. A complication
5. Action-reaction
6. Dark moment
7. Resolution

The Writing Process

---

Traditionally, these stages include having students:

1. Brainstorm (a time to generate ideas, stimulate thinking, make plans, and create a desire to write) what they want to write
2. Draft their thoughts
3. Revise their thoughts after input from the teacher or peers
4. Edit their writing for errors
5. Publish their writing

The authors of our text have a few different terms for these stages.

• Discovery: finding a topic and writing preliminary ideas
• Drafting: getting ideas down on paper
• Revising: Making it right

The Writing Workshop

---

Begins by providing students with the structure they need to understand, develop, or use specific writing strategies or by giving them direction in planning their writing or in revising their drafts. The minilesson is  brief, direct instructional exchange (usually no longer than 10 minutes) between the teacher and the writing group (can be the whole group too).

Writing workshop plan:

• Minilesson (3-10 minutes)
• Writing process (45-120 minutes)
• Group share session (10-15 minutes)

A main purpose of a group sharing session is to have writers reflect on the day’s work. “Process discussions” focus of concerns implicit in the following questions:

• How did your writing go today? Did you get a lot done?
• Did you write better today than yesterday?
• Was it hard for you to keep your mind on what you were writing?
• What do you think you’ll work on tomorrow?
• What problems did you have today?

Guided Writing Instruction

---

An instructional framework in which teachers scaffold students’ writing as they write. Guided writing involves teaching skills that are needed by students based on actual observation, engaging the students in conversations as they write, and using prompts to guide instruction.

Reading – Writing – Technology Connections

---

Technology integrated into the curriculum for meaningful learning, can be a powerful tool in students’ literacy development. Students have instant access to electronic texts on the Internet. Using computers to construct electronic texts helps students examine ideas, organize and report information and inquiry findings, and communicate with others. Word processing, desktop publishing, and authoring software programs allow students to use and develop literacy skills to publish writing in creative ways and prepare multimedia reports and presentations relevant to curriculum objectives.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

---

I really liked the idea of having the teacher write stories and poetry and sharing it with the students. This gives students a role model to their writing and then they can get to know more about their teacher through their writing. When the students write during class about a topic the teacher gives or just free journal writing, the teacher can write too and share what they wrote. I will also use the ideas for setting up the classroom to encourage writing. Writing is so important in students’ lives and will be something they will use when they get older too. I want to encourage this the most I can.

Scaffolding the Development and Use of Comprehension Strategies

---

Scaffolding instruction means that teachers model strategies step-by-step and explicitly demonstrate the processes of thinking before, during, and after one reads. Next, teachers provide the students with guided practice in the strategies, followed by independent practice and application.

Active Comprehension and Asking Questions

A common comprehension strategy is to have students answer questions about what is read. These questions include:

• Literal questions: students answer by using information stated in the text
• Inferential questions: students answer by using the background knowledge along with the information from the text
• Evaluative questions: students answer by making judgements about what they read

When students are engaged in a process of generating questions and making connections throughout reading, they are involved in active comprehension.

Reciprocal Questioning (ReQuest)

ReQuest encourages students to ask their own questions about the material being read.

Question-Answer Relationships (QARs)

QARs help learners know what information sources are available for seeking answers to different types of text questions. QARs enhance student’s ability to answer comprehension questions by teaching them how to find information they need to answer questions. The first information source in the text. The second source in the reader.

Questioning the Author (QtA)

QtA demonstrates the kinds of questions students need to ask in order to think more deeply and construct meaning about segments of text as they read. Students learn that authors are fallible and may not always express ideas in the easiest was for readers to understand.

Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal teaching is an approach to scaffolding reading comprehension in which teachers introduce four strategies, model the strategies, and gradually encourage independent use of the strategies in small groups as students take on the role of the teacher. The four strategies are:

1. Predicting what the text is about
2. Raising questions about the text
3. Summarizing the text
4. Clarifying difficult vocabulary and concepts

Think-Alouds

Think-alouds is a strategy in which teachers and students share their thoughts, discuss what they wonder about and what confuses them, and make connections as they are reading. One of the best times to do think-alouds is when the teacher is reading a story out loud.

Developing Readers’ Awareness of Story Structure

---

Stories are central to student’s reading development. Student’s knowledge of stories begins to develop at an early age.

Mapping a Story for Instructional Purposes

Story maps are a way of identifying major structural elements, both explicit and implicit, underlying a story to be taught in class. Structural elements include setting, characters, and the problem/solution and the steps it took between the two.

Building a Schema for Stories

Some activities to build schemas for stories are: read, tell, and perform stories in class; show relationships between story parts (flow charts work best); reinforce story knowledge through instructional activities. Some of the instructional activities include:

• Macrocloze stories are similar to cloze passages except that the teacher removes single words, sentences, or even whole paragraphs from a story.
• Scrambled stories are a story separated into its parts and jumbled
• Story frames provide the student with a skeletal paragraph: a sequence of spaces tied together with transition words and connectors that signal a line of thought
• Circular story maps use pictures to depict the sequence of events leading to the problem of the story

Guiding Interactions Between Reader and Text

---

Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA)

DR-TA involves readers in the process of predicting, verifying, judging, and extending thinking about the text material.

