Blog 3:  No More Independent Reading Without Support

Earlier in this book, a term was introduced that explains to me what the authors are trying to accomplish - “scaffolded silent reading” or ScSR.  Although the authors use the acronym IR in the remainder of the book, I think ScSR is more appropriate. They advise teachers to move beyond reading while their students are reading to actively conferencing with students as they are reading independently. The authors state that teachers need to be:

*assessing “the match between student self-selected books and students’ abilities by listening to them read,

*coaching students in using reading strategies,

*and engaging them in book discussions.”

With so much emphasis placed on test scores, the authors state that “At every grade level for all ability groups,

*individual schema-based learning (Students connected new learning to what they already knew. As students engaged in IR, teachers provided individualized instructions when students encountered obstacles.),

*conceptual learning (Students self-selected with teacher coaching, two expository trade books on the same topic and then read them back to back.), *transactional learning (Readers silently read teacher-selected fiction books related to a thematic unit and engaged in teacher-monitored classroom discussions based on the texts.)

produced the highest comprehension scores. Situated practice, workbook practice, and basal reader groups produced the lowest scores.”

Early readers need more scaffolding during ScSR to include oral reading activities like repeated reading, choral, echo, partner, or assisted oral reading along with explicit reading instruction. Readers need to talk about what they read and be held accountable through reading logs and written summaries. The authors recommend using the reader’s workshop model where a focused lesson is presented, then students spend the majority of their time reading and practicing what they learned during the focused lesson. Students then close the reading time by reflecting and sharing what they have learned.

Striving readers benefit even more from ScSR than average or above average readers. They need more help in selecting appropriate books and instruction on reading strategies. For many of these striving students and for more and more of our other students, reading at school is the only reading they will do all day.

Blog Post 2

I chose the book, Catching Readers Before They Fall by Pat Johnson and Katie Keier. I will be focusing on chapters 4 and 5 for this blog post. The first thing that stood out to me in chapter 4 is figure 4.1 on page 54. It provides an example for the things that readers check for when word solving. It is an equal balance between meaningful information and deciding if something makes sense, using structural knowledge to decide if something sounds right, and using visual knowledge to decide if something looks right. All 3 of those are very important clues to check for when reading. I will be more cautious to stop and ask my students these things during guided reading if they become unsure of a word.

The chapter also states, "Many teachers who work with beginning struggling readers find themselves at a loss for what to say when a child reading with them gets stuck on a word. It happens to all of us." (Johnson and Keier) I find myself in this situation at times because I want to help my students but I become fearful that I will only confuse them more. The chapter goes on to give ideas for ways that we can encourage students by giving them promptings such as, run your finger under the word to see if it looks right, let the first part of the word help you, keep your eyes on the message. (Johnson and Keier)

I also enjoyed reading chapter five because it discusses the components of a comprehensive framework. Figure 5.1 on page 73 suggests ways to incorporate reading and writing into your classroom. It suggests, read alouds, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading. It also suggests morning message, community writing, and independent writing. (Johnson and Keier) These are all things that we do in 4K that are a part of our daily schedule. Guided reading is something that becomes mandatory in kindergarten but I have started this process with several of my 4K students who are ready.

I really like the writing tips that this chapter suggests. We do journals twice a week in 4K at my school and I am always searching for ways to help my students strengthen their writing. Some of the tips include, check and confirm, predict what letter or word will come next, generate and recognize high frequency words, and recognizing that text is read and written left to right, top to bottom, and that there are spaces between words. (Johnson and Keier)

I highly recommend this book to all Early Childhood Educators. I am already finding ways to strengthen my teaching skills to promote learning in my classroom!

-Kristen Cochran

Blog Post 1

For this assignment, I chose the book, "Catching Readers Before They Fall" by Pat Johnson and Katie Keier. The first chapter focuses on Expanding our Paradigm of Reading. "We believe by expanding one's knowledge of reading process in all its complexity, any teacher can increase his or her repertoire of teaching reading to children who struggle (Johnson and Keier 2010)." This chapter encourages teachers to keep trying to develop teaching stamina. It suggests how desperately our readers who are struggling need us and it is so important to get to them before they fall.

