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Walden University Dr. Martha MooreEDUC 6706: The Beginning Reader, Pre-k-3

WHAT IS A LITERATE ENVIRONMENT?

Reading and writing are essential for learning. In order to ensure that these two skills are being acquired to their fullest potential, our students must have access and support from a literate environment. This instruction should be driven by research based and well-proven instructional strategies (Tompkins, 2010). This includes getting to know the literacy learners, selecting appropriate texts, and incorporating the interactive, critical, and responsive perspective of literature while using appropriate instructional strategies.

GETTING TO KNOW LITERACY LEARNERS, P-3Getting to know your learner is essential to making sure that you

create a lesson that is both effective and appropriate for your learner. There are two types of assessments that you should perform on your students for to get to know your student as a whole.

Cognitive Assessment

Phonemic awareness

Phonics

Vocabulary

Comprehension

Fluency

(Laureate Education, 2010a)

Non-Cognitive Assessment

Motivation to read

Self-concept of reader

Reader attitude

Reader interest

Reader attributions

(Afflerbach, 2012)

PHONEMIC AWARENESS

• Phonemic awareness assessments measure a student’s understanding of how letters make sounds

• Phonemic awareness has been shown to predetermine a student’s future success in reading (Tompkins, 2010)

• I used a phonemic awareness test and running record to help determine which beginning reading stage my students were in.

• Over time the running record could be used to show growth of phonemic awareness

• I then used this information to learn how to differentiate my lessons to benefit each of the three students I was working with.

TILE TEST

• The tile test is used to measure a student’s awareness of phonics by using a hands on approach (Norman & Calfee, 2004). Students have access to cut out letters and words (tiles) that they can manipulate based on the questions being asked to them.

• Phonics is important to assess and determine how students decode words

• The tile test allows the assessor to have a metalinguistic view of how students are processing the information about letters and sounds, words, and sentences.

• Students need phonics skills in order to decode unfamiliar texts (Tompkins, 2010)

• The tile test uses real and made up words so an assessor can see how students use their phonics skills to decode words

• The tile test allowed me to see how the students decoded different phonemic patterns so that I can determine how they think as well as what they do and do not know

INFORMAL READING INVENTORY

• Informal Reading Inventories are commercial made tests that allow assessors to measure multiple skills at once including word identification, oral reading fluency, and comprehensions (Tompkins, 2014).

• Informal reading inventories can be used from 1st – 8th grade

• I used the Informal Reading Inventory to assess struggling second grade students to determine what instructional strategies would be best suited for these students

• The Informal Reading Inventory was a key indicator of the reading stages of my students whom were determined to be transitional readers

ELEMENTARY READING ATTITUDE SURVEY• The non-cognitive assessments I chose to use was the

Elementary Reading Attitude Survey

• The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey measures how students react to reading and books in a multitude of circumstances including at home, at school, on summer vacation and so forth.

• Elementary Reading Attitude Survey can be used to help educators relates students’ attitude of reading and their performance in class (Meckenna & Kear, 1990)

• This non-cognitive assessment proved to be very insightful as it brought to my attention that one of my struggling readers was also a reluctant reader. This helped me to determine what instructional strategies would be best suited for this group of students.

WRITTEN WORK

I also assigned a written assignment to measure both non-cognitive and cognitive aspects of the students

• Students writing can be used to determine what writing skills they need help developing.

• Written work can be used to select grammar lessons

• Written work can be used to assess spelling levels (Tompkins, 2010)

• I also used the assignment so the students can tell me through writing what kind of books they like to read and why

SELECTING TEXTS

• Selecting appropriate texts for reading will ensure that students are engaged and that learning through reading is encouraged and promoted (Laureate Education Inc., 2014c)

• Texts should be challenging

• Texts should be engaging

• Texts should be used to meet both literacy goals and objectives

• Students should read informational texts more often

• When selecting texts a teacher should take into account the Literacy Matrix and teach from all areas of the matrix (Laureate Education Inc., 2014c)

LITERACY MATRIX

Narrative Informational

Semiotic

Linguistic

• The Literacy Matrix is used to determine what kind of literature a text is. • Based on the reader, where a text falls on the matrix can affect its difficulty level and help guide instruction based on objectives to be taught • Literature can be completely semiotic (pictures) or completely linguistic (words)• Literature can be narrative and informational at the same time.• The texts will fall on both axis similar to a graph.