KWL

KWL is a three-step teaching plan designed to guide and to motivate students as they read to acquire information from the text. K – What do you know? W – What do you want to find out? L – What did you learn?

Discussion Webs

Discussion webs require students to explore both sides of an issue during discussion before drawing conclusions. In the center of the web is a question. The question reflects more than one point of view. Students explore the pros and cons of the question in the No and Yes columns of the web.

Story Impressions

Story impressions is the name of a strategy that helps students anticipate what stories could be about. Fragments from the story, in the form of clue words, enable readers to form an overall impression of how the characters and events interact in the story.

Text Connections

Text connections can be thought of in three ways:

• Text-to-Self: This is a text connection that asks the students to share what a piece of fiction or nonfiction text reminds them of personally
• Text-to-Text: This is a text connection that asks the students to recall another text that reminds them of the one they are reading
• Text-to-World: This type of connection is more inferential in nature because it asks the students to make connections beyond the story

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

---

Something that I really liked from this chapter was having the students come up with questions to enhance their comprehension. This is something I would like to use with the student I am tutoring as well in my classroom someday. This is a different technique to work on comprehension that I wouldn’t have thought of. I also like the text connections because this allows the student to relate what they are reading to something they already know.

The Relationship Between Vocabulary and Comprehension

---

Experiences, Concepts, and Words

---

Vocabulary is represented by breadth and depth of all the words we know – the words we use, recognize, and respond to in meaningful acts of communication. Breadth is the size and scope of out vocabulary and depth is the level of understanding that we have of words. Vocabulary is classified by four components: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Principles to Guide Vocabulary Instruction

---

Principle 1: Select Words That Children Will Encounter While Reading Literature and Content Material

• Key Words
• Useful Words
• Interesting Words
• Vocabulary-Building Words

Principle 2: Teach Words in Relation to Other Words

When words are taught in relation to other words, students are actively drawn into the learning process. They must use background knowledge and experiences to detect similarities and differences.

Principle 3: Teach Students to Relate Words to Their Background Knowledge

Ask “What is it that the students already know about that they can use as an anchor point, as a way of accessing this new concept?”

Principle 4: Teach Words in Prereading Activities to Activate Knowledge and Use Them in Postreading Discussion, Response, and Retelling

Prereading and postreading vocabulary activities that connect vocabulary words to content are more desirable than isolated vocabulary exercises.

Principle 5: Teach Words Systematically and in Depth

Researchers are finding that for students to process vocabulary in depth, they must generate a novel product using the term.

Principle 6: Awaken Interest in and Enthusiasm of Words

The teacher’s attitude towards vocabulary instruction can be contagious.

Strategies for Vocabulary and Concept Development

---

• Relating Experiences to Vocabulary Learning
  • The more direct experiences students have, the better.
• Using Context for Vocabulary Growth
  • Students need to hear the new words used in different contexts.
• Developing Word Meanings
  • The ability to relate new words to known words, can be built through synonyms, antonyms, and multiple-meaning words
    • Synonyms: words that are similar in meaning to other words
    • Antonyms: words that are opposite in meaning to other words
    • Multiple-Meaning Words: give students opportunities to see how words operate in context
• Classifying and Categorizing Words
  • Categorization: students recognize that they can group words that label ideas, events, or objects. The teacher gives students 2-6 words and ask them to find the word that describes all the other words or to cross off the word that doesn’t belong
  • Word Sorts: to group words into different categories by looking for shared features among their meanings
  • Concept Circles: putting words or phrases in the sections of a circle and then directing students to describe or name the concept relationship among the sections
  • Semantic Mapping: a strategy that shows readers and writers how to organize important information
  • Analogies: a comparison of two similar relationships
  • Paired-Word Sentence Generation: a task that could be used to test students’ understanding of difficult concepts. The teacher gives students two related words. The goal of the strategy is to generate one sentence that correctly demonstrates an understanding of the words and their relationship to each other

Semantic Analysis to Writing:

Predictogram: Story elements – including the setting. the incidents in the plot, characterization, the character’s problem or goal, how the problem or goal is resolved, and the theme or larger issue to which the problem or goal relates – can be used to develop students’ meaning vocabulary with the predictogram strategy.

Teachers choose words from the story that they feel will be challenging to the students. The words and their meanings are discussed in class, and students relate their personal associations with the words. Finally, students work in groups to predict how they think the author might use each tern in the story.

Self-Selection Strategy: Students select the words to be studied. Each student selects one word they believe the class should learn, the teacher chooses one too. These words are written in the board and students give the definitions they gathered from the context in which they found the word.

