For this week we did not read an article, but did more of an activity. It was actually kind of fun! Trying to think of different words to describe both one of the houses and the little pigs in "The Three Little Pigs" was fun and would be very fun for little kids to do. This would also be good for expanding their vocabulary. Having them think of different descriptive words for these nouns is a good way to make them think of other ways to describe things. It was good too that it wasn't just synonyms for what was already there, but that they had to think of words that sounded right in the story as well. This would be a very fun activity for kids to do that were definitely in the primary grades, around second grade, and could be done with a lot of stories that they were familiar with or could get familiar with. This is a great activity that I might even use.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Feb 22
The readings we did for this week were a bit surprising! The first article I read was one about reading levels. It was titled "Let's Start Leveling about Leveling". This article was very interesting and seemed to be right up my alley. I am a big believer in giving student's a choice in what they want to read. However, I am also a big advocate of teaching children on how to choose a book for themselves. It is important implant this scaffold into their brains, because if they know how to find out which books suit and know how to pick out the books for themselves, they can apply this knowledge for later use, rather then just asking the teacher which book should I read?
The second article was titled Oral Reading and Miscues which contained a lot of information having to do with handling miscues and how to inform children about them. It gave questions to ask the child, like does that word makes sense in the rest of the story?, or does that word change the meaning or plot of the story? Things like this can guide a child through reading and help them pick up on miscues.
The second article was titled Oral Reading and Miscues which contained a lot of information having to do with handling miscues and how to inform children about them. It gave questions to ask the child, like does that word makes sense in the rest of the story?, or does that word change the meaning or plot of the story? Things like this can guide a child through reading and help them pick up on miscues.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Feb 8, 2012
Hello again. This week in E339 we read a very interesting article that proved to be very insightful. However, there were some points that I strongly disagreed with. The whole article was about "sounding out", and how it is a cultural thing and that it doesn't really work all that well. It described other strategies that children use while reading and that parents and some teachers should encourage. The article never really went on to say what "sounding out" was. The writer did a study on children and asked them what "sounding out" was and they gave him several, but mainly two answers. These two were saying each sound of each letter of the word, or "chunking" the sounds together in a word. Basically, he discovered that sounding out can mean an array of things.
I made a big comment at the end of this article. I kind of had an epiphany. Why can't "sounding out" just mean a lot of different strategies? Instead of just saying to students to "sound it out", we should be encouraging all the different strategies that mean "sounding out". There's nothing wrong with encouraging students to "sound it out", just as long as they know that "sounding out" is a vast umbrella that covers several methods of decoding a word.
I made a big comment at the end of this article. I kind of had an epiphany. Why can't "sounding out" just mean a lot of different strategies? Instead of just saying to students to "sound it out", we should be encouraging all the different strategies that mean "sounding out". There's nothing wrong with encouraging students to "sound it out", just as long as they know that "sounding out" is a vast umbrella that covers several methods of decoding a word.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Feb. 1, 2012
Well hello again! This week we read two different articles that actually proved to be very helpful and one of which really opened my eyes to teaching young students writing. The first article we read was Teaching Phonemic Awareness. This article was all about teaching kids who struggle with hearing the words and how they are supposed to sound. This is extrmely important, because not only are they not hearing the word correctly, they are spelling the words wrong because they are not hearing them right. The article gave several strategies as to how to correct this and show students how words are built and how they sound.
The second article was titled Every Mark on the Page: Educating Family and Community Members about Young Children's Writing. This one was the real eye-opener. The author of the article kept coming back to the idea that family members and members of the community always hone in on spelling errors. The argument of the author was that they shouldn't only be focusing on this. A lot of kids make errors like making a '9' when trying to write the letter 'P'. This is them, a lot of the time, testing their limits and being "creative". Instead, members of the community and families should be focusing more on what the child is trying to write about. Does he/she use sentence fluency? Is he/she making sense as they write? Is is cohesive? Is is structured well? Then once we see that they are making sense and know what they are writing about and see that they are making an attempt to structure their writing, we can go back and see the grammar mistakes. Alternatively, we should have the student go back and see/find their mistakes.
The second article was titled Every Mark on the Page: Educating Family and Community Members about Young Children's Writing. This one was the real eye-opener. The author of the article kept coming back to the idea that family members and members of the community always hone in on spelling errors. The argument of the author was that they shouldn't only be focusing on this. A lot of kids make errors like making a '9' when trying to write the letter 'P'. This is them, a lot of the time, testing their limits and being "creative". Instead, members of the community and families should be focusing more on what the child is trying to write about. Does he/she use sentence fluency? Is he/she making sense as they write? Is is cohesive? Is is structured well? Then once we see that they are making sense and know what they are writing about and see that they are making an attempt to structure their writing, we can go back and see the grammar mistakes. Alternatively, we should have the student go back and see/find their mistakes.
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