Thursday, October 02, 2008

Notes from A's Class


Midterm framework


12 Identification
  • Example - Consonant digraphs - two letters, one sound
    • sh, ch
3-4 Discussion questions (Major topics so far)
Format - What, Why, and How
  • Inter-relatedness of the Language Arts
  • Reading Process - CLR
  • Emergent Readers
  • Word Recognition
  • Fluency
  • Vocabulary
Multiple choice
New material
Magnifying glasses - word detectives - theme
Kids physically manipulating paper letters
Oral cloze
Kids were having fun

With a worksheet, the goal is just to get it done. The kids aren't having fun. Attitude is a choice. What you choose to do will affect their attitudes. If you don't make learning fun, you won't enjoy teaching.

Read-Write-Think lesson on learning sight words. Semantic clues first, then graphophonic clues, picture of a watermelon. Review entire lesson.

Word recognition - Runny Babbit example
Use with 3rd or 4th grade.
Word recognition skills are learned, shifting to comprehension.

Fluency is the bridge between word recognition and comprehension. To get from word recognition to comprehension, you need to become fluent.

First part is reading with flow - correct pitch, juncture, and intonation.
Why important? I pause when I teach. I'm trying to get knowledge from my head to your head. It's more likely to get there if I speak with pitch, juncture, and intonation. Why important? It causes the words on the page to come alive in the reader's head. The opposite of fluency is word-by-word reading. When a child reads like that, the words are not going to his head. If the words don't come alive, there's no comprehension, no mental stimulation, no enjoyment. If you hate reading, your thoughts go to, 'how many pages do i have left?' We have to create this fluency bridge by grade 2, definitely grade 3.

To make sure kids do well on FCAT, schools work on comprehension. They should be checking fluency. Without fluency, you're checking on the other side of the bridge, they aren't there yet.

How do you make certain that the kids are fluent?


Echo reading (works on pitch, juncture, and intonation)
Very easy to see which aren't fluent. One thing to do is echo reading. One problem is word-by-word readers are grouped together, so all their models are non-fluent, and they weren't read to as kids. You become a good role model reader for them. May need to start by teaching them what an echo is.

5 Chinese Brothers, example of Echo reading. Kids enjoy imitating intonation, even accent, etc.

Model examples - mannequin, model home, HGTV

Start off with phrases. When they have the book in front of them, use entire sentences. Don't let memory become a part of it; make sure they have the text.

Speeches - from a teleprompter. That's reading. They have a speech coach. Gestures.


Buddy Reading -
  • with friend
  • self-select book
  • self-select location
  • make sure they aren't 2 non-fluent readers
Stop and Go Reading (working on juncture)
modeling stop and go reading
When you get to any type of punctuation, the next person starts reading. Kids have to focus and pay attention throughout.

With Round Robin reading, kids figure out which paragraph is theirs, then tune out. This is not a good strategy. You need to be a thinker. If it's a bad strategy, stop it. Don't use it.
Oral cloze
Let a student read and leave one word out, let the other students fill in the missing word.
When a reader begins to make more use of syntactic and semantic clues, they become more fluent.

Theme for each month
Logo contest. Logo goes on a bookmark. On the bookmark, put information for parents on how to build fluency, these methods.

NIM - neurological impress method Sit close behind, read aloud together, a little bit faster. Read into their right ear, theoretically impressing the left side of their brain.

Riddles and Jokes Telling a joke requires good delivery, good pitch, juncture, intonation. Have a theme

Vocabulary
Beethoven Lives Upstairs by Barbara Nichol
I told you never to try to teach them words that weren't already in their heads. So you need to put more words in their heads, so that you can teach them those words.
Period book. Timelines. Clothes they wore, vintage pictures. Writing with a feather.
This book is written in the form of letters from Christoph to his uncle, and responses. You could be teaching letter writing. Use compare/contrast on words that are not sight words. Most are. Once they get to the end of the letter, they want to hear the response.
As you go up in age, the words don't get that much more difficult. If they have the strategies, they can read these words.
Vocabulary - Learning the meaning of new words
Humerus - funny bone - acted out, made it come to life
Teaching and learning should make sense. If you can't comprehend,

In life, a good vocabulary helps you to accurately communicate with people. The best single indicator of someone's intelligence is their vocabulary. V. is important to being able to express yourself. Works in receptive and expressive. Works as a ceiling in many occupations. Can't get higher because they like the skills to communicate.

How do you teach vocabulary?
What doesn't work - get a list of words on Monday, look up the definition, write it in a sentence, test on Friday. If you had twenty words a week and did it for ten years, maybe you get 6000 words? You learned 20,000 words by a much better method and you probably don't remember learning them. By the time you were five, you learned those words by your parents talking to you. The best way to make sure that your students have healthy, robust, rich vocabularies? By purposely infusing these words into your speech with children. (Esoteric information is that which is known by only a few.) If you teach 3rd grade, go look at books written for 4th and 5th and 6th grade. Start using those words in your speech.

Enthusiastic Model

Teach morphemic analysis - get a list of Latin and Greek roots. Teach in the context of a word that they already know. When you're riding a bike, you put your feet on the PEDals. PED = feet. PEDestrian. BiPED is an animal that walks on 2 legs. If you want your camera to stay steady, use a triPOD. Cap on your head, CAPtion is the heading of a picture, CAPtain is the head of the team.

Wordplay - let them play with words. What do these words have in common? star, evil, peek, pals, now. Can you find any other words that can be read backwards?
palindromes - racecar
acronyms
Know what they are, give examples.
Wordplay makes them feel smart. They want to share and learn more.





The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists by Edward Fry
I did not say you stole my red bandana.

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