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.

Finding Key Words

                                                            

Yopp and Yopp's article " Ten Important Words Plus: A Strategy for Building Word Knowledge" provides teachers with a way to hone in on material classes are reading. Their strategy of having students independently find the ten most important words it ensures that all students are fully reading the passage. It also checks for understanding and allows time for students to read at different speeds which would be very beneficial in an inclusive classroom. This is also a very adaptable strategy. Yopp and Yopp's suggest some places to go once the bar graph is constructed but that could very greatly depending on the class. You could even task students with how they feel the ten most common words could be best demonstrated and build off their ideas. The best part about this strategy is that it fully engages students and encourages to really go through passages in order to gain what is most important. 

I believe many of us have seen a student struggle with reading. So many times we are at a lost at how to help them when "sound it out" doesn't work. The article by Kathleen F. Clark "What Can I Say Besides 'Sound it Out'? " is especially helpful to future teachers because it details how to coach students into reading correctly instead of asking them to make the letter sounds and figure it out. The most interesting example to me was that of the teacher who asked his students if "fenk" was a word when they were trying to say the word "fence". Reminding students of what various sounds letters make and then having them eliminate options is a skill they can continue using for the rest of their lives. It is far more reliable than simply sounding words out because it engages their thoughts and their context for the word. Have the ever heard a word like 'fenk' in a story before? Would 'fence' make more sense?

What ways do you still use the reading skills, such as "sound it out" as we were so often taught, in your lives?

Reading Fluency

One thing I really gathered this week from bot the Rasinski and Deeney articles was how important it is to be cautious when assessing reading fluency. As Deeney displayed even when a student passes the accuracy portion of a reading assessment it does not mean the comprehend the story or could retell it accurately. Fluency is such a multi-faceted phenomenon it is an injustice to the students when teachers fail to test it correctly, really. It is unfair to a student to just figure out whether or not they can read 'accurately' and quickly  considering they might not gaining anything from the texts.

As step in the right direction then is to focus on understanding when teaching reading fluency. Rasinski's article brought up the good point that modeling fluent reading is beneficial, but only when couple with the students repeatedly reading on their own. That is where things like coaching comes into play in order to help students gain the most out of reading as well as activities such as read alouds, reader's theatre and word wall's with high-frequency words come which will help to build students excitement and confidence in reading and understanding.

Literacy is Everything

One of the things that was most definitely highlighted in the " Letting Go of Letter of the Week" article by Donna Bell and Donna Jarvis was how many students come in to the classroom as readers but they believe they aren't. When we think about reading in a classroom setting it is so hinged on the ability to pick out letters and read trade books we do seem to forget that literacy is everywhere. As shown in the article students could pick up reading cues on common brands despite of background differences. By isolating 'school reading' as a phenomenon that only occurs between the pages of classroom book or novel we're severely limiting our expectations for students and overlooking a wealth of prior knowledge. Even in older grades you shouldn't believe student can't or doesn't read just because they don't read or enjoy assigned novels, magazines, cereal boxes, board books, trade books, beach reading are all still viable forms of literacy.