INFORMATIONAL TEXTS

• Students should have ample access to informational texts

• Upper Elementary, high school, and even adults struggle to read informational texts (Duke, 2004)

• It has been found that less than ten percent of classroom libraries in the lower grades are informational (Duke, 2004).

• Increased exposure to informational texts at a young age will help prepare students for skills necessary as adults (Duke, 2004)

• It is important to teach text structure with informational texts so students learn how to comprehend informational texts

• I used an informational text to show students how to use images to support both comprehension and critical thinking skills

INTERNET SOURCES

• Castek, Bevons-Mangelson, and Goldstone (2006) describe the internet as being a rich source of knowledge and literature

• The internet provides multiple opportunities for students to collaborate, explore, research, communicate, and enjoy reading and learning (Castek, Bevons-Mangleson, and Goldstone (2006)

• I used several forms of literature from the internet to support student learning• Youtube read-alouds• Open-book to check out e-books• Online encyclopedias

LITERACY LESSON: INTERACTIVE PERSPECTIVE• The interactive perspective in literacy ensures that students

are able to interact with books and learn strategies to develop skills in reading and writing (Laureate Education Inc., 2014e).

• This perspective focuses on teaching students metacognitive and strategic ways to tackle a text.

• I developed a lesson using the interactive perspective to teach my students comprehension and word recognition strategies.

LITERATURE UNIT

• Literature units are used for a teacher to model specific skills for students to use while reading literature (Tompkins, 2010)

• Children develop skills through reading

• I develop a literature unit that focused on how to learn from images in a text

• During the literature unit, I used several instruction strategies• Gradual Release• P-QAR• K-W-L• Slap Jack• And connections to the text

K-W-L

• K-W-L is a chart that organizes what children Know, What they want to know, and what they learned

• It quickly assess how students developed there ideas of a topic before and after a lesson

• K-W-L charts help students to activate prior knowledge, combined new knowledge with old knowledge, and assess what they have learned (Tompkins, 2010)

• It is in formative assessment for educators

• I used the K-W-L chart to assess what students learned about the children in Where Children Sleep by James Mollison, what they were curious about the children, and what they were able to learn about the children after learning knew skills for reading images

GRADUAL RELEASE

• Effective strategies should be taught with a gradual release method to scaffold the learning of new skills (Stahl, 2004)

• In a gradual release students are slowly given responsibility for strategies

• I first modeled a strategy, asked for help with the strategy, asked students to do it on their own, discussed their answers, and then let them answer on their own again.

P-QAR

• A Picture-Question-Answer-Response is similar to a regular QAR

• It is used to provide students with strategies to consciously be aware of how to find answers to comprehension questions based on what kind of question is being asked, and were to find the answer to that questions (Tompkins, 2010)

• There are four types of question sin the P-QAR• Right There Questions: Can be found easily in the images• Think and Search Questions: Must be found in multiple locations in

the text• Author and me Questions: students must use both prior knowledge

as well as what is found in the text• On my own questions; student must use there own thoughts and

reasons to develop an answer.

SLAP JACK

• Slap jack is one of many games that can be used to help teach sight words and high frequency words

• A student flips over a card with a high frequency word on it. The first student to know the word must slap the word as quickly as possible and then say that word out loud. If that word is correct, they win the card. This is repeated until all the cards are collected by a student or none of the students know the words that are left.

• Providing students with opportunity to enjoy and play games while learning (ReadingResource.net).

