Response Protocol: Teachers often try to engage English language learners in talking by asking questions. This is designed to help teachers better their understanding of students’ language development and broaden their repertoire for meeting the needs of this population. This provides a framework for teacher responses to English language learners’ responses to teacher questions.

Contributions Approach: Teachers typically include culturally specific celebrations and holidays in the curriculum.

Additive Approach: this is a thematic approach. Teachers might integrate into the curriculum a unit that addressed multicultural issues; otherwise the curriculum remains relatively the same.

Transformative Approach: teachers attempt to help students understand diverse ethnic and cultural perspectives by providing them with opportunities to read about concepts and events, make judgments about them, think critically, and generate their own conclusions and opinions.

Decision-Making and Social Action Approach: this is an extension of the transformative approach. It provided students south opportunities to undertake activities and projects related to the cultural issues they have read about and analyzed. Projects that involve social action and civic duties are encouraged.

Academic and Cognitive Diversity: when a student learns at a pace or in a style different from that expected at the school.

Exceptional Children: students who differ from the norm (above or below) to such an extent that an individualized program of adapted specialized education is required to meet their needs.

Public Law 94-142

this is the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, that passed in 1975. It has several principles in effect today.

• Nondiscriminatory identification and evaluation
• Free, appropriate education (FAPE)
• Least restrictive environment (LRE)
• Parent and student participation and shared decision making

IDEA 2004

This specifies that the state must follow guidelines that are designed to prevent the inappropriate over identification of disproportionate representation by race and ethnicity of children as children with disabilities.

Instructional Principles for Academic and Cognitive Diversity

• 

Inclusion: Students with specialized needs are Included in the regular classroom as much as possible  and receive assistance for the regular education teacher as well as the special education teacher. Special education students in regular education settings have opportunities to learn from their peers and to develop friendships and social skills.

literacy coaches: The primary goal of coaching reading is to provide long-term professional development for teachers that ultimately result in improving reading achievement ideal characteristics of literacy coaches include:

• strong understanding of the reading process         
• excellent in teaching reading
• Exemplary communication skills with peers
• Skill in literacy assessment and instructional practices

Differentiated Instruction: Based on assessing student needs, implementing multiple approaches to learning, and blending whole class, small group, and individual instruction. Teachers can differentiate based on students levels of readiness for a topic, student abilities, and students interests.

Classroom Application

One of my biggest fears in my future classroom is a student, or students, not feeling included or welcomed. Learning about how to encourage and aid ELL is extremely important in the process of making all students feel welcome, which is my most important goal. It is equally important in the process of creating an effective learning environment for ELL.

Scope and sequence: the objective of providing a vertical arrangement of skill development and to ensure continual skill development. This usually means diagnostic and achievement tests are frequently given.

Basal reading approach (bottom up curricula): Basals provide everything a teacher needs to a complete reading program, but most teachers use supplements as well. They contain both narrative and expository text that use a wide range of genres. They provide a scope and sequence of skills and strategies to be taught at various levels and grades.

Language experience approach (LEA): heavily prevalent in preK and kindergarten classrooms. This is often associated with story dictation, recording the language of children on chart paper or newsprint and using what they say as the basis for reading instruction. LEA includes planned and continuous activities such as individual and group dictated stories, the building of word banks of known words, creative writing activities, oral reading of prose and poetry by teacher and students, directed reading-thinking lessons, the investigation of interests using multiple materials, and keeping records of student progress. It also emphasizes student experience with reading and writing  and uses meaning text and meaning lessons.

Integrated language arts approach: this extends the concept of language experience experience throughout the grades by immersing students in reading, writing, talking, listening, and viewing activities. Teachers who use this belief that systems of language should not be taught as isolated skills and that reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing should be tough in concert. In this approach, the language arts support one another and are connected through the use of information and imaginative literature.

Literature based approach: an approach that encourages students to select their own trade books, with the sessions followed by teacher-student conferences, where students will be asked to read aloud from their book. This approach aids individual student differences and abilities, while also focusing on meaning, interest, and enjoyment.

