This week I read an article called "Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality" by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. The full text is available here through UTK Libraries.

Their basic premise is to promote the use of guided reading to challenge students and continuously raise their comprehension levels while encouraging teachers to challenge themselves and continue their professional development.

The things Fountas and Pinnell like about guided reading:

• small group teaching allows for differentiation
• pairs students with texts on the edge of their ability level (not too easy or too hard)
• has teachers doing authentic assessments of student reading levels
• encourages greater variety of reading materials in a classroom

But Fountas and Pinnell offer some warnings. One, that teachers have been pushing students up to too high a level based on their performance in these activities, without looking at how much they truly understand. Two, that allowing student groups to become stagnant doesn't reflect how students are progressing.

"Teachers need to become expert in forming and reforming groups to allow for the differences in learning that are evident in students."

They encourage teachers to draw students into a deeper understanding of text, and to not rely too much on reading levels when it comes to choosing texts.

Fountas and Pinnell actually formed the popular A-Z leveling of books, but even they say it's not everything. A teacher has to consider things that might make a text more or less accessible and therefore understandable to students--it isn't simply a matter of what percentage of words they know. That really resonated with me, as a person who tried to read The Great Gatsby in fifth grade and comprehended approximately none of it. 

I enjoyed this article and thought a lot of the visuals were cool and helpful little charts, so I included some here.

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.

This strategy bookmark might be a little contrived with the animal thing, but I liked it. I felt like it reflected what we've been reading this week--basically that there are more strategies out there for understanding words than just going letter-by-letter. We use a lot of these almost without thinking, when we encounter unfamiliar words, and we might forget that these are skills that can really be taught.

I'm taking a Farsi class right now, so it's a foreign language and a foreign alphabet for me. I am still not a fluent reader, and already I find myself using these strategies. Sometimes it feels like that means I'm kind of "faking it"--but if it helps me decode, then hey. I find myself recognizing high-frequency words without really "seeing" the individual letters. Things like that.

Here is a wonderful video I found about prefixes. It is a rap. It's completely ridiculous but maybe you'll like it, too.

For me, it's kind of hard to remember how exactly I learned literacy skills in English, but I find a lot of this stuff makes sense when I think about struggles I've had with other languages. Do any of your foreign language learning experiences come to mind when reading about these strategies?  

One of the suggestions we saw this week was using real everyday objects as tools for learning phonemes. Phonemic awareness has been stressed as being one of the most important keys to functional literacy. Something kind of bothered me about it though...do we really want M for Marcus to be inextricably linked to McDonald's?
This is something I've been thinking about a lot. I loved the idea of using authentic materials and showing how print-rich the world around them really is, but for some reason, the idea of teaching kindergartners letters through commercial packaging rubbed me the wrong way. Advertising is already such a huge part of kids' lives, do I really want to promote that? Then again, will I have a choice? A lot of schools are already sponsored by soda companies and the like.
I want to get off my high horse and do what is most effective and most relevant for students, but I think I would feel better if we talked about this.

Something to consider: kids' reactions to branding can be pretty adorable...

phonics hockey
The family culture of literacy in the Jones family emphasized how important literacy was in everyday life and in fostering close relationships. Since not every child is lucky enough to live in a home where reading is important, how can we create a culture of literacy in the classroom?

The article and the textbook both talked about how children with a lot of prior literacy exposure come to school excited to learn how to read: they know why it's important, all the things in the "real world" it will help them to understand. I love the idea of bringing in menus, shopping lists and magazines. One of the most exciting things about learning to read, for me, was the idea that I could finally start to decode all the grown-up stuff I was surrounded by. What kind of real world materials would you like in your classroom?





The link above is a cool idea for a kinesthetic game to get kids more familiar with phonemes; check it out!