CONNECT TO TEXT

• Activities should be authentic to best teach students sight words (Tompkins, 2010)

• Connecting sight words to a text is one way to do this.

• I connected the sight words we studied to the text by allowing my students to use the sight words to describe the images they were viewing.

• Students had to be able to read the word and know what the word means in order to correctly label a picture.

• The students then had to tell me why they selected that word to describe the image.

LITERACY LESSON: CRITICAL AND RESPONSE PERSPECTIVE• The critical perspective in literature is used to teach

students think critically about a text, to ask questions, and understand the deep underlying meaning of texts (Laureate Education Inc., 2014d)

• The responsive perspective, allow students to respond to a text by feeling. Rosenblatt’s transactional theory explains how a persons interaction with a text can forever change them (Probst, 1987)

• I developed a lesson that allowed the students to critically analyze characters and people in different cultural and socioeconomic circumstances

• I also allowed the students to respond to the text sin order to understand how deep and powerful the texts truly are

THINK-ALOUD

• Think-Alouds are a explicit instruction strategy for teacher to model how to think while reading (Tompkins, 2010)

• The texts that I selected for the lesson had multiple levels of symbolism in the images on the page.

• I used Think-Aloud to model how I processed the information in the images and how the images correlated with the text.

OPEN-MIND PORTRAIT

• Because my lesson required students to think from different characters and peoples perspectives, I chose to use an Open-Mind Portrait.

• An Open-Mind Portrait is an activity where students draw a picture of a character or person they read about. On a second page, stabled behind the first, students write about what is inside of a characters mind.

• This activity helps a students think more deeply about an event from the view point of another person or character (Tompkins, 2010)

• The student were required to think about what was important to the different characters and how the circumstances the characters lived in changed what was most important to them.

• This aided in the students using the critical perspective of literacy because students thought deeply and critically about other people and their perspectives.

GRAND CONVERSATION

• A Grand Conversation is a discussion that is lead to talk about the big ideas within story so that students can reflect on what they learned and their feelings towards this (Tompkins, 2010).

• Grand Conversation's have two parts, a student lead part, and a teacher lead part.

• In the Grand Conversation in my lesson, students talked and shared their feelings about differences of children in the story as well as the differences between themselves and the children in story.

• I ended the grand conversation by asking questions on topics that were not brought up that were important to the over theme of the text.

CREATING A LITERATE ENVIRONMENT

• Creating a literate environment requires a lot of hard work and dedication

• Research based practices insure that students receive the highest quality of education

• Each aspect of creating a literate environment is important

• An amazing lesson can mean nothing to a student if it is not appropriate for the students, so a teacher must know the students

• Literature should be the means by which students learn to provide context and challenge

• Students grow as readers and human beings when they have experiences with a text in all three of the literacy perspectives.

REFERENCES

Afflerbach, P. (2012). Understanding and using reading assessment, K–12 (2nd ed). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Castek, J., Bevans-Mangelson, J., & Goldstone, B. (2006). Reading adventures online: Five ways to introduce the new literacies of the Internet through children's literature. Reading Teacher, 59(7), 714–728.

Duke, N. (2004). The case for informational text. Educational Leadership, 61(6), 40–44.

Laureate Education (Producer). (2014a). The Beginning Reader. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Laureate Education (Producer). (2014b). Analyzing and selecting text [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Laureate Education (Producer). (2014c). Informational text in the early years. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Norman, K., Calfee, R. (2004) Tile Test: Hands on approach for assessing phonics in the early grades. International Reading Association (pp. 42–52) doi:10.1598/RT.58.1.4

Probst, R. E. (1987). Transactional theory in the teaching of literature. Resources in Education,

22(12).

Stahl, K. A. D. (2004). Proof, practice, and promise: Comprehension strategy instruction in the primary grades. Reading Teacher, 57(7),

Tompkins, G. E. (2010). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach (5th ed.). Boston:

Allyn & Bacon.