Chapter two focuses on why all students are not successful. "The children who are not learning to read are often confused, frustrated, and slowly giving up hope on themselves as readers (Johnson and Keier 2010)." I also learned through this chapter that ongoing research believes that there are many things going on inside of children's brains when they are learning to read. These different things consist of keeping a constant check on themselves while reading, noticing when things are misread, and using a variety of strategies to fix their own errors while reading.

In chapter three, Vygotsky takes a seat in the classroom. Vygotsky has a few basics for the classroom that he believes. Through this chapter, I learned that he believes, the most effective learning takes place during the students zone of proximal development, the language that teachers use play a crucial role in students cognitive development, and the environment plays a huge role, the students should be in an environment that fosters lots of talking and interactions with each other.

So far, I would recommend this book for teachers to read. It is helping me to see how students think while reading as well as what will foster a successful learning environment that will encourage students to become better readers!

-Kristen Cochran

Blog Post 2: Chapters Four and Five of Catching Readers Before They Fall

I've really been enjoying this book, Catching Readers Before They Fall. The title for chapter four is Beyond "Sound It Out". This chapter was very informative to me because it teaches teachers different ways they can help their students in solving words. The chapter teaches three ways that proficient readers read: Meaningful information, structural knowledge, and visual information. The text states, "Students need to learn the importance of paying attention ti the visual information in print, beginning, with how to notice the first letter. They also need to check their predictions against the letter information or number of words on the page. Finally, they need to take on the responsibility of checking for themselves and not waiting for someone else to monitor their errors for them". The part of the chapter that I've been making sure to use more in the classroom is asking the students questions after they finish reading. Asking the students questions like, "Does that make sense?" can really help me to guide the students in the direction that they need to go regarding their reading comprehension skills. In the chapter, it discusses how teachers can purposely make mistakes in front of the students so that they can tell the teacher what they did wrong. I've tried this strategy only to have confused the students, so I think this is best for more advanced or sufficient readers. 

I previously found teaching students to use a balance of the sources of information like meaning, structure, and visual to be difficult. After reading pages 64-66 I figured the best way for me to teach balance of sources of information is to use it in my morning message. This chapter provided several prompts that help the students to be able to self-initiate problem solving. 

 Chapter five, A Comprehensive Literacy Framework, focuses on how the classroom instruction and environment is designed to help the needs of the readers. The chart on page 73 of the components of a comprehensive literacy framework. The text gives a great example of when children are participating in reading/writing to, reading/writing with, and reading/writing by. The chapter states, "If we want to support children as they build an effective reading process system, then we must show them what it looks like when a proficient reader is using his or her system. Shared reading provides a place to do just that". When I use the components of a comprehensive literacy framework on page 73, I always make sure to remind the students to make sure they are using the information they've already learned to help guide them or to make sure they are self-monitoring. 

“Blog Two: No More Independent Reading Without Support

Common Core states that students should be able to “read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.” While this book states that Common Core does not require the independent reading to be accomplished during class time, it does require the standard for all grade levels. The standard also specifies informational texts. If you look in lots of early childhood classrooms, you will find that they are filled with lots of fictional stories but less informational texts. The amount of time students spend in IR (independent reading) makes a difference too. Good readers and poor readers need differing amounts of IR time to get the most out of the experience. The book states that “ . . .different time allocations should be provided for students at different stages of development.” (REALLY?! Not only do I need to let them read, I have to know how many minutes will be most beneficial??!! Sorry – that is just a little much to expect.)

Studies conducted on students said that “. . . reading easier texts during IR resulted in achievement gains” while other studies showed that students needed to be challenged in their reading to make gains. I’m not sure which I believe the most – or both could be correct under a given set of circumstances. The classroom library makes a great difference in students’ accessibility to the type and number of books – especially for poor readers. A study by Krashen (2011) shows “ . . . access to books as a factor in increased reading performance, while the evidence for workbooks, computer programs and other materials is not as strong.”

Mark Twain said, “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who can’t read.”

