Reading Comprehension

"The real problem is not that they cannot think but that they do not think while they read"

-Cunningham and Allington Classrooms That Work

I really enjoyed the reading this week discussing comprehension strategies. I think in order to do well in life and enjoy reading, you must have a good basis for understanding and comprehending the information. We are given some comprehension strategies:

• Calling up and connecting prior knowledge
• Predicting, questioning, and wondering 
• Visualizing experiences from a text
• Determining most important parts and summarizing
• Drawing conclusions and making inferences

I also really like the idea of literature circles. I think it gives students an opportunity to read what they
would like, interact with their peers, and discuss reading. As we have been doing our book groups in class, I have realized that I am liking that format more and more. It is fun, creative, collaborative, and engaging with the text.

Think-Allouds also seem to be an important part of comprehension teaching. Modeling good reading strategies is important because without us telling them, the students would never know how or what to think about when they read. Some tips for planning a Think-Aloud are:

• Choose a selection that truly makes you think
• Decide how much will be read aloud
• Practice before you teach the lesson! 
• Allow students time to collaborate and talk about their own experiences with the text

                                                          This video shows a 2nd grade teacher doing a Think Aloud

Also, because modeling is one of the most important parts of teaching kids to read I really like the steps our books gave us. 1. I do, You Watch 2. I do, You Help 3. You do, I help 4. You do, I watch
I think these steps are really easy to remember and will foster an atmosphere of helpfulness instead of authority and lecturing.

Question for the reader: Do you think there are any fun and crafty ways to integrate comprehension in the classroom? Something that would be hands-on and creative for those students who do better learning that way.

Making Words!

When kids are learning to read and write they often form their own spelling. The main question is how do we get our students to begin learning new words and spelling them correctly without forcing

them to do monotonous spelling quizzes?

One example is giving students an assortment of letters and have them make as many new words as they can. This will allow them to try new words and spellings to see what they can figure out on their own.

Another way is to make a fun word family using a fun craft. I think this would be especially fun because I love giving students a chance to be creative and do different word projects based on their preferences, and that would be an easy project to make lots of different word families for students to choose from.

Our articles this week gave us many do's and don'ts for teaching new words, but I think the most important aspect is to keep it interesting. If students get bored learning new words, they are more likely to not listen or be reluctant to write new words in their free writing.



How do you think we can actively engage our students to learn new words and make connections to old ones? Do you remember how your teachers integrated this into your elementary classrooms?

Fluency Instructional Tools

• Shared Reading: Teachers accurately demonstrating how to read and giving voices to characters, thinking aloud while reading. Nursery rhymes, crafts about the stories, asking questions and sharing thoughts about the text with each other.
• Choral Reading: A whole group or class reads the same passage at the same time together. Improves expression (modeled by the teacher), where you can have students “read like your sad, happy, ect)
• Read Around: Using games like popcorn reading or starting in one place and everyone reading parts of a text. It helps fluency because you have to pick up where others left off (following along) but also be able to keep the inflection and tone of your peers. You would use short stories, books being read by the whole class, old favorites, or your textbooks.
• Poetry Performance: Have students learn the importance of varying pitch, tone, voice, ect. Having a poem that students emphasize different words and how it can change the story. It shows how important correct prosody is.
• Reader’s Theater: Use of a script (no props or anything) Helps with expression and practicing reading. 
• Repeated Reading: Reread the same text over and over to learn the words and be able to read it “perfectly” (but is this really practical?) A good activity might be having a “read aloud” by one student a week on Friday, and they spend the week practicing their book to read aloud to their classmates.
• Wide Reading:reading of texts and articles that exposes students to rare words and new words that are not high-frequency but important words. It is the act of reading a lot of different texts about a lot of different subjects. (opposite of Narrow Reading, which would be like an author study)

Fluency

"Fluency is the ability to read most words in context quickly and accurately and with appropriate expression" Classrooms That Work (49).

As we learned this week, fluency is an important component of literacy. Without fluency it is difficult to comprehend texts and gain a better understanding through reading. It is important to model fluent and expressive reading through echo reading and choral reading so that you can excite your students about reading well.

One of the biggest factors of fluency is recognition, which is why a high-frequency word wall is suggested. It is important to do a word wall...not just have one. In order to do a word wall our text suggests:

• Be selective about the words you choose, limiting it to the most common words
• Add words gradually (only 5 or 6 a week)
• Make the words easily accessible where everyone can see them
• Practice, Practice, Practice! Chant and write the words with your students often
• Do a variety of activities so that your students can read and spell the words automatically 

You can make your word wall interesting with different colors and hanging it from the ceiling.

For younger grades, you can make a word wall center so students can practice spelling these words with magnets.

In order to truly understand how to instruct and assess fluency, we must have a good working definition of the components of fluency. Deeney tells us in his article,

Fluency consists of four components: 
Accuracy (freedom from word-identification problems)
Rate or Speed (automaticity, without hesitation)
Prosody (smoothly)
Comprehension

It is also important to note that one-minute assessments do not assess all four categories of fluency. Instead, they only assess Accuracy and Rate (and it can measure endurance if you have them read for longer). While it is useful to gather this information, it is important not to measure overall fluency using just these assessments.

Deeny offers a few instructional methods to improve fluency:

• Increase automaticity (like using the word wall)
• Decrease readability levels (to increase endurance, students must read texts they can already read fluently)
• Read texts that are interesting to them
• Increase reading volume
• Reread books
• Engage parents

Making it fun will make students excited to read well.

Rasinski also tells us how to "create fluent readers" in his article. He emphasizes that students who have many uncorrected words in their assessment probably need more instruction on decoding words and phonics skills. However those who need to strengthen their automaticity and prosodic reading would benefit from assisted reading and repeated reading. He suggests that the best passages for repeated read aloud reading includes: poetry, scripts, speeches, jokes, monologues, and dialogues. Be careful though! Make sure your students (and you) do not confuse reading fast with reading fluently. If a student can read a high number of words per minute but without prosodic and comprehensive reading, then they have not achieved fluency.

Question for the readers: Do you think that assessing fluency is this often is too much? Many schools assess fluency weekly, and even have students keep personal charts of their improvements. Do you think this is a good practice? Do you think there is a better way to assess fluency?