In my classroom I see the most literacy during teacher lead read aloud. Mrs.R is very good about reading to the students. Nearly every time I am in the classroom I have seen her reading various books to the students. She has a read aloud time everyday in which the students listen to her read a novel of some sort. In addition to this she also reads to supplement other teaching. For instance when the students were learning about Native Americans she read aloud a few short stories about Native American culture. This is a very frequent activity that is done in the classroom. She is also very interactive with the students during these reading, stopping at appropriate breaks in the story to ask the students how they feel, what they think is going to happen, whether or not they understand a word or what they expect of certain character. I think Mrs.R is great at covering a broad range of important thought processes that a student should go through when they are reading. Touching on how it makes them feel focuses the student on looking inward where as predicting what may happen forces the student to analyze what they know about the story and what it is leading up to. Other than Mrs. R's read aloud activity and before a special subject I don't see during my time any other forms of literacy routines or activities that they do.
I think the reading that had the biggest impression on me in terms of implementing new ways of literacy development is the Langer Article. She touches on 4 different types of questions to probe students, "intial understanding", "developing interpretations "reflecting on personal experience" and "elaborating and extending". With these types of questions in mind she focused on how there shouldn't be pressure to go into lengthy detail for each one rather let it be a genuine feeling when going through the perspective of each type of question. If you can't draw conclusions just yet or are still spit-balling the idea in your mind that is fine. I also liked how she discussed how literacy isn't as straightforward and there aren't always right and wrong answers in literacy, a lot of it has to do with the reader. I would really like to get my students to understand that concept. I think having students be required to at the the end of the week to write down how they felt during a certain experience or have them do free writes and really stress the importance of the thought process behind it and not whether it sounds good or if it's right or wrong.
I thought it was very interesting and I believe one of the articles touched upon or maybe it was on of the videos we watched in class last week, how students need to learn how to learn while they're reading or learn to think about their thinking.I think read alouds do a great job of doing this. They are not only a great way to get younger children interested in texts but also a great way to have students realize how they should be thinking while they are reading. By the teacher stopping and getting feedback from the students she not only is understanding how they're comprehending it but also prompting the students to reflect on their own thinking and recognizes differences between their opinions and others. I guess I had never realized how important GUIDED reading to the class could be.
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