Blog 2: Comprehension: The Bottom Line

Blog 2

Shameeka Spann

 This week I chose chapter 8 in the book Catching Readers Before They Fall. This chapter was titled “Comprehension: The Bottom Line.” It focused on comprehension and comprehension strategy instruction. According to Johnson and Keier (2010) “The end goal of reading instruction is for the students to be able to comprehend what they read” (Johnson and Keier, 2010). Johnson and Keier (2010) also state that proficient readers automatically apply comprehension (Johnson and Keier, 2010). So, struggling readers are in more need of comprehension instruction. Teachers should also focus on the transitional readers with comprehension because there are areas in comprehension that could still be covered with them to succeed. One thing that stood out to me in this chapter was when Johnson and Keier (2010) stated, “If we ask top readers to slow down, learn about a strategy, name it, or learn how it works, it would interfere with their processing (Johnson and Keier, 2010). So, basically the authors are stating that these students are able to comprehend so we should not interfere with their fluency by asking them to slow down when reading or explaining strategies they used. This actually opened my eyes because when I noticed my strong readers making errors I would tell them to slow down reading. Then, I noticed they would struggle to focus. Now I have learned, that those were miscues my students were making. I was interfering with their fluency. I’ve learned through this process and the chapter in the text that my strong readers need to be trusted because as teachers we have a hard time letting our students grow. According to Johnson and Keier (2010), “Students do not have to be aware of how they comprehend, as long as they did” (Johnson and Keier, 2010). The gradual release of responsibility was discussed in this chapter on how teachers should introduce strategies that includes: modeling, shared demonstration, guided practice, and independence. I have used this model most of my years of teaching because I view it as the “I Do, We Do, You Do” concept. In chapter 8, a sample lesson was presented focusing on what strategy instruction should look like. The teacher, Pat modeled for the students how to practice the questioning strategy without naming the strategy, but thinking aloud to model it. Then, students actually shared what they observed. This is new learning to me because I always thought I had to name the strategy at the beginning of the lesson for my students before I modeled. Visualizing was also modeled by the teacher Pat as she used poems during shared reading. I used Pat’s model of not naming the strategy in my classroom as I taught a lesson about drawing conclusions. My students were able to understand the strategy and use the strategy during the read aloud. In the upcoming week I am also planning to use shared reading as I introduce author’s purpose without naming the strategy, but involving student conversation. In conclusion, Johnson and Keier (2010) state that effective teaching in comprehension should include: text large enough for students to see, teacher reads as students follow along, students engage in conversation, students practice strategy with partners as teacher observes, students share how the strategy was helpful. (Johnson and Keier, 2010). “Comprehension is thought- and that is definitely the bottom line when it comes to teaching reading” (Johnson and Keier, 2010).

What You Should Know About "Sounding it Out" and a Comprehensive Literacy Framework

We have to keep in mind that English is not consistently phonetic and that 40 to 50% of words cannot be solved by sounding them out. Students can use other ways along with letters and sounds to solve an unknown word. We have to support children as they build word-solving strategies. If you are a proficient reader, you know that you don't depend only on phonetics. You also look at the structure of the sentence, what part of speech the word is that is unknown, and what word makes sense with the content. Struggling readers who are focusing only on phonetics need to be taught or shown how to use other sources to figure out a word or sentence which include meaning, structure, and visual. Does it make sense? Does it sound right? Does it look right? These are questions that students should ask themselves when reading (or self-correcting). Beginning readers tend to focus on one source, which is chosen by which comes easiest to them. You can teach students to listen to themselves when they read in order to fix something if it doesn't make sense. Another thing that can be taught is using a picture and a first letter to figure out the word. Students should also be taught to skip the word and read the rest of the sentence and try to figure out what makes sense in the sentence. Modeling strategies can help students perform them as well in order to become fluent and proficient readers.
We also want to keep in mind the components of a comprehensive literacy framework. Reading includes read-alouds, shared reading, interactive read-alouds, guided reading, and independent reading. Writing can include morning message, community writing, and independent writing. Reading aloud is very beneficial for struggling readers. Hearing more and even being able to follow along can help them to see if the word looks right or sounds right. Shared reading can provide an opportunity for community, as children talk, think, listen, and join in on the reading. "Actively engaging children in reading a familiar text can support them as they begin to transfer strategies into their own reading and writing." During guided reading, children can try to solve words with help from the teacher. An introduction can be provided in order for the student to think about what he is reading. During independent reading, children can reread books, which can help build fluency, allowing the student to think more about the content of the text rather than the words, and it can also build confidence in reading for the student. Community writing can be together or in small groups. During this time, students can contribute and learn what can fit in to prewritten sentences and they can create their own sentences with the help of one another to suggest and correct as they go. It's important to focus on reading and writing because using what they know in one area can help them in another.