Word Knowledge Rating: A way to get students to analyze how well they know vocabulary words:

• I’ve never seen the word
• I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it means.
• I recognize it in context. It has something to do with _____________.
• I know the word in one or several of its meanings.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

---

I really liked reading about the strategies for vocabulary and concept development. I have never heard of some of the strategies and look forward to using some of them. Concept circles sounded interesting and is a different visual that just putting the words in a list. I also liked the idea of paired-word sentence generation, giving the students two words that can be written in a sentence together to make them related. I also liked the idea of the predictogram and might be something I will use for tutoring.

Defining Oral Reading Fluenct

---

Fluency means reading easily and well or the ability to read expressively and meaningfully, as well as accurately and with appropriate speed. Fluency has three parts:

1. Accuracy in word decoding: readers must be able to sound out words (using phonics and other word decoding strategies). Mediated word identification may need to be used. This means that the reader may need more time to retrieve words from their long-term memory.
2. Automatic processing or automaticity: readers use as little mental effort as possible in the decoding or text, saving mental energy for comprehension.
3. Prosody or prosodic reading: a linguistic concept that refers to such features in oral language as intonation, pitch, stress, pauses, and the duration placed on specific syllables.

Effective fluency instruction has three parts too: instruction, practice, and assessment. Fluency instruction should incorporate the teaching of basic skills such a phonemic awareness and phonics. It should also model what fluency looks and sounds like. Fluency practice includes the use of decodable text and other independent-level texts to strengthen the sounds and spelling that are taught in the classroom.

The final component to fluency is assessment. Assessing fluency can be done relatively easily and requires little time, especially with today’s available technology.

Predictable text can be read with ease. Predictable books have context or setting that is familiar or predictable to most students. The pictures should also support the text. The story line is predictable and there may be a repetitive pattern. There are several different kinds of predictable texts:

• Chain or Circular Stories (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie)
• Cumulative Stories (The Gingerbread Man)
• Pattern Stories (The Three Billy Goats Gruff)
• Question and Answer Stories (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?)
• Repetition of Phrase (Goodnight Moon)
• Rhyme (Is Your Mama a Llama?)
• Songbooks (Over in the Meadow)

Strategies to Assist with Fluency

---

• Choral reading is reading aloud in unison with a whole class or group of students.
• Echo reading is a method of modeling oral reading in which the teacher reads a line of a story and then the students echo by reading the same line back, imitating the teacher’s intonation and phrasing.
• Fluency-oriented reading instruction (FORI) was developed for whole group instruction with a grade-level basal reader. FORI incorporates the research-based practices of repeated, assisted reading with independent silent reading within a three-part classroom program. The three components are a reading lesson that includes teacher-led, repeated oral reading and partner reading, a free-reading period at school, and home reading. The purpose of FORI is to build fluency and comprehension of grade-appropriate text through repeated reading, text-related discussion, and teacher support and guidance before and after reading.
• Reader’s theater is an oral presentation of drama, prose, or poetry by two or more readers. Reader’s theater differs from orally reading a selection in that several readers take the parts of the characters in the story or play. Instead of memorizing or improvising their parts as in other types of theater productions, the players read them.
• Repeated readings are done orally and provide additional sensory reinforcement for the reader, allowing him or her to focus on the prosodic elements of reading that are essential of phrasing. Oral readings also ensure that the student is actually reading, not skimming or scanning the text. This involves simply having a child reading a short passage from a book, magazine, or newspaper more than once with differing amounts of support.
• Paired repeated readings is where students select their own passage from the material with which they are currently working with. Students first read their own passages silently and then take turns reading them out loud.
• The fluency development lesson has five steps to follow. Those steps are:
  1. Read the text to the class while students follow along silently
  2. Discuss the content of the text
  3. Together, read the text chorally several times
  4. Have the class practice reading the text in pairs
  5. With the entire class, have volunteers perform the text as individuals, pairs, or groups of four
• Automated reading or listening while reading a text
• The oral recitation lesson has two parts: direct instruction and student practice. The first part incorporates comprehension, practice, and then performance. The second part involves practicing until mastery is achieved.
• Support reading strategy and cross-age reading both emphasize specific aspects of fluency training and integrate the teaching of fluency with other important aspects of reading, such as comprehension and word recognition.

Parents can also be involved in their student’s learning by:

• Reading more
• Reading aloud
• Rereading familiar texts
• Echo-reading
• Using predictable books

Assessing Oral Reading Fluency

---

The easiest way to do this is to listen to them read orally and keep records of assessment. Fluency assessments help teachers determine if their instructional approaches are working, and if more instruction is needed for some students.

The simplest way to formally assess fluency is to take timed samples of students’ reading and compare their performance with published oral reading fluency norms or standards. The number of correct words per minute assesses both accuracy and automaticity, also known as reading rate. To get a word-correct-per-minute (WCPM) score, students are assessed individually as they read for one minute from an unpracticed, unfamiliar, grade-level passage of text.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

---

I really enjoyed reading about all the different fluency strategies. I like how some of them were for large groups and how some were for small groups or individuals. I have seen choral reading done before but not much echo reading which really interested me. I also liked how the text mentioned that assessment can be done by simply just listening to the students read. This makes reading assessment seem a lot less stressful than having to do a formal assessment.

---

---

---