Reading Comprehension

How do today’s readings help you understand your own reading comprehension processes? How do the readings help you understand the reading behavior of the learners in your classroom? (2/25)

Through research, Applegate developed 8 profiles of learners, the description of those learners and an intervention for each. One of the 8 reminds me of one of my students in my 1^st grade classroom. We will call him John. According to Applegates profiles, John is a left fielder. This means he generates unpredictable ideas that seem to have no real connection to the text. My MT and I have noticed this numerous times throughout his journal when he would have a prompt, but would be writing about something not even related to the prompt. Ideas for intervention include story structure activities, think-aloud, context clues, detecting relationships and induced imagery. Applegate mentions that left fielders, though their answers are not related, answer with great confidence, which is a characteristic of John.

I think as teachers, we have students who fall into one of these readings comprehension processes. Letting these students stay in these phases is what we need to change. Taking the interventions and adapting them for each student will pull the students out of the negative processes for comprehension and if done correctly will make them able to more accurately comprehend readings.

Reading comprehension interventions can start even in kindergarten, according to Gregory and Cahill. Kindergarteners begin to learn about reading comprehension with visuals. In the article the teacher used an example of visualization for snowflakes. The kids read a poem and them to the left of it they drew what they were visualizing. They would have to practice good reading comprehension skills in order to drawn an accurate picture.

Overall, teaching good reading comprehension skills/strategies at a young age can only benefit students. There are ways to help each type of learner at any age, you may just need to be a little creative as a teacher.

Different children have different needs!

In response to the "What do you think?"

What do you think she should do, and why?  

I think that Mrs.Potter should first understand that each child is different, in the Ladson-Billing "Seeing Color" article I read, it stated that teachers giving the students all equal work is not equal at all. Each students learns different as well as having different needs. It is impossible to not see color or differences. 

I think Mrs. Potter need to understand that first Lupita does not know a lot of english, the fact that she does not call on her in class, is not helping that. She needs to call on her so she can work on her english as well as the social interactions with her peers. Although she shouldn't call on her everyday or for everything. She could put up pictures of items around the room with the word in english and spanish labeled on it. This will help her build her vocabulary. She could also do more group work so that she is involved. 

For Jonathan, I think that he might be scared to ask for help. She could read the assignments to him, if time allows for this (she was just circulating around the room). Let him know that it is okay to ask for help if he does not understand something. she could give the whole class verbal directions so that he can hear them. Also if his reading level is that low, I would talk to the parents about it. This would be tricky if his parents are not helping him in the first place. The labels around the room would help him as well to identify things. 

For Eddie, I would first give him something to help with the sensory needs, like a string on the legs of his chair so that he can bounce his legs and it wont be disruptive to him or the other students. She could give him something to tap or squeeze that is not noisy. She could make a list of things that he needs to complete and give him a visual chart to cross off or remove items as he completes them. He might be bored and already know the material, or he might have too many stimulus and his focus is shutting down. 

Spelling, Spelling

Discuss the ‘stages of spelling development’ evident in each sample (see Tompkins, p. 169) and give examples. Design a ‘literacy center’ activity that would help your students improve their spelling and explain why you think it would support students’ learning.


My students are in the 1st grade. I pulled 3 writing samples from my students daily journals, all from the same day. They were asked to write about their weekend. After looking at the 3 samples, I believe they are all in the emergent stage. They don't write in journals, they write on pre-printed paper with a big box on the front that they are expected to draw a story in which relates to their writing. Along the lines of stages of spelling, student A shows evidence of stage 4: syllables and affixes spelling. She included inflectional endings such as the ing on sledding and used the right form of there in the sentence "there are sleds." The other two student samples I see stages of Stage 2: letter name-alphabetic spelling. They both spelled words as they sound for example, house = hos, woke- wok, doctor = doktr.