Technology based instruction: learning to read using mobile and desktop devices if as commonplace as using a nasal used to be. This technology can include interactive games, audiobooks, and access to information faster. Web-based applications allow students to access and retrieve information immediately, construct their own texts, and interact with others, using desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices. Children become skillful in their ability to organize, revise, and edit what they write.

Technology based approach: This essentially means using technology in your curriculum, this can be using audiobooks, online activities, etc.

Instructional scaffolding: providing enough instructional guidance and support for students so that they will be successful in their use of reading strategies.

Explicit strategy instruction: clear and direct instruction, makes they who, what, when, where, and why of skills and strategy use.

Running records: This is a method for marking miscues of beginning readers. The student reads a passage aloud as the teacher follows along, they mark correct words by a tic mark above, circle words the student missed, write in words they added, and cross out words they said wrong/ replaced it with a different word. Afterwards, the teacher asks the student a few comprehension questions as well.

Classroom application

I love learning about running records! This was interesting to me because its learning and practicing something that I will do very frequently. I liked this because its very straightforward, and the way I practice these will be the exact way I orchestrate them. In a sense, it makes it feel more “real” because it looks exactly the same now, as it will when I’m doing it in the classroom.

Explicit instructional approach: practices that are intentionally teaching a concept, that allow teachers to help students develop metacognitive awareness and strategic knowledge.

Implicit instructional approach: concepts that are unintentionally taught that students may learn.

Systematic instructional approach: practices that are carefully thought out, build on prior knowledge, build from simple to complex, and are designed before activities and lessons are planned.

Autobiological narrative: linking personal history as a reader to instructional beliefs and practices. This helps inquire into the past to better understand what you do in the present and what would would like to do in future classroom situations. This explores memories, incidents, or situations in their lives.

Professional knowledge: knowledge gained from an ongoing study of the practice of teaching. Teachers build a knowledge base that is rooted in current theory, research, and practice.

Literacy coach: the role of a literacy coach is is to support teacher learning. They provide expertise in reading and learning to read, professional development opportunities and resources. They help develop expertise in the classroom.

Alphabetic principle: how the alphabetic writing system works. It suggests that there is s correspondence between letters (graphemes) which are the basic units of writing and sound (phonemes).

Orthographic knowledge: the knowledge of likely spelling patterns.

Schemata: prior knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, values, skills and the procedures that a reader brings into a reading situation.

Metacognition: thinking about your thinking and your cognitive processes.

Graphophonemic system: the graphic symbols or marks in the page that represent sound.

Syntactic system: the order or words and language.

Semantic system: background knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, beliefs, and values.

Schema theory and reading comprehension

Students use their schemas to create meaning to new experiences. These two terms go hand in hand because for comprehension to happen, students must activate a schema that fits with information in the text. This is why we activate schemas before activities by asking students questions like: “what do we know about this topic”. Some readings will  be difficult to understand if certain schemas aren’t activated.

Piaget

Piaget spent most of his life observing children and their interactions with their environment. His theory of cognitive development helps explain that language acquisition is influenced by more general cognitive attainments. He believed that language affects thought, but does not necessarily shape it.

Vygotsky

Vygotsky viewed children as active participants in their own learning. In early development, children bring to acquire language competence; as they do, language simulated cognitive development. He believe children carry on external dialogues with themselves, which eventually gives way to inner speech. Piaget and Vygotsky both believe children must be actively involved in order to grow and learn.

4 steps of literacy development

1. Beginning: students demonstrate little to no receptive or productive English skills.
2. Early immediate: students continue to develop receptive and productive English skills. They are able to identify and understand more concrete details during unmodified instruction.
3. Intermediate: students grow language skills to meet the communication and learning demands with increasing accuracy. They understand more concrete details and begin to understand abstract concepts.
4. Early advanced: students begin to combine the elements in English language in complex and demanding situations and are able to use English to learn in content areas.

3 models of reading

Models of the reading process often depict the act of reading as a communication event between a sender and a receiver. The writer has a message to deliver to the reader, who needs to interpret the meaning.

