Guided Reading: Simply Explained

This article was very concise and specifically explains what a guided reading session includes. The purpose of guided reading is to have the children in small groups working on a reading strategy together. Some of the strategies are letter-sound relationships, context clues, word structure, etc. This process can be modified and can be utilized in the upper grades. The students are able to pick a book and are grouped together by their reading abilities. The goal of guided reading is effective and improved independent reading. Students get into small groups, typcially 4-6 kids and their duration of the session is usually 15 to 20 minutes. The teacher explicitly explains what strategy they are working on and what she expects from the students. This is a wonderful idea and I truly believe that I will implement it in my classroom in the future. I want to make sure that I know all of my student's reading levels and abilities in order to place them in the right reading group. Here is a link of my article:

http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/de/pd/instr/strats/guided/guided.html

Technology Savvy

Technology is a great tool to use in the classroom and has grown and advanced tremendously in education. Many teachers are afraid to utilize technology because they have very different philosophies about teaching. I, on the other hand, completely think that it should be utilized in the classroom at any time possible. Children these days are so advanced and understand how to use technology at an early age. There are many ways that a teacher can incorporate technology into their lessons. The article written by Dalton and Grisham, talks about an online source called Wordle. Wordle can be used for many things in the classroom such as memorizing vocabulary or brainstorming about a certain subject.

Another example of technology the article talks about is using power point. Power point is a very important tool in deaf education. The students use power point in order to learn to write stories together. The students usually play a game or make something and then use power point to write about it. This enables them to add words in different colors, such as making the words red that are their high frequency words. Power point also enables the students to input pictures and animation. This can help the students pay attention to the lesson or connect what they wrote with to a picture like a story book. Also in power point, paragraphs written or pictures drawn by the student can be scanned in and added to the power point. This is a great way to incorporate the children's work into the lesson. Here is an example of a slide template that could be used to talk about Easter:

What are some other examples of how to incorporate technology in classroom?

Comprehension is a Process

In the article by Gill, it lays out a visual representation of how reading comprehension is a process. There are ways in which you can follow the process and different activities you can do. The matrix was very helpful to me because it shows it as three steps and what each component of each step is. Pre-reading is important because you must be able to get the student interested. What are some ways you can get the reader interested in the book? Also a K-W-L chart is a great way to discuss as a group what they already know and then fill out what they want to know and save the learning part for the post reading. This was an easy to follow matrix and of course you can tweak it however you want depending on your students reading levels.

In the article by Pardo, she talks about building and activating prior knowledge. In deaf education this is crucial because many students come in lacking prior knowledge that we may expect them to know. Some students do not have access to the language or may have a different connection to certain words that will enhance their knowledge. It takes a lot of questions and different ways in order to build and activate their knowledge in a positive and meaningful way. Students need to know that whatever knowledge they have already is important and by building on it, it can effect the way they comprehend new knowledge.
What are some ways to activate their prior knowledge of the example: The beach? What could you ask them, how can you get them motivated to learn about it?

What is a Word?

This article told us to think about our own vocabulary. I sat and pondered and thought about all the words I have accumulated in my vocabulary. I have broadened my vocabulary by hearing different words in my environment and this makes me think about deaf education once again. It is so important that we receive our vocabulary for the most part in an auditory sense. For the children that I teach, it is best to label objects around the room and constantly use different vocabulary when I am signing. This helps them get the words visually and the labels help them put names with objects. This helps them get a sense of why words are what they are. Also for children to notice words that are often used. In my classroom I am in right now, these words are called "High Frequency Words." These are words such as "a," "an," "the," and "with." These are important words that the students need to recognize because they are often used in many sentences they produce.
Think about:
How did you acquire new words in your vocabulary?

Phonemic Awareness Instruction

This concept immediately made me think of deaf education and visual phonics. First when I was reading the article it talked about younger students using different songs or chants in order to focus on different aspects of the phonemes in the different words. Rhyming is also an important aspect of phonemic awareness and can help students predict what the word will be next based on the rhyming scheme. This is a great tool to use in your classroom. As far as visual phonics goes, this technique is used when you are teaching a child with a hearing loss what different sounds are. It focuses on using symbols that represent hand movements on the mouth. This helps the child visual what sound they will make and most symbols represent what movements your tongue makes. However, if some students have some hearing the techniques such as sing song, in the article and book can be used to teach the deaf students phonemic awareness.

Fluency: Echo Reading

I enjoyed the section about echo reading because it seems like it would make the passage that you are reading come alive for the students. Students can practice their voices and maybe you could ask your students what voice they would prefer and in turn this can incorporate the character traits. You can discuss with your students what the character's traits are and what their expression would be in the story. This can be applied to any sort of materials you read and can possibly make them more interesting to the readers. This can be used when reading poems, plays, or just a simple picture storybook. Also if it is a poem written by a student, this is where they can be imaginative and decide how they would portray their own character. Echo reading helps students with fluency as well because you as the teacher can model the passage and then they can repeat and in turn this will help them remember the readings. They will be able to hopefully replicate the reading later and comprehend the passage better.
This is a link of a video helps explain how to teach echo reading to your kids! Copy, Paste, and enjoy!

http://www.ehow.com/video_4402311_teaching-kids-echo-reading.html

Early Literacy

Some features of these articles really resonated with me because I do work with young children at a daycare. I do believe that there should be as much literacy and reading as possible during there day at daycare. They are there all day from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. which is such a long time and during this time their knowledge should be expanding. I like how in the article it focused on reading every day with your child. The ratio at daycare is 8 children to 1 teacher, so we have 16 children. It is so important to get them all focused on some sort of reading more than once a day. It should be any sort of reading materials such as just showing them pictures with the word on it, audio books, or just reading to the class. I have found that their attention spans are short so I think that reading one to two books is just enough. Inflection and animation in your voice is very important as well. I think that the teachers at the day care may not need to have a college degree because some of the workers that I work with are very capable and I have seen major gains in the children's reading abilities.
Question to think about:
What are different ways to incorporate literacy in your interactions with young children?