The students in my MT’s
classroom are always making connections or comments to whatever book they are
read to in class! The only down side to these comments and connections is that
I feel like my MT doesn’t follow up with them or try to spark a conversation
from them, the comments are said and then dropped. When I first started
observing I thought these students (like many other children) were just calling
out random facts about their life as you read. As we progress through this
semester I have come to realize that more and more these students are not just
saying random facts but rather making connections to the text and their daily lives!
I know that for my LA lesson about “Officer Buckle & Gloria” I tried to
encourage these comments and connections and create a discussion based around
them so that the students would hopefully know what it kind of feels like to
have their connections further discussed on rather than just dropped. If guided
the students in the right direction, maybe even by Neufeld’s strategies, as
I’ll mention below, these students could improve their fluency based on their
own skills of connecting right now!
Sadly as far as word
identification goes, I don’t feel they have been taught constructive strategies
in order to help themselves identify unknown words. Several just come up to
myself or the other intern and ask them to tell us the word. I know we ask the
students to sound it out and they get frustrated because I think they are used
to being given the answer. There’s one student I worked with who would be able
to read cite words easily but when she came to a word she didn’t know she would
get stuck. When I asked her to sound it out she did a good job trying but then
when I asked her what the word was she said a word that sounded nothing like
what she had just sounded out. She was, however, able to tell me what the word
was if there was a picture of the word. She is able to make connections to
pictures but is not yet capable of sounding out words to form the word itself.
This tells me that maybe in the future trying to make connections with pictures
or outside text connections may be the best way to increase her fluency level.
As I was trying to pick
a reading that would best help me understand fluency based on the classroom I’m
in, I stumbled upon the article by Paul Neufeld, “Comprehension Instruction in
Content Area Classes”. I recognized Neufeld’s article because I had read and
reviewed several of his articles when I was researching these literacy
components for the TE 301 project. I read some of the other articles and was
definitely intrigued by Neufeld’s because of the excessive lists of strategies
to try out. I believe his suggestions are effective to assessing accuracy, reading speed,
prosody. The strategies that stood out to me was the “getting-ready-to-read”, “during-
and after- reading”, “5 common text structures and visual organizers”, and “keywords
table”. I was reviewing all of these strategies and reflecting back to my MT’s
classroom and really felt like with my students ability to make connections and
their keen ability to make effective observations, they could really benefit
from the organization and questions Neufeld lays out in his article. For
example, what may help the girl I mentioned before who cant sound of words but
rather can say the word if looking at the picture, she may want to create a
keyword chart that will help her better recognize the unknown words she may
stumble upon in a new book!
The students in my MT’s class also make multiple comments when responding to books in class or providing answers about their writing prompts. I also feel as though the students make so many great comments that could be connected to one another to build a deeper understanding of the topic being discussed; however, there is more of an ask and respond sort of pattern during class “discussions.” I saw that during the lesson plan I conducted around the book, Keep Your Ear on the Ball, the students were hesitant to build off of one another’s comments. I observed that if one student had their hand raised and a student mentioned an answer similar to theirs previous to their turn, that student would put their hand down because they did not want to “repeat the same answer.” When I asked if they could share and expand their thoughts, the students were unsure of how to respond in this way. It was as if the students were looking to provide “the right answer,” rather than their own ideas about the topic. I noticed that I had to direct questions in a way that would spark responses from more than one student otherwise free discussion would not have commenced between the students. Since discussing openly seemed to be a new concept for the students, developed conversation never occurred during the lesson.
ReplyDeleteUnlike the students in Kate’s class, Mrs. C. does meet with reading groups throughout the week to help students develop their fluency strategies. Reading groups are created based on their reading levels; groups have varied activities based on their reading levels. I meet with a group who is not as high of a reading level and we go through an entire lesson from Rewards; activities include breaking words up into syllables, finding vowel sounds, defining words, etc. The activities are set up so that there is a variety of independent and choral responding. Although the students do work through the activities successfully, I think there needs to be more strategy development in natural settings. When students are working on assignments in the classroom and request for the spelling of a word, they are usually just provided with the correct spelling rather than using the strategies they use in their reading groups to help them spell the word on their own. If students were held more accountable for using their strategies to spell words, they may begin to see patterns in the strategies they practice in their reading groups to help them become more confident with spelling words on their own instead of relying on others to spell words correctly.
It may also benefit students in my field placement if they were aware of their fluency level. One way this could be done is by conducting a running record to test their fluency. This could be a great way for my MT to assess who may need more help with accuracy and reading speed. As an extension to assessing the students' running record, their comprehension could be tested on the prompt they read for their running record to see if there is a correlation between their fluency and comprehension level.
I looked through the Neufeld article as well and I also appreciated the long list of strategies he provided in the article. I think it is important to try out as many strategies as possible to see what works best with students. Without trying multiple strategies, it’s impossible to know what works best for students in developing their skills. The students in my field placement range in their achievement levels and learning styles so trying out multiple strategies would really benefit the class; what works best for one student may not work best for all.
I find it very common for students to have the urge to share their ideas and connections out loud in class. What I find interesting is to hear about teachers not expounding on these ideas. Students love being able to relate to text, whether it is their own story or one that they have read. Since this is one of the major things we want our students to do, I think we need to focus more on bringing these connections out, even if they do interfere with our lesson plan for the day.
ReplyDeleteFluency is something that I recognize as being important in language arts, but I think that it should involve more explicit instruction. Growing up, and from what I have observed in the field, students oftentimes have no idea that their reading performance is being tracked. I knew that it was important for me to be able to read and write, but I thought that most of testing was on the word recognition. I know that fluency involves these things, but I think it is important to find and incorporate various ways of teaching it.
I agree with you Kate when you discuss the fact that student’s comments sometimes seem pretty random, I find this very often in my classroom and they go unnoticed as well. When students make these comments and they are not recognized by the teacher, I feel that students begin to think that their thoughts are not important. It is our job to make these connections for students when they are not about to do so themselves. When I did my discussion lesson on You Can Be A Friend, I allowed students the opportunity to share their thoughts by asking them if they had a best friend and what makes them friends. This gave students that chance to connect the reading to their everyday lives and sadly they are not always given this opportunity in my classroom.
ReplyDeleteAs far as word recognition, my MT has a word wall in the class that students are suppose to refer to if they come across a word that they do not know, or can’t spell. However the word wall is not used as an effective resource. Most of the time when a student’s comes across a word that is on the word wall, they don’t even realize it because it is not used as an ongoing tool in the classroom. Many of them just ask the MT or I how to spell the word and we direct them to the word wall, but they don’t even know what they are looking for.
Fluency is very important in Language Arts, because it creates enjoyment for students to read because they are not spending a lot of time trying to sound out the words, seeing that they are able to read the words they can take comprehension away from the text which allows them to make text-to-self connections.