User:Dgmstrickland

This purpose of this page is to share reading instructional strategies including comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary for elementary and middle school aged children.

Part 1: Personal Belief System and Reading Models

Reading Belief System Philosophy Paper

Reading was always prevalent in my household as I grew up. Since I am currently in my early 50s, television had minimal airtime, with only one centrally located in our living room and having only four or five channels to choose from. In addition, there was no social media, unless you consider talking on the telephone social media. Adding to that, we were a military family which meant that we moved periodically. My family lived in Hawaii and Guam for 6 combined years before I turned twelve. Satellites in those days did not air many channels, and television was not even available all hours of the day and night. My sisters and I learned to read because we saw our parents read. My mother read books and my father read magazines almost daily. It was part of their routine, so it became part of ours. They read the local paper, we read comic books, and the multi-page newspaper comics every Sunday. We looked forward to its arrival. Every recipe we made from a box had instructions that you needed to follow to prepare correctly, so we read them. This was our version of fast food! We checked out books from the base or school library every week. It was exciting to read them; they were our alone time activity. The stories I would read transported me to other places. I was only on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean when I wasn’t reading a book. I developed a love for reading. My mother still tells the story about how I wouldn’t go to sleep at night until she had read me a story in bed. That was because she had made it a routine before I could protest if it wasn’t happening.

During my school years, instruction was very formal. We were taught with a bottoms-up method. There really wasn’t an interactive approach. Students listened to instruction and followed whatever the teacher told us to do. I always considered myself a reader; it was internalized as important and I worked through the decoding because I enjoyed comprehending what I read. I was fortunate, as I didn’t struggle to connect meaning to text, and decoding wasn’t difficult as I had effective phonemic awareness. During the time I attended college to become a teacher, reading instruction focused around much of the same ideas I had practiced when I was learning to read. Because of this, when I began to teach, I aligned my beliefs with these sequential methods. Younger readers needed to be taught to understand letter/sound identification. After that, letter blends identified in simple words, which led to multi-syllable words, sentences, and finally paragraphs. Instruction included a lot of exposure to various types of print. All of this was being supported during instruction in small reading groups practiced with leveled text. Read-alouds were also part of this structure, with the teacher modeling how reading should sound.

As I became more confident instructing students, our curriculum changed, and I needed additional methods to support the needs of readers who were reading and comprehending at higher levels. The newest push in our district was to incorporate more interactive instructional methods in the classroom. My vice principal started presenting professional development opportunities for staff to encourage more discussion and positive interaction among the students as they were learning. We learned to become more the facilitator in guiding our lessons, while the students worked in partners or groups. There was more questioning, sharing, speaking, and listening involved with this method, and of course more engagement. Collaborating on lessons and ideas with my team also helped to influence changes in my instruction. I began to incorporated strategies such as Jigsaw, Talk and Turn, and Think, Pair, Share.

My theoretical methods have changed to a combination of bottoms up and interactive strategies. How I plan to teach must reflect the needs of my students and what skills they are lacking. Since I am currently teaching reading intervention to struggling readers, my instruction for readers lacking fluency includes more strategies from the bottom-up method. This includes phonics and word study, modeling reading to show appropriate pacing and intonation, frontloading vocabulary, and scaffolding their reading as needed. With students who need more support with comprehension, I use more inquiry and discussion, making sure they are rereading, making connections and using reflective journals or graphic organizers to support their learning. With all students, discussion occurs before each lesson to set goals they will work on and after each lesson, we discuss where they each feel they are with those goals. Making progress is the main objective. I strive to always make our group work time a safe environment where they can take risks when sharing their responses or reading a passage that is more challenging for them. My goal as their teacher is to help each student develop perseverance. I believe that if they each view themselves as capable of learning, then they will persevere to success.

References

Morrow, L. (2012, Oct). Early childhood literacy: Which skills are critical to develop for later learning? Reading Today, 30, 38-39. Retrieved from https://explore.proquest.com/document/1181268213?accountid=4202

Rasinski, T. (2014). Delivering supportive fluency instruction-especially for students who struggle. Reading Today, 31(5), 26-28. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1518887891?accountid=4202

Three Models of Reading Instruction

By: Donna Mayson-Strickland /Strategies of Reading Development

Part 2: The Early Years of Literacy Development

Stages of Reading Development from Birth Through Preschool

Pre-Reader or Pseudo Reader   Emergent Reader   Teaching Strategies for each reading component Resources:

 http://www.readingrockets.org/sites/default/files/childbecomesreader.pdf 

/Reading Assessment Brochure

Part 3: Reading Strategies, Interventions, and Instructional Approaches

Reading Assessment Brochure

Reading Assessment Brochure              

      /Informal Assessment Chart

Part 3: Next document:

Informal Assessment Chart Part 4: Reading/Writing Connection and Technology

/Comprehension, Vocabulary, and Fluency

Strategies to Develop Comprehension, Vocabulary, and Fluency

By: Donna Mayson-Strickland Part 5: Reading Assessments

Part 5:  Reading Assessments:  Incorporate Writing into your Everyday Curriculum

By: Donna Mayson-Strickland

•       Incorporating Writing Activities Four Technology Tools:

Classroom Technology Tools Part 6: Reading/501

Course Reflection

By:  Donna Mayson-Strickland

As I reflect upon the information I have studied during this reading course, I feel energized to take much of what I have learned into the classroom as my school district is beginning its second quarter. Since I have been teaching for about twelve years, there have been strategies I studied that I happily realized I have been using all along. There have also been strategies I had honestly forgotten about or had minimized their importance, but now look at with renewed interest. Finally, there have also been strategies and tools I didn’t even know about, but I am now excited to begin implementing into my daily routine.

I thought it was very helpful to start this course by reading about different instructional beliefs and having to identify what our own instructional belief was. I hadn’t really put a lot thought into my own history of learning as a child and how that has influenced my teaching style. It also helped me realize the impacts of good administrators and teammates I’ve worked with, and the ways they have helped me to become a better teacher by becoming a more interactive one.

It was interesting reviewing the informal and formal assessments. It may have been obvious that I am not a big fan of standardized testing, but I am a huge advocate for informal assessments. My team and I have been utilizing informal assessments daily for math, reading and writing for the last several years. I also took a course on informal assessments this past summer, because I wanted to learn more about their validity. The scientific evidence is there to back them up if you are using the information in a timely manner for remedial instruction. That is exactly what I do with my reading intervention groups daily, and last year when I worked in special ed. Department with math and reading interventions. I feel strongly that it should be part of instructional practice.

One of the strategies I’ve already started working on adding is the book series lending plan that the school in Vegas had. I’ve already been talking to the other teachers about it and I dug through collections of used books in our book room and already have a small library going. My kids have started to borrow books to read as they are leaving my intervention classroom. I am going to continue building this program. I have also been incorporating more partner reading since studying more about that strategy. I had gotten away from that as a routine, but the kids really like it and I can tell they are getting more out of that than silent reading or my modeling reading for them.

Between the information in the chapters, the awesome videos which showed excellent teachers instructing students, or the panels of experts who spoke on instructional practices, I really have been impacted by it all!