This was a good article to sum up the things we had seen and talked about in our last class. I could identify with her when she described the way she used to teach. It is very different from the balanced literacy method. I was thankful to see skill and strategy explained, and the three language cueing systems, semantic, syntactic, and graphophonemic, talked about in more detail and with examples.
I am not familiar with the term masking. I see her examples, but am not sure exactly what masking means. Could someone clarify this for me?
There are three things I liked in this article...
ReplyDelete1) I like her suggestion for developing vocabulary. I think having the children insert other words or phrases in pace of what is written in the text is a great idea. This will also help with word choice in their writing.
2)I like the masking questions she provided. Like Jackie, I would like to know more about masking and what exactly it means.
3)I like that she evaluated her teaching after each lesson to improve her teaching. I think this is a piece that teachers often forget but, it is so important.
On page 60 of this article, a point was brought up that we mentioned briefly in our class. It says, "I always remind them that they can't control the kind of teachers or teaching students will have after they leave their classrooms, but they can control the kind of reading experience students have while they are with them. We don't need to give students negative reading experiences in order to get them ready for future negative experiences. We need to give them positive experiences so that they can develop reading strategies that can be transferred to any type of reading required of them at some future point in their lives." I think this is so important. In our district, I know that balanced literacy is something that is seen in elementary schools but not necessarily in the middle or high schools. It can be a catch 22 for elementary teachers because of this - especially fifth grade teachers. We want to provide students with the experience of the balanced literacy classroom, but we worry that students will be lost, confused, or disappointed if they get a middle school classroom that is completely different. I think this article puts it wonderfully - we have to provide them with the positive experience and tools to be successful in all classrooms of which they may be a part.
ReplyDeleteThis article mentions the F.A.T. City Workshop. I watched this several times in classes in college and learned something new every time. If you have never seen it, I encourage you to find a copy and watch it!
I thought the article did a nice job summing up the importance of shared reading through this - "During shared reading, the decoding is done by the teacher, so student readers can focus their cognitive energies on the tasks of comprehension: visualizing, questioning, inferring, making word associations, predicting, connecting, and analyzing. As these comprehension tasks become automatic, they can be transferred to students' independent reading or a shared reading of more complex texts."
The main idea that I like about Shared Literacy is that develops a sense of community in the classroom. Everyone in the class has something to contribute and learn from one another. It was great that Shared Literacy looks for what is meaningful to the students.
ReplyDeleteThis article had a great list of strageties for a word the student doesn't know such as: look at the sounds, look at the pictures, read it again, and read it aloud and sound it out. This list was complied by the teacher and students.
This article offered helpful insight into how open-ended questions can draw out information from students to let us know how they are thinking through text for meaning. These open-ended questions allow for student responses that show us the extent that they are using cueing systems. As we evaluate their responses we can mold our "explicit" instruction to best meet their needs. The "masking" activity seems like a great way to offer hands-on activities that will create discussion for meaningful demonstrations of how and when to use specific cueing systems.
ReplyDeleteHigh school students are certainly not to old to have shared reading. Content teachers get so busy following 10 million standards...my On Grade Level ninth graders can use shared reading to build confidence in themselves. Like Barbara stated...it develops a sense of community. My 9th graders will gain by seeing "cool" kids trying to learn...my special ed kids will gain by seeing "regular-ed" kids doing it too. Where as my honors 10th graders usually get too embarrassed to ask questions because they think they have to know it all. Shared reading will help everyone calm down and set the learning tone. High school students (I'm sure middle school too) are so self conscious...this serves as a grounding measure. Excellent read.
ReplyDelete