Theory to Practice

Over the last 8 weeks I have developed a much deeper understanding of the different components of reading, reading development, and the theories of behind reading. This course has helped me to better see the value of each component separately and also how they build and support one and other.

I have always loved reading ever since I was kid. This course has helped me to reflect on my reading development and experiences with literacy early on. After reading The Peter Effect: Reading habits and attitudes of preservice teachers, I began reflecting on the reasons I developed a love for reading. One major reason was my teachers and the school climate. I can recall a few teachers who provided great experiences with reading and writing that sparked my curiosity and engagement and that have stuck with me to this day. I strive to provide the same types of experiences for the students that I teach.

Students recognize and imitate many of the attitudes and behaviors that they see around them. The ideas in the article helped to support my belief that teachers must show a love and passion for the subjects they are teaching in order to spark one in their students. If we want our students to love reading we must show that all there is to love about it by giving them meaningful and authentic work with a variety of genres and texts.

One concept that has given me a better understanding of the reading process and changed my philosophy about teaching reading is the Schema theory. As discussed in the video “Schema Theory, Learning and Comprehension”, Schema theory is the idea that everything we learn and experience gets sorted and stored in our brain. Schema contains all a readers personal experiences and knowledge including the places you have been, the people you know, and a variety of other experiences. This knowledge has truly helped me to see the importance of spending time to build that background knowledge and vocabulary for students.

I found Schema theory to be extremely interesting and important for the development of successful readers and learners. I am in my PDP year at my school and selected building background knowledge and vocabulary for shared readings as my focus for the year. I have already been more conscious of developing and building my students schema when planning and teaching by planning days just to focus and introduce new ideas, using graphic organizers, specifically KWL charts when reading new nonfiction texts, and helping to make connections across all content areas. Our most recent story is a nonfiction book about ponds. Prior to reading the book, I showed students videos of what an actual pond looks and sounds like, showed pictures, and brought in real pond plants to help make the new information more meaningful and to develop a shared experience so all students could connect to the new content and text in at least one way. We also made a KWL chart and after reading students were so excited to share all they learned and remember about ponds.

The purpose of Yopp’s article “A Test for Assessing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children “ is to present a tool for assessment that is reliability and valid and has the evidence and research to support this. The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation is used to measure a child’s ability to separate and articulate the sounds of a spoken word. The assessment has 22 prompts and is given to students individually, taking from five to ten minutes each. Students are considered to be phonemically aware if they score highly on the assessment, having emerging phonemic awareness if they could answer some correctly. Students who are considered to be lacking phonemic awareness skills can still acquire them through appropriate instructional support and phonemic awareness activities.

Yopp offers several suggestions as to how teachers can implement phonemic awareness activities into the literacy curriculum. Conducting read alouds using books that contain attention to speech and language including rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and phoneme segmentation or substitution. There are also sounds manipulations you can make to the repetitive phrases in popular songs. A strategy that has been used for intensive reading programs is the use of concrete tools such as Elkonian boxes and chips to practice isolating individual spoken sounds. These are just several examples offered for providing meaningful practice with phonemic awareness skills.

I could easily use this assessment as well as the suggested activities to assess and practice phonemic awareness skills in my kindergarten classroom. Looking at the Phoneme Segmentation assessment sheet and directions, I feel this would be a simple and valid assessment to give students in my room. It is similar it to one of the Aims web tests I administered to students last year. One difference however is that on Aims web students were given credit for identifying sounds that combined such as /h/ /-at/ in hat instead of /h/ /a/ /t/. One of the suggestions I found most interesting was the segmenting guessing game because I believe my students would be highly engaged in such an activity. I also really like the idea of including vocabulary words from other content areas to segment and have students guess.

In Nancy Chick’s writing, Metacogniton: Thinking about One’s Thinking , she discusses taking a metacognitive approach to learning and the many positive effects it can have on ones learning and their approach to learning. Metacognition is when one consciously thinks about the process used to plan, monitor, and assess understanding and performance. Metacognitive practices increase learning by strengthening the ability to adapt one’s learning in order to comprehend and complete new tasks and content. Students who learn to think using a metacognitive process will have an increased awareness in their strengths and weaknesses as a learner across all areas of learning. Having this awareness of strengths and needs will assist students in developing a plan for their learning considering how they learn best and what needs to be learned.

As I was reading this article I was thinking about the importance of teaching students how to think using a metacognitive process. This type of thinking is important to teach at a young age so that students can use it throughout their education, finding and using the best approaches to learning and processing so that they can excel. The article offered several ways to promote a “classroom culture ground in metacognition” that I would like to use in my classroom. The first recommendation is to promote an environment that encourages students to identify their confusions and ask questions. I teach kindergarten so I feel this comes natural to many of my students so I plan to continue to do this and push them to ask themselves specific questions that will foster metacognitive thinking such as “What was difficult?” or “what did I do to help me solve this problem?”. I will also allow students to turn and talk to share their reflections with a peer to incorporate Chick’s second recommendation of integrating reflection. Her final suggestion is to model metacognitive thinking. This is something my school strongly encourages through our lesson plan template using the I do, we do, you do model. We use this format for all lessons and incorporate this modeling into the first portion of the lesson.

