The role of the teacher in reading comprehension is interesting to me. It made a lot of sense, but it was good to have it explained outright: that a teacher in a child's younger years has to give a much more complete scaffolding of how to extract meaning from language. The main thing I got from exploring this concept was just wonder at how children come into the world needing to learn EVERYTHING, even things that, to us as adults, seem so natural and obvious. Sorry if that's a bit esoteric, but I can't get over it. It is something to be cognizant of as we interact with young learners.

Two interesting measures of fluency in the readings this week were prosody and endurance.
I always thought of fluency as the traditional "speed and accuracy" measures, but when the concepts of prosody and endurance were explained, they made A LOT of sense.

Prosody  or lack thereof is what made student-lead read-alouds all throughout grade school so painful. No one is engaged by a robotic rendering of A Separate Peace. The students could "read fine" and they didn't struggle with the words or anything, but it was so flat, so rushed. And while, when reading myself, I find very theatrical performances to be super disingenuous, there is definitely a comfortable middle ground there, where one can convey the meaning of the words AND punctuation without feeling like a bad Laurence Olivier impersonater. Maybe I am just way too socially anxious. Anyway.

Here is a really cool tool I found. It's an iPad app that allows readers to try to match the waveforms of a teacher's reading of a passage. It was devised to help students with ASD sound more natural.

prosody app

Endurance was interesting to me because it's something that I don't think was ever assessed for me, but is still like, a skill I remember acquiring. When you can choose longer and longer books and it doesn't intimidate you. Two books can have the same level words, but the one with more pages, up until a certain point, will just seem like too much work. In foreign language classes even now, I can read a dialogue no problem, for instance, but if my teacher asked me to read a prose excerpt I think my eyes would just glaze over.

Making Words Set Up


The Making Words activity is a great idea for classrooms--it makes sense for beginning readers/spellers of course but I also really liked the Making Big Words idea, particularly the few minutes of "free play" that the activity begins with it. It's a structured activity but it allows creativity and a feeling of independent achievement. I think connections kids make themselves are better remembered. With older kids, it might be fun to do another manipulatives activity but with root words, prefixes and suffixes, maybe in groups.