I would set up literacy centers to include lots of long and short vowel sounds, consonant blends and digraphs. For long and short vowel sounds, I would have cut out and laminated pictures of items with long and short a (or which ever vowel is necessary) and I would have them work in groups of 2 to sort them into short and long vowel. I would have another literacy center where students get an opportunity to write whatever they want, like a free journal entry. Another center would be tracing high frequency words, then writing them on their own, etc. With these types of centers, kids will notice vowels and their sounds within words. With more opportunity to write, kids will become better. Practice makes perfect.

Spelling Development

Discuss the ‘stages of spelling development’ evident in each sample (see Tompkins, p. 169) and give examples. Design a ‘literacy center’ activity that would help your students improve their spelling and explain why you think it would support students’ learning. 

I am in a fifth and sixth classroom, most of the students are in stage 4. Most of them understand the homophones like you're and your, but do not understand that words have meaning and that there is meaning in relation to spelling of words. In their writing they demonstrated the inflectional endings such as, the difference between ed and ing. In order to move then into stage 5 they will need to understand that words have meaning. 

Spellen Divelopmint

Discuss the ‘stages of spelling development’ evident in each sample (see Tompkins, p. 169) and give examples. Design a ‘literacy center’ activity that would help your students improve their spelling and explain why you think it would support students’ learning.


I am in a fifth grade classroom, and I collected a couple of samples from two different students. In one sample I noticed that she spelled "because" like "becouse", and she spelled "hurt" like "heart". This seems to be stage three because she is mixing the vowels up within the word. The other sample I have, I noticed he spelled "take" as "tack", and "been though" like "bin threw." This seems to be at stage three as well with mixing certain words up like "meet" as "mete." 


I would have them read the week's spelling words in sentences that show what they mean, and have the spelling words sound similar to each other to show the distinction. Such as hurt and heart, and been and bin, threw and through. Then they would have to write two sentences for each spelling word (about 10 words) that shows the correct definition.

Spelling Stages

Spelling Stages -

My students are in fifth grade. After studying their writing samples and comparing that with the Stages of Spelling in the Tompkins book, I think my students are for the most part at the stage they should be (stage 4), given their age. For instance one student spelt the word moving correctly. Dropping the e when adding the "-ing" to the word is something accomplished at this stage. I am not sure that they are are the fifth stage yet because when spelling the word probably as "proble" not connecting the world probable with the word probably.

A fun station activity would be to do a word sort with words with similar roots that do not sound very similar when spoken and have students match the words to the correct root. The first one to do it will then have to explain it to the rest of the students at the section. Students who don't understand will be encouraged to ask questions.

Kaitlyn

Reading Discussions Promoting Personal Involvement

What type(s) of talk are you seeing in your classroom?

I honestly have not seen much talk in my classroom. I have seen her discuss vocabulary words before reading, and I have seen her stop in the text to have them make inferences before they read on. I have not seen any discussion after reading the texts though.

What scaffolding is needed for response-centered talk to take place? 

Notice who is enjoying or is even confused my certain parts of the text when reading. They may not come out and say it, but they are personally engaging and it is those moments that they will be motivated to read that specific part, or to bring up topics in book discussions. It is also important to read different genres. In the article I read, one student was very engaged on an informational text about elephants. She stated she wanted to be a veterinarian. Her interest in animals worked well with informational texts.

There was a study done in the reading that I did that stated students were more motivated to read when discussions were focused on their questions.

What types of learning resources are available that have the potential to promote rich discussions?

There are questionnaires that they can use to survey other classmates, they can play “Hot seat” with one person sitting in the chair and they have to portray a character in the book and students have to ask them questions. They can also do journal writing on what they have learned or write to characters of the book, or even other classmates, and then we can discuss in class (or this can be done after discussion)

Think about specific students in your class who do not participate actively in classroom talk. What types of scaffolding do they need to participate successfully in response-centered classroom talk?

We have a few ESL students, and one of the articles talked about how they may not be engaging because they do not understand certain phrases like, “sitting in the nose bleed section, or pulling my leg.” Discussing the book with the class rather than answering questions brings much more understanding for them. I think maybe buddy work could do this, where they have to come up with things they don’t understand, or things they liked and why and they have to discuss with each other. There would have to be a clear outcome though for them, so they see the purpose and benefit from the discussion.