Chapter 3- Assessing and Teaching Emergent Readers and
Writers.
Chapter three has tons of great
information in it and for someone like me who is used to high school and middle
school it has a lot of great teaching techniques for emergent readers. That
being said it may be too much… I was overwhelmed by the end of the chapter and
had to go back and read through it again. I felt like I was writing down every
single bullet point and I may never use them. So I decided to focus on things I
had not really done before like telling a story instead of reading it and engaging
young students in decontextualized conversation.
Telling a story instead of reading
it always seemed like a cop out to me. I felt like students needed to be
engaging with the written word all the time or else I was doing something
wrong. I was so glad to read the benefits of telling a story in engagement, comprehension
and oral language skills because I love telling stories. I can tell very
energetic stories of many famous moments in history, although they are mostly
wars so probably not for young children, and most popular fairy tales. I can’t
wait to meet up with Mel and practice telling stories!
The other thing I never thought a
lot about was decontextualized conversation and storytelling. Once again I
thought that the written word had to be involved all the time or at least
pictures and graphics. I was surprised to learn the benefits of
decontextualized conversation until I started thinking about it and then it
started to make sense. Students will be engaging with text throughout their
lives and most of that text will not come with pictures or diagrams. They will
have to be able to “see” what is going on without visual aids and they should
be trained to do that from a young age. I would be interested to see if
children exposed to more decontextualized conversation were better at figuring
out word and spatial reasoning problems in mathematics later in life.
One line of this chapter that really
stuck out to me is they referred to proper use of “I” versus “Me” as hypercorrect.
That annoys me. It isn’t hypercorrect it is just correct. I feel like the book
was calling me a grammar snob. Maybe I am too sensitive.
Chapter 4 – Assessing and Teaching Beginning and Fledgling Readers
and Writers.
This
book is just full of wonderful teaching ideas! The ideas in this chapter are
for beginning readers but many of them could be adapted for higher level
vocabulary or foreign language classes as well. I had never heard of a running
record before I read this chapter but wow what a great tool! The consistent
symbols and scoring system should be very helpful when assessing the ability of
younger children. Does the running record help with older students and
challenging high school or college material as well? It might be harder to score
unless one on one time with students is common in your class room.
I never
thought of handwriting as being important to literacy. My own hand writing is
legible but never got the flowery curls of my mother’s script. She is also
better at spelling than I am and I have to wonder what difference my lack of
handwriting instruction made in that regard. I got very little instruction in
handwriting but my students now are getting none and will whine constantly if they
are asked to write something long hand. My students have even suggested to me
that they could type out their board work in an e-mail on their phones and send
it to me. Sometimes I allow them their electronic crutch because I want
thoughtful fluid responses and I get better writing when they have a
spellchecker and a keyboard.
I think
handwriting also suffers at home. Parents often read to their children and have
them read books as well but they rarely ask them to properly form a lower case “q”
and a lower case “g” to point out the differences. If teachers aren’t paying
attention to handwriting and parents aren’t reinforcing good handwriting how
long before we graduate students that can’t write a check or sign their names?
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