Guided Reading in Special Education

For my article I wanted to focus on guided reading in special education, I found this article about students with autism http://journals.cec.sped.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1429&context=tecplus, that I felt was really en-lighting about how to engage students. What I felt was most encouraging is that the reading assessments used compared students to their own previous abilities instead of national averages. This gives a better and more realistic view of how much a student has improved. This is good for all student, but particularly those in special education because while some students may be intelligent they are seen as low-achieving due to their grades compared to national averages. As the article states guided reading is also an adaptable teaching method that can engage students at all levels because the level of the book can be changed, questions can be modified and so on. This method also provides a lot of opportunity for one on one teacher involvement to help students who may struggle.

Evoking Vocabulary

While reading both the "Vocabularly Lessons" article by  Blachowicz and Fisher, and the "eVoc Strategies: 10 Ways to Use Technology to Build Vocabulary" article by Dalton and Grisham I began to think about the practicality and limitations of technology in the class. As Dalton and Grisham say technology can be a very useful tool, especially in a day and age where everyone pulls out their Ipad/pod/phone to do anything and everything. I though their ideas about using Wordles were very useful, in fact it spurred me to look into how they can be beneficial some more and I found this blog post http://thecleversheep.blogspot.com/2008/10/top-20-uses-for-wordle.html where a lot of great things you can do with Wordles are outline. Great! 

That being said, I do feel an over-reliance on technology can be a hindrance for a classroom. Going to UT we all know that sometimes, things just don't work. On those days students need to know how to receive all the information that they were going to pull of the internet from books and other sources. I also started thinking about how I like the idea of using the Oxford English Dictionary when teaching some vocabulary, or at least a simplified similar style so that, like Blachowicz and Fisher mentioned, students can learn the etymology, and morphology of words in order them to help know roots they can apply to other words.

How much technology to you think should be used in classrooms? In what ways?

The Importance of "I Wonder..."

For reading this week I read were Gill's,"Reading Teacher" and Gregory's "Kindergartners can do it too! Comprehension strategies for early readers." Both articles discussed the importance of comprehension. It was wonderful in Gregory's article to see kindergartners being self-aware of schema. It  made me think of how you have to break things down to be on learning level with a class, but once you do they can truly build on ideas and use them to learn more. I really loved the idea of stopping and talking to a class about what they think they know about a subject of a book before reading. The 'I wonder' statements really get a class thinking about what they already know and gives them questions to be looking for in the text. When a class has guidance like that for a reading they are paying closer attention in order to find the answers to their questions.
Building off the idea of comprehension I recently saw this video about teaching  comprehension to children. 

I think that using the idea presented in the articles as well as asking question as the reader does in this video will help teachers who, as Gill says, are still unsure about whether or not students comprehend.