Preparing Our Classrooms for Literacy

The first article I read was Allington's "The schools we have, the school we need. The Reading Teacher." I picked up several key points that we have been talking about this past semester in Reading Education, but also in my 422 class. These main points came through when Allington compared what teachers to to what they should be doing. For example, he compared sorting vs. assorting. Schools place such an emphasize on placing and tracking lower developed students without understanding or recognizing their full potential. It is almost as if teachers are losing time by assessing and tracking who should be placed in special help or a lower reading level. In actuality, students should be instructed on their ability. It is so important for teachers to not undermine a child's ability. In fact, I am a strong believer in integrating reading through every subject. As Allington pointed out in his article, there is slim pickings over the books in which children can choose from in the classroom. Teachers also are uncomfortable with the idea of letting kids flat out sit and read. They feel like they are not doing their job I suppose or that children aren't taking anything away from that experience. I think this is going away from everything we have learned so far. If a teacher sets the child up in supportive ways such as a word wall, pictures, reading folder, and etc, a child can use those tools to facilitate and stimulate themselves with the text they are discovering on their own. Allington mentioned ways in which we could change our classroom to support literacy. I really liked the idea of delegating two days out the week to be literacy days. However, much of the other things he mentioned involved money and funding. I see this as a long but needed battle.

The other article I read was chapter 12 out of "Classrooms that work." I looked very closely to "A Day in a Kindergarten Classroom" because so far that is what I am interested in teaching. I thought the most interesting thing that stuck out to me was giving students choice. When they walk in they have a choice, whether it is choice of center they want to do or the choice of letter they want to be when they leave for recess. There is a lot of group and individual critical thinking, but the teacher is leaving the critical thinking to the students. It is very much an inquiry based classroom. This chapter took in what we have been learning from the past semester such as rhyming, fluency, context cues, real alouds, repetitive reading and placed it into a day activity. It showed me how easy it can be to incorporate literacy into every different subject.

Real Life Inquiry

For my real life inquiry, I went to a fourth grade classroom. Once a week, I visit a school for four hours. It is very beneficial for me to see the vast amount of differentiated reading levels. During this time, I worked particularly with one little girl during centers, where reading was involved the whole time. One day, I worked with her for about forty five minutes on a tri-fold packet that asked reading comprehension questions about what they had read in class that day during group reading time. The only problem was, the little girl could not comprehend group reading it seemed because they were either reading too fast or the girl could not understand the vocabulary and order of the story. While working individually with the little girl, she often gave up very fast. I asked her to look at the first question and read to me what it said. It was difficult for her to even read the directions, and she often doubted herself while reading. When I could tell she didn't feel comfortable, I told her I was going to read the question, but wanted her to follow her finger with mine on each word. I read slowly. . . .very slowly.
   While we were looking through the text to find the answer to the question, it required that she read the whole paragraph to fully understand the answer. I don't feel like it was her fault that she wanted to copy the first sentence at the beginning of each paragraph to fill in her worksheet. I don't think she has ever been taught how to look for correct answers in the text, and she was about on a first grade reading level. The material was much too advanced for her. We spent about 45 minutes reading one paragraph. I asked her to read for me. I told her to read it slowly, and when she ran across a more difficult word, I broke the word up. I broke the word up so that I knew she would eventually get it right. The best part about working with this little girl is when she got the word right her face would light up. I think one of the major things holding her back was the lack of confidence she felt. What worried me the most was that I was personally worried for her in every other subject as well. How could she succeed in any subject if she couldn't even read directions? I think this little girl needed a word wall, reading/writing folder that fit her needs, and reading material that was on her level so that she could build her confidence.