Catching Readers Before They Fall chapters 1 & 2

This post is going to cover my readings for chapters 1 & 2. I knew there was a process for reading, I guess I still find myself amazed at all of the things we do in milliseconds that we have to break down for children one step at a time while also not making that the only strategy we use. I continue to find myself going back to something the author's said early in chapter 1 - the most important safety net for struggling readers is going to be their classroom teacher. My next thought was "wow, how do classroom teachers find that 1 student out of all 25 or 30 of them and say "okay, you and I are going to work together to improve your reading". I also find myself thinking about how if I were a classroom teacher, how would I restructure things to assist them in working on their reading and helping them to establish the strategies that I don't even remember establishing. I think for me, the one thing that I continuously come back to is, I'm not a classroom teacher. This has bothered me for a while, a lot of the things mentioned here are geared toward classroom teachers - which they should be since the responsibility they have is so terribly important. I have come to some important conclusions... I can be helpful to the classroom teacher, I can make sure that the things my student needs are there for them when they need it. I can help to mitigate, to the best of my ability, the things that are making this process-building mission that much harder. These are things like if they are a student that has some vision, are their environmental factors that are making the process more difficult? Some of these could be things like is it too dark, is the spot they're sitting in too bright or are they facing toward a window and is this causing glare? If they are having materials enlarged, how large is it, how many letters can they get on a screen at once? If they can only get part of a word, they are having to memorize the word, then memorize the word in the context of the sentence and then try to comprehend what it was that they just read. That just sounds exhausting and it's a wonder that any Visually Impaired child learns to read at all - but somehow they do, somehow I did too. I had the thought that maybe I could reinforce the skills and the reading strategies that the teacher is working on in class when I pull the student out for supplementary instruction. I don't know if it would be appropriate for me to do things like a miscue analysis but maybe it would be helpful to mention things I notice they are having difficulties with when they are reading.

Blog One: No More Independent Reading Without Support

Sande Tisdale

Blog One: No More Independent Reading Without Support

   I was very happy to see the title of this book in the list of suggested readings. I was one of those teachers who gave children self-selected reading time while I was working with small groups but I often felt the children weren’t engaged in IR in a productive way. I remember reading about the example of ‘finding Waldo.” Some children do gravitate to activity books or pictures books rather than books that engage them in real reading. I like the idea of Scaffolded Silent Reading (ScSR). The book states that a “. . .study found that in-school IR led to gains that were better than the national averages in reading rates and a 43 percent average increase in the proportion of ideas recalled, representing a substantial increase in comprehension over the school year.” Independent reading is important but I feel like I need to spend more time teaching children how to do it effectively.

    I was interested to read the section about the correlation between IR and the success of students. I think we all agree “ . . . that the best readers read the most, and that poor readers read the least.” I was happy to see that the authors wrote about the difference between those relationships being correlational as opposed to causal.  I know that children who have access to lots of books and an emphasis on reading at home are generally those who have more well educated parents, who live in households with higher incomes, and whose parents value education. All of these factors affect the acquisition of reading skills.

   I have a lot of teachers’ sites saved on social media. I now find myself looking at these activities with a more discerning eye – asking myself, “Would this activity be more important to my students’ education than having the opportunity to practice reading?” I also am taking another look at my morning activities. I loved gathering my children together on the floor in the morning to do calendar activities and read alouds. In second grade, we don’t dress bears like the example in our book but are all of our activities more important than students’ reading? Some, I would say yes; others, not so much. 