The article “Raising urban students’ literacy achievement by engaging in authentic, challenging work” by Teale and Gambrell focuses on the implementation and results of a reading program called In2books. The program was designed to address the “performance gap” and to increase reading and writing achievement for students in low-income and culturally diverse schools. The goals of the program are to motivate students in second through fifth grade to read, write, and think about texts at a higher level through authentic experiences in reading and writing including reading texts that are highly engaging, pen pal letters, and class discussions.

There are several key components that contributed to the success of In2books. One of the biggest contributing factors to the success of the program was the selection of high quality, age appropriate, and engaging texts. When selecting books, the designers were sure to select texts that posses quality features of literature, were culturally diverse, ranged in difficulty levels, showed children solving problems and were overall uplifting. Teachers and students were engaged in repeated reading followed by various skill-based activities that promoted comprehension, writing, and higher-level thinking. Repeated readings also promoted increased fluency. Writing letters to an adult pen pal provided students with a real life audience and gave them an authentic, real world reason to be writing. Students knowing they would receive a letter encouraged and motivated them to write and incorporate new ideas gained from class discussions and activities. It is important to note that it takes persistence, authentic and engaging tasks to develop growth in the reading and writing, and that it is not solely a result of the program selected.

My biggest take away from this article is the importance of providing students with authentic experiences in reading and writing. Teale and Gambrell discussed the significance of selecting books that were engaging and culturally diverse. This is just one of the ideas I plan to implement into my classroom. My students will be able to context with the text on a new level and therefor engage in deeper learning. I would love to have my students participate in a pen pal activity to discuss literature but this could be difficult with kindergarteners, especially this early in the year. However I think I could set up a book buddy system with an older grade at my school to read quality and engaging literature, have partner, group, and whole class discussions about the book. Having the older students assist my kindergartners with writing as a way to reflect and comprehend the text after it has been read and discussed could be an authentic and engaging follow up activity.

The article, “Role of the Reader’s Schema in Comprehension, Learning, and Memory,” by Anderson (1984) analyzes the Schema theory by explaining it, providing evidence to support it’s ideas, and offering suggestions for how teachers can implement it into the classroom. In order for students comprehend, schema must reflect the relationships between the different elements. Since Schema theory is largely based on personal experiences, cultures, and perspectives, there are many ways that a reader could interpret a text.

There have been six functions of schemata that have been identified in effecting learning and remembering. Schema creates folders of stored information, determines what information should receive more attention, and creates a basis for generating inferences. Schemata also allows the reader to develop an order of importance for storing the new content, guides the reader for the information to recall, and help the reader to fill in gaps by inferring. Research shows that fluency and comprehension recall are higher and more accurate when there is greater schema (Anderson 1984). Culture is another factor that plays into schema development and comprehension. The more relevant the text is to the readers’ culture, the more likely they will learn and retain the information.

Accessing students’ background knowledge is crucial for comprehension. There are many ways teachers, including myself activate and build the schema of our students in order to increase their comprehension. One way I do this is by having students turn and talk to share what what they know about a new topic. I may show them a picture, short video or sound clip, or bring in a prop to get their minds thinking. We then share our ideas and record them in a graphic organizer. After determining what students know, I will find additional videos, props, songs, or related texts to expand their understanding of the idea. Our first story in Ready gen this year was a bout a penguin who gets lost and meets other Arctic animals while looking for home. To build student scheme, I showed them videos of penguins, where they live on the map, pictures of their homes, and real life pictures. We then made connections by discussing our homes and waddling like a penguin.

After teaching fourth grade and kindergarten, I was able to make many personal connections to John Carroll’s ” The Nature of the Reading Process”.  The article discusses the process of reading, including the stages of reading as instant word recognition, determining the meaning of individual words, comprehending what is read, and the components of learning to read. I felt I could connect with each focus of the article as well as the eight components of reading. Carroll compared getting meaning from print with getting meaning from spoken language, it is also component number eight. This is something that I discuss and teach with my students. One of the first ways I teach this is through morning message. On the first day of school I tell the class that I wrote them a note to tell them what we will do on their first day of kindergarten, then I read through the message with them making sure to point to each word as I say it. I do this so children can begin to connect that spoken words carry meaning, their words can be written down, and that those written words have the same meaning as when they speak them. After several days, most of my students can begin to see that written words carry a message. After reading the message, I ask them what will we learn today or where will we go today? This reminds them that the written message I pointed to while I read aloud, meant something. It also helps them to practice recalling information that was read. Carroll also discusses the ability to dissect spoken words into component sounds. My school uses Saxon phonics and it has us practice this skill with the students everyday.  This skill is crucial for students in learning how to decode words and sound out words for spelling.

Hi! My name is Miranda Valladares. I am a kindergarten teacher with the School District of Philadelphia. This is my second year teaching kindergarten. Before that, I taught fourth grade for two years at the same school. It has been a big transition from fourth to kindergarten but I have truly enjoyed every day of it. It is such a rewarding experience to get to teach children how to read. My school divides each grade into three classrooms primarily based on student needs. We have an ESOL room, a special education room, and a dual room. Students are spilt based on their needs so the ESOL and special education teachers can push in or pull out. I teach in the special education room so many of my students have already received early interventions or have been identified as having a possible need for intensive interventions or individualized education plans.

I have created this blog to share my experiences in the classroom and my learning throughout the course.  I hope that I am able to apply my new understandings and insights learned throughout the course into my teaching practices in the classroom. I also hope this blog, as well as my peers blogs, will offer new opinions, ideas, and suggestions on ways to best instruct my students.