Real-Life Reading Inquiry-Word Study

While preparing for our assignment of engaging in a reading activity, I decided it would be interesting to work with my twin eight year old cousins. Knowing they are on slightly different ability levels when it comes to literacy, I thought it would be interesting to administer the elementary spelling inventory we were given in class and work with them on various other word study activities. I then compared their spelling inventories and analyzed their behaviors while doing the activities.

Before doing the lesson with my cousins, I reviewed the Yopp and Yopp (2007) article "Ten Important Words Plus: A Strategy for Building Word Knowledge." From this article I took away the importance of wide reading and word-learning strategies, so after doing the spelling inventory we played Scrabble for some time and afterward went to the library. While playing Scrabble, they both had trouble making words on their own, so I helped them with strategies to build words. By going to the library, I hope to have encouraged reading a variety of reading material, which I think was successful.

I also found an article by Cronnell and Humes (1980) called "Elementary Spelling: What's Really Taught." This article helped me when analyzing the spelling inventories and following activities. Both children did relatively well on the spelling inventory, the more advanced child spelling 20 of 25 words correct and the lower level child spelling 17 of 25 correct. Even the words they spelled incorrectly were very close to the accurate spelling. However, when given letters they were unable to create words, which supported by this article leads me to believe they need more help with organizing and other spelling strategies. Therefore, I worked on that while helping them play Scrabble. While at the library, I noticed that the lower level child chose books that had very little text. This may be one reason adding to his lower reading and spelling achievement compared to his twin sister. I think he would benefit from more text heavy reading about topics that he is interested in. What other ideas would you recommend for these children? Also, what do you think about using games to practice spelling and vocabulary?

          

Guided Reading

The article I found about Guided Reading is a 2007 article titled "Guided Reading: A Research-Based Response to the Challenges of Early Reading Instruction" written by Anita Iaquinta. It is very informative so I encourage you to click here to take a look.

Along with many other details, this article presents some things that need to happen before, during, and after guided reading lessons in order for them to be effective. I think this is helpful for teachers that are interested in adding guided reading to their classroom lessons. A few ideas the author suggests for introducing the text are: Prepare an introduction to the text that will help readers access and use all sources of information,  leave some opportunities for students to independently solve problems while reading, I key words and their meanings, practice using context to understand word meanings, Introduce key ideas and concepts, and help children understand how texts are structured. During the reading, provide prompts to help process the text. After the reading, talk about the text with the students and encourage dialogue among them, invite personal response and assess students’ understanding of what they read. This is what I found very helpful from this article. Something I encourage you to think about is would you use guided reading in your classroom? If so, how can you make sure that it remains interesting for your students?

Increasing Vocabulary Importance

Increasing the amount and complexity of vocabulary in children is important, but can also be something that is a struggle to teach and support. Many teachers, especially of young children, need more information and strategies on how to encourage young children's vocabulary development and how to incorporate that into their current schedules. Dalton and Grisham present 10 very interesting electronic or technological ways to encourage and interest children in learning and using increasingly more and complex vocabulary.

The strategies presented in this article can be helpful and interesting to children of all ages. One strategy that I like for younger children is using visual displays of word relationships within text. A word cloud, as I have added above is a free and useful way to use this strategy. They are easy to create and customize to fit the needs and interests of your students. Other online resources, games and field trips using vocabulary as a focus are also very helpful for increasing the vocabulary of children of all ages. Children also would enjoy using digital text and audio-book type technology for vocabulary study, which is not only fun but helpful as well. I encourage you to consider how you might incorporate technology into vocabulary study in your classroom. Also, do you think the strategies in these articles will continue to be useful in increasing vocabulary development if more research is done? 

They all can Comprehend!

The readings I chose to do on comprehension were the Cunningham and Allington chapter and the Gregory and Cahill article "Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers." These two reading helped me to better understand how to help the young readers I will be teaching to better comprehend the things that they read. They have also shown me how many comprehension strategies for older children are very similar, if not identical, to strategies that work for very young readers. These strategies include making connections, visualizing, questioning and predicting, summarizing and making inferences. While the way these strategies play out in the classroom may look a little different in younger versus older classrooms, the main ideas are still the same and very helpful for children. Questions I encourage you to consider are how do you think you will incorporate these strategies into your classroom? and Do you know of any other specific activities that encourage reading comprehension? Here is a video that I found that supports the importance of teaching reading comprehension to young children.