Module 3 - Miscues

So I found this module fascinating, I remember when I wrote papers in school, I would occasionally see red writing above what I had written. My teachers would always need to review one-on-one with me what the red writing meant, simply because I could not see it. If I remember right, sp was used to represent a spelling mistake, but I’m not certain about this. In reading the directions for how to perform a miscue analysis, I kept thinking to myself, ‘but how am I going to do this?’ I understand what the purpose of this is, to represent what a reader does if they read a word or phrase incorrectly. I think I would read along with them using my own braille copy then I would go back and make markings later. I originally thought I might do this in an excel spreadsheet with each word in their own box and leave a blank line below each line of text and then I could make the comments in the box below or above the word. I haven’t decided if this method will work or not. I’m not going to be able to use some of the symbols and didn’t understand all of them because they are graphical but I got the point of the exercise. I think what I could use would be a chart with the words that I can use. For example, if they made a substitution, I would need to be able to use a letter for my notes to represent this in a form of shorthand. At least, that is what this sounds like to me, a method of shorthand. The recording would allow me to go back and actually write the notes.

Post #1 - Module 2

I thought these readings were interesting, I found that they all focused on a different area of how best to help students learn to read. I really enjoyed the article entitled The Pleasure Principle. This article made a great deal of sense to me. What better way to encourage kids to read then to let them find a book to read and simply let them read it for the enjoyment of it. I didn’t realize that the pictures in a book were so important to determining the meaning of an unfamiliar word. I admit, I have helped a student of mine break a word down into its parts to try and figure out what the word was, not realizing that was not an entirely good idea. It’s amazing to me that this process happens very quickly for me as a confident reader. This quote helped me to understand what a reader does to figure out an unfamiliar word, “when recognizing words, a reader might search for information from the letters and pictures; he gathers information from his background knowledge or from the context of the story; he links parts of unknown words with parts of words he does know; and he predicts what a word might be. A reader confronting an unknown word might also crosscheck the meaning and structural information with the visual graphophon-ics cues to confirm a prediction. The reader is constantly keeping a check on himself by self-monitoring—does the word look right? Make sense? Sound right?” Johnson C. H. In the context of this process, no wonder it takes some students quite a while to grasp how to go through the process of figuring out what a word is – this process sounds exhausting. In light of the above quote, this one made me feel better about the process as a whole “Clay (2001) says we cannot teach a strategy but can only encourage students to be strategic by the way in which we teach.” The responsibility of teaching a child to be a reader who can decipher new and unfamiliar words is admittedly quite terrifying to me. The thought of what if I do it wrong, am I going to mess this kid up for life is something that I’m hoping in time I will become more comfortable with working through. For now, I try to take comfort in knowing that it’s a process. I know that in the population of students I work with – Visually Impaired students, one of the more difficult facets to deal with is that this population of students often lacks background knowledge. Often times they are missing that background knowledge, simply because due to their lack of vision, they have not been exposed to many things that our sighted students take for granted. Since I work closely with this population, one thing we deal with is this lack of background knowledge, but that’s a tiny piece in the process that students use to determine new words... The concept of a literacy-rich environment is one that is unique to this population as well, having access to a book either in a font type or size they can read or perhaps even a book in braille is sometimes more difficult to achieve for this population of students. In thinking about my own literacy journey, I realized that I read a lot of audio books, simply because I could get a book in an audio format easier than I could get it in a format that I could read – either large print or braille. I do think that apps like the kindle app or even a few specialized apps, allow for customizing of font types for them to read visually, however this isn’t always an option either. So for this population, sometimes thinking through the process of how they have access to the material being read is just as important as can the child figure out what this word is. Is it a font type or size or is it a matter of too much visual clutter on a page as well. These things are then layered on top of all of the other concerns that go into the process of how to figure out what a word is.

Blog Post 1: Chapters One, Two, and Three of Catching Readers Before They Fall

For my choice textbook, I chose Catching Readers Before They Fall by Pat Johnson and Katie Keier. I decided to choose this textbook because I personally find teaching someone to learn to read as a difficult task. Since my major is early childhood education, there is a chance that I will be hired full-time as a teacher in grades K4 through fifth grade teacher. Grades K4 through fifth are critical times for teaching young learners, and they require a lot of attention academically. From this textbook, I hope to learn more ways to integrate different reading strategies to help young readers to be able to read sufficiently.