1. Bottom-up models: assume that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the print. This is initiated by deciding graphic symbols into sounds. The reader identifies features of letters; links these features together to recognize letters; combined letters to recognize spelling patterns; links spelling patterns to recognize words; and then proceeds to sentences, paragraphs, and text-level processing.
2. Top-down models: assume that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the readers prior knowledge. The process is initiated by making predictions or “educated guesses” about the meaning of some unit of print. Readers decide graphic symbols into sounds to “check out” hypotheses about meaning.
3. Interactive models: assume that the process of translating print to meaning involved making use of both prior knowledge and print. The process is initiated by making predictions about meant and/or decoding graphic symbols. The reader formulated hypotheses based on the interaction of information from semantic, syntactic, and graphophonemic sources of information. (Essentially this is a combination of the two other models)

RTI and the 3 tiers

RTI means response to intervention, derived from IDEA. This is a systematic approach to identification an instruction of struggling readers. With RTI, the identification process for leaning disabilities shifts from a focus on the discrepancy between achievement and intellectual ability to the emphasis of early support and intervention. The focus of this process is on providing interventions and assessments to develop reading and writing skills and strategies for all students.

Tier 1: all students are provided research-based instruction differentiated to meet each students needs. Intervention is considered preventive and proactive.

Tier 2: more intensive work is provided to students who have not been successful in traditional classroom learning situations. Therefore more focused small group interventions and implemented with frequent monitoring to measure progress. Regular classroom teachers receive support from speech SL educators and literacy coaches.

Tier 3: learners receive intensive, individualized intervention targeting specific deficits and problem areas. Special educator and literacy specialists are responsible for the intervention and assessment processes; classroom teachers provide support.

Classroom application

This course and it’s text interests me more so than last year! Last semester we learned what we would be teaching, now we get to learn how to teach those concepts. Learning about the processes and theories that are behind the instruction of reading and writing are very important as I will be learning and using them for the rest of my career!

Text Sets

Teachers collect text sets of books and other reading materials on topics for teaching thematic units. Materials for text sets are carefully chosen to include different genres, a range of reading levels to meet the needs of students, and multimedia resources. It’s important to include plenty of materials for English learners and struggling readers.

Mentor Texts

Teachers use stories, nonfiction, and poems that students are familiar with to model the writer’s craft. Picture books are especially useful mentor texts because they’re short enough to be reread quickly. Teachers begin rereading a mentor text and pointing out a specific feature, such as adding expression for strong verbs, writing from a different perspective, or changing the tone by placing adjectives after nouns. Students imitate the feature in brief collaboration compositions in their own writing.

Trade Books

Trade books are published by manufacturers for general audiences. These usually include best-seller books and do not include academic books.

Learning Logs

Students use learning logs to record and react to what they’re learning in social studies, science, or other content areas. Learning logs are a place for students to think on paper. Students use these to discover gaps in their knowledge and to explore relationships between what they’re learning and their past experiences.

Double Entry Journals

Students divide their journal pages into two parts and writer different types of information in each one. For example, they write important facts in one column and reactions to the information in the other.

Quickwriting

When students to quickwriting they write on a topic for 5 to 10 minutes, letting thoughts flow from their minds to their pens without focusing on mechanics and revisions. Teachers use this to activate students background knowledge at the beginning of a unit, monitor their progress and clarify misconceptions during the unit.

Collaborative Books

Students work together in classroom collaborations to write collaborative books. Sometimes students write one page for the report, or they can work together in small groups to write chapters.

Essays

Students write essays to explain, analyze, and persuade; sometimes their topics ar personal, and other times they address national or international issues. Essays are short, usually no longer than two pages. Essays can be personal, comparative, or persuasive essays.

Prereading Plan

Teachers prepare students to read the chapter and nurture their interest in the topic on these ways:

• Activate and build students background knowledge about topic
• Introduce big ideas and technical words
• Set purposes for reading
• preview the text

Anticipation Guides

Teachers introduce a set of statements on the topic of the chapter, students agree or disagree with each statement, and then they read the assigned text to see if they were right.

Question-Answer Relationships

Students use this to understand how to answer questions written at the end of the content area textbook chapters. This helps students understand questions where you can find the answer right in the text and questions that require further comprehension.

SQ4R Study Strategy

This strategy is used for students in seventh and eighth grade. It is a sex-step technique in which students survey, question, read, recite, relate, and review as they study a content area reading assignment. This strategy includes the before, during, and after stages of reading.

Planning a Thematic Unit

Alternative Assessments

Teachers devise alternative assessments to learn more about English learners’ achievement when they have difficulty on regular evaluations. For example, instead of writing an essay, students can draw pictures or graphic organizers.

Semantic Feature Analysis

The semantic feature analysis strategy uses a grid to help kids explore how sets of things are related to one another. By completing and analyzing the grid, students are able to see connections, make predictions and master important concepts. This strategy enhances comprehension and vocabulary skills.

Classroom Application

This chapter gives a lot of information of different activities students can do with and for their learning. I really enjoyed double entry journals and quickwrites. I think well on paper too, just writing down everything that comes to mind. I think this is a great way for students to understand, recognize, and sort their ideas. I would love to use this in my classroom!

How to Address Struggling Reader’s Problems

How to Address Struggling Writer’s Problems

Characteristics of Struggling Readers

• Difficulty developing concepts about written language, phonemic awareness, letter names, and phoneme- grapheme correspondences
• Slower to respond than classmates when asked to identify words
• Behavior that deviates from school norms
• Ineffective decoding skills
• Don’t read fluently
• Insufficient vocabulary knowledge
• Difficulty understanding/remembering the author’s purpose
• Unfamiliar with English language structures

Characteristics of Struggling Writers

• Struggle with word choice and writing complete sentences
• Difficulty developing/organizing ideas
• Difficulty using effective transitions
• Problems with spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar skills
• Struggle with writing process/using writing strategies effectively
• Students complain of arm or hand pain when writing
• Show little interest/do bare minimum
• Refusal to write at all

Differentiation

Differentiating instruction is based on the understanding that students differ in many important ways. Differentiation is especially important for struggling readers and writers who haven’t been successful and who cannot read grade-level textbooks.

Differentiating the Content

Content is what you are teaching: literacy knowledge, strategies, and skills that students are expected to learn at grade level. Teachers concentrate on teaching the essential content, and to meet students needs, they provide more instruction for some students and less for others. For students already familiar with the content, they increase the level of complexity of instructional activities. Teachers decide how they’ll differentiate the content by assessing students’ knowledge before they begin teaching.

Differentiating the Process

The process is how you teach: the instruction that teachers provide, the materials they use, and the activities students are involved in to ensure they are successful. Teachers group students for instruction and choose reading materials at appropriate levels of difficulty. They also make decisions about involving students in activities that allow them to apply what they’re learning through oral, written, or visual means.

Differentiating the Product

The product is the result of learning. It demonstrates what students understand and how well they can apply what they’ve learned. Students usually create projects, such as posters, reports, board games, puppet shows, and new versions of stories. Teachers often vary the complexity of the projects they ask students to create by changing the level of thinking that is required to complete the project.

Grouping for Instruction

Teachers use three grouping patterns: while group, small group, of individually. Decisions about which type of grouping they use depends on the teachers purpose, the complexity of the activity, and students specific learning needs. Small groups are used flexibly to provide a better instructional match between students and their needs.

Tiered Activities

To match students needs, teachers create several tiered (related) activities that focus on the same essential knowledge but very in complexity. These activities are alternative ways of reaching the same goal because “one size fits all” activities cannot support all students. Creating tiered lessons increases the likelihood that all students will be successful.

Literacy Centers

Literacy centers contain meaningful, purposeful literacy activities that students can work on in small groups.

Interventions

Schools use intervention programs to address low-achieving students’ reading and writing difficulties and accelerate their literacy learning. They’re used to build on effective classroom instruction, not as a replacement for it. The teacher or specially trained reading teacher meets with the student daily. During interventions teachers diagnose, provide intensive, expert instruction, and scaffold students. Interventions take various forms: they can be provided by adding a second lesson during the regular school day, offering extra instruction in an after-school program, or holding extended-school-year programs during the summer.

Reading Recovery

Reading recovery is the most widely known intervention program for the lowest-achieving first graders. It involves 30-minute daily one-on-one turtoring by specifically trained and supervised teachers for 12 to 30 weeks. Reaching recovery lessons involve these components:

• Rereading familiar books
• Independently reading the book introduced in the previous lesson
• Learning decoding and comprehension strategies
• Writing sentences
• Reading a new book with teacher support

Interventions for Older Students

Despite teachers best efforts, approximately one quarter of students in the upper grades are struggling readers, and they need effective classroom interventions in addition to high-quality reading instruction. Struggling students require expert reading instruction, particularly on comprehension and vocabulary strategies to reach grade level proficiency. Programs should include high quality instruction, instructional-level reading materials, and more time for reading.

High-Quality Instruction

The best way to help struggling students is to prevent they difficulties in the first place by providing high-quality classroom instruction and adding an intervention, if needed. Teachers use a balanced approach that combines explicit instruction in decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing along with daily opportunities for students to apply what their learning. Teachers address the components: personalizing instruction, using appropriate instructional materials, expanding teachers expertise, and collaborating with literacy coaches.

Response to Intervention

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a multi-tier approach to the early identification and support of students with learning and behavior needs. The RTI process begins with high-quality instruction and universal screening of all children in the general education classroom.

Classroom Application

The topics discussed in this chapter could arguably be the most important and valuable for effective teachers. Recognizing, assessing, addressing, and intervening with students who are struggling is crucial to their success. There are some students who can go through middle school and up to high school without their true level of reading and writing being discovered. It’s our job to help struggling readers and writers as soon as possible, because they longer they go unnoticed, the harder it will be for them to catch up and/or be successful in the academic career.

Vocabulary for Chapter Ten

• Basal: a commercial reading program that includes authentic literature sections and emphasize an organized presentation of strategies and skills, especially phonics in primary grades. They include all materials needed for lessons like digital components or handouts.
• Think-aloud: teachers verbalize while reading a selection aloud. Their verbalizations include describing things they’re doing as they read to monitor their comprehension. The purpose of the think-aloud strategy is to model for students how skilled readers construct meaning from a text.
• Grand Conversation: a student led conversation about a story where students ask the questions, discuss their thoughts and feelings, and make meaning as they talk about the story.
• Silent Sustained Reading (SSR): an independent reading time set aside during the school day for students in one class or throughout the whole school to silently read self-selected books.

Components of the Basal

Materials in Basal Reading Programs

Literature Focus Units

Steps in Developing a Literature Focus Unit

Teachers develop a literature focus unit through a series of steps. Effective teachers don’t just follow the directions in lit. fucus unit planning guides, but rather do the planning themselves because they are more knowledgeable about their students.

Step One: Select the Literature

Teachers select the book for lit. focus units ( a picture-book story, a novel, a nonfiction book, or poetry) and collect multiple copies so each student has their own copy to read. They also collect supplementary materials to go along with their choice (handouts, puppets, posters, charts, etc).

Step Two: Set Goals

Teachers decide what they want their students to learn during the unit and they connect the goals they set with the standards that their students are expected to learn.

Step Three: Develop a Unit Plan

Teachers read or reread the selected books and then think about the focus they’ll use for the unit. After determining the focus, they choose activities to use at each of the five stages of the reading process and think about how they’ll differentiate their instruction for all students.

Step Four: Coordinate Grouping patterns with Activities

Teachers think about how to incorporate whole-class, small group, partner, or individual activities into their unit plans. it’s important that all students have opportunities to read and write independently as well as to work with small groups and come together as a class.

Step Five: Create a Time Schedule

Teachers create a schedule that provides sufficient time for students to move through the five stages of the reading process and to complete the activities planned for the unit. they also plan mini lessons to teach reading and writing strategies and skills identified in their goals.

Step Six: Assess Students

Teachers link instruction with assessment using the four-step cycle: planning, monitoring, evaluating, and reflecting. they begin thinking about assessment as they chose the book and plan the unit. then, they will use informal assessment tools to monitor students progress during the unit, so they can reteach lessons or adapt their instruction so all students are successful. at the end of th unit, they assess the projects students have made. In the final step, they think about their effectiveness and students self-assess their learning and work habits.

Literature Circles

Key Features in Literature Circles

1. Choice: Students make many choices in lit. circles. they choose the books they’ll read and the groups they will read them with. they share in setting the schedule for reading and discussing the book and their roles in the discussions. they also decide how they’ll share their book with the rest of the class.
2. Literature: The books chosen for lit, circles should be interesting and at students’ reading level. they must seem manageable to the students, especially during their first lit. circles. it’s important teachers have read and liked these books, as they will do a booktalk to introduce them.
3. Response: students meet several times during a lit. circle to discuss the book. through these discussions, students summarize their reading, make connections, learn vocabulary, and explore the authors use of text factors. they learn that comprehension develops in layers. they learn to return to the text to reread in order to clarify a point or state an opinion.

Types of Talk During Literature Circle Discussions

Roles Students Play in Literature Circles

Reading and Writing Workshops

Reading workshops foster real reading of self-selected books. Students read hundreds of books during reading workshop. At the first grade level, students might be reading and rereading three or four books a day. Writing workshops foster real writing and the use of the writing process, for genuine purposes and authentic audiences. Each student writes and publishes as many as 50-100 short stories in primary grades.

Teachers use both workshops or may alternate between them. These workshops can be used as a primary instructional approach in a classroom, or it can be used along with guided reading or another approach.

Activities in Literature Circles

• pre-reading
• reading
• responding
• exploring
• applying

Responses in Reading Workshop

Management of Workshops

in the beginning of the year, teachers establish the workshop environment in their classroom. They provide time for students to read and write and teach them how to respond to books and to their classmates’ writing. Teachers create a schedule and post it in the classroom and discuss with students the activities and expectations. They teach the workshop procedures and continue to model them until students become comfortable with the routines. As students gain experience with the workshop approach, their enthusiasm grows and the workshop approach is successful.

Classroom Application

Learning about the lit. circles and reading and writing workshops in this chapter, were interesting for me because I remember doing them. It’s interesting to have the student lens and then be able to add the teacher lens on top of it, giving you both perspectives. I feel like this helps me get a better grasp on the topics because I can (vaguely) remember doing it myself.

Vocabulary

• Genre: the three board categories (genres) of literature are stories, informational books or nonfiction, and poetry. There are sub-genres within each category.
• Text structures: authors use text structures to organize texts and emphasize the most important details. Sequence, comparison, and cause and effect are three internal patterns used to organize nonfiction texts.
• Text features: authors use text features to achieve a particular effect in their writing. Literary devices and conventions include symbolism and tone in stories, headings, and indexes in nonfiction books, and page layout for poems.
• Tone: the attitude of writer toward a subject or audience.

Text Features of Non-Fiction Books

• Diagrams
• table of contents
• index
• glossary
• timelines
• scales

Expository Text Structure

Narrative genres

Elements of Story Structure

Plot: the sequence of events involving characters in conflict situations; it’s based on the goals of one of more characters and the processes they go through to attain them. Characters set the story events in motion as they attempt to overcome conflict and solve their problems. Conflict is the tension or opposite between forces in the plot and it’s what interests readers enough to continue reading the story. Conflict occurs in four ways:

• Character and nature
• Character and society
• Between characters
• Within a character

Characters: characters are the people or personified animals in the story. They’re the most important structural element when stories are centered on a character or groups of characters. Inferring a characters traits is an important part of comprehension: Through character traits, readers get to know a character well, and the character seems to come to life. Characters are developed in four ways:

• Appearance: readers learn about characters through descriptions of the facial features, body shapes, habits of dress, mannerisms, and gestures.
• Action: the best way to learn about characters is through their actions. What a character does or says gives the reader a great idea of what kind of person/animal the character is.
• Dialog: authors use dialog to breath life into their characters, develop the plot, provide information, move the story forward, and spark reader interest. Said is the most common dialog tag, but authors often use more descriptive tags like nagged or giggled.
• Monologue: authors provide insight into characters by revealing their thoughts. Thoughts and wishes are central to the story.

Setting: the setting is generally thought of as a location where the story takes place, but that’s only one aspect. Setting has four dimensions:

• Location: many stories take place in predictable settings that don’t contribute to a stories effectiveness, but sometimes the location is integral.
• Weather: severe weather, such as a blizzard, rainstorm, or a tornado is crucial is some stories. In other books, the weather is not mentioned because it doesn’t affect the story outcome.
• Time period: for stories set in the past or the future, the time period is important.
• Time: this dimension involves both the time of day and the passage of time. Most stories take place during the day and span over a brief period of time.

Point of view: stories are written from a particular viewpoint. And this perspective determines to  a great extent readers understanding of the characters and events of the story. The points of view are:

• First person viewpoint: tells the story through the eyes of one character using first person pronouns like I.
• Omniscient viewpoint: the author is godlike, seeing and knowing all, telling readers about the thought processes of each character without worrying about how the information is obtained.
• Limited Omniscient viewpoint: this viewpoint is used so that readers know the thoughts of one character. It’s told in third person, and the author concentrates on the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the main character or another important character.
• Objective viewpoint: readers are eyewitnesses to the story and are confined to the immediate scene. They only learn what’s visible and audible and aren’t aware of what characters think.

Theme: theme is the underlying meaning of a story; it embodies general truths about human nature. Themes usually deal with the characters emotions and values, and can be either explicit or implicit.

• Explicit themes: are stated clearly in the story
• Implicit themes: must be inferred, this is the more common of the two.

Narrative Devices

Text Factors of Poetry

Layout, or the arrangement of words, on a page, is an important text factor. Poems are written in a variety of forms, ranging from free verse to haiku, and poets use poetic devices to make their writing more effective. It’s important to point out poetic forms and devices to establish a common vocabulary for talking about poems, and because poems are shorter than other types of text, it’s often easier for students to examine the text, notice differences in poetic forms, and find examples of poetic devices that authors have used.

Formats of Poetry

There are three types of poetry books are published for children.

1. Picture books: picture book versions of classic poems; in these, each line or stanza is presented and illustrated on a page.
2. Specialized collections: these are either written by a single poet or are related to a single theme.
3. Comprehensive anthologies: these books feature 50 – 500 or more poems arranged by categories.

Poetic Forms

Poets who write for K-8 students employ a variety of poetic forms.

• Rhymed verse and narrative poems: these are the most common and tell a story.
• Free verse: this is a contemporary form, writers aren’t required to use traditional poetic techniques, including structure, rhyme, and rhythm. Instead, writers chose word to express ideals precisely and create powerful images, and they divide the lines so they flow like speech.
• Haiku: a Japanese poetic form that contains just 17 syllables, arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. It’s a concise form. These usually deal either nature, presenting a single clear image.
• Odes: odes celebrate everyday objects, especially those things that aren’t usually appreciated. The unrhymed poem, written directly to that object, tells what’s good about the thing and why it’s valued.
• Concrete poems: the words and lines in concrete poems are arranged on the page to help convey the meaning. When the words and lives form a picture or outline the objects they describe, they’re called shape poems. Sometimes they layout of words, lines, or stanzas are spread across a page or two to emphasize meaning.

Assessing Knowledge of Text Factors

The four step process of assessment has been explained in previous blogs, however this image explicitly states the standards for student knowledge of text factors.

Classroom application

Poetry is my favorite genre of writing; I’ve played around with writing all forms of poems. This chapter’s information was interesting to me because of my love for poetry, but also because I will want to incorporate it as much as I can into my curriculum. In doing this, the book lists will be very handy and knowing/understanding all of the forms and text factors is essential.

Comprehension

Comprehension is a creative, multifaceted thinking process in which students engage with the text. Comprehension involves different levels of thinking, from literal to inferential, critical and evaluative; which are the four distinct levels of comprehension.

1. Literal Comprehension: readers pick out main