Since chapters one and two are smaller chapters compared to the rest of the textbook, I decided to synthesize them together. The title for chapter one is Expanding Our Paradigm of Reading and the title for chapter two is How Reading Works. The first chapter was more over an over view of how the next several chapters can help teachers expand their knowledge of teaching  literacy. The authors, Johnson and Keier, encourage teachers to create or adhere to their own belief systems because it will change as new thoughts and situations occur through our teaching careers. "Classrooms should be incredibly safe places where every student feels respected and valued; where it's okay to make a mistake; and where it's accepted by all to have strengths and weaknesses that may be different from other students in the classroom community (Johnson and Keier 2010) ". This quote sets up the mood for the title of chapter one, Expanding Our Paradigm of Reading. In order for teachers to do this we must start with making sure our classroom environment is a safe zone for our students. "Do keep trying to develop teaching stamina. The struggling readers in your classroom need you desperately. We know it's difficult and we know you can do it (Johnson and Keier, 2010)". This quote stood out to me because it's easy for teachers to lose hope when the strategies they integrate into their lessons don't work for all the students. In order to teach stamina, reading needs to be looked at as a marathon. If a child isn't persistently prepared and challenged on a daily basis by their teacher, they won't have the chance to improve academically. Students have to be constantly checked on to make sure their reading and comprehension is on the right track (Johnson and Keier, 2010).

I really enjoyed reading chapter three, Vygotsky Takes a Seat in Our Classrooms, because it introduces the importance of Lee Vygotsky and his concept, the Zone of Promixal Development. This chapter demonmstrates how we as teachers can accommodate struggling readers by teaching them in their Zone of Proximal Development. On page 32, figure 3.1, there is a explicit model of how Vygotsky's Zone of Proimal Development. The model shows three different stages of how our students learn; zone of actual development, zone of proximal development, and out of reach.
"Granted in a classroom situtation it would be difficult to have every child working within his or her ZPD every moment of every day. But we have found that when teachers understand the zone of proximal development, they strive to know their students better and try harder to vary their supporters, questions, or instruction for different students".  When I have my own classroom, I plan to have individual student ZPD charts so that I can learn my students better. My favorite statement that I plan to focus more on when I teach is:"Social interactions provide the platform for learning how to learn and for the development of self-reflection, responsibility, cooperation, and effective problem solving, and it is through social interactions that children develop and expand their capacity to learn (2003, 136)".

Blog 1

Shameeka Spann

Text Choice: Catching Readers Before They Fall

            The chapter I chose for this blog was chapter 5 titled, A Comprehensive Literacy Framework. According to Johnson and Keier (2010), traditional read alouds are read alouds in which teachers model what language of books sound like, what loving a book looks like, and what being lost in a book feels like (Johnson and Keier, 2010).  Interactive read alouds are when teachers read text with a clear instructional purpose, engage students in conversation before, during, and after the read alouds (Johnson and Keier, 2010). Johnson and Keier (2010) state that during interactive read alouds, teachers model comprehension strategies such as, making connections, activating prior knowledge, and questioning. In this text, one thing that stood out to me was the classroom situation about the importance of reading to children. The authors discussed teacher Katie reading the book Skippyjon Jones in the Doghouse, and the connection one of her students made with the read aloud and the book Where the Wild Things Are. Although she did not plan for her students to make a connection, one student made a connection on his own based on a previous strategy lesson. This actually reminded me of my students during traditional and interactive read alouds. My students have made amazing, unexpected connections during the stories with topics I taught during Science and Social Studies. Some days we were focusing on another strategy, but they still understood how to make connections. I was very impressed with them, and their excitement as they shared the connections. One special statement in this chapter that stood out to me was, “All kids need to be read to, but it is especially beneficial to struggling readers” (Johnson and Keier, 2010). This statement is very important to me because I agree with it, and based on observations of my students I know it can be true.  Reading to children is very important because not all children come from a home environment in which they have adults to read to them.  During this reading, the following statement taught me more about shared reading than I knew before, “The shared reading experience provides a time for struggling readers to try reading strategies, or build concepts within a safe environment and with the support of the teacher and other readers.  One strategy I plan to use during my shared reading is modeling for students the questioning strategy, which was explained in the text. I also learned in this chapter that for guided reading, the book introductions should include a lot of social interactions and conversations. I would like to end on this final statement about the importance of guided reading, “Remember we are teaching the readers, not the book” (Johnson and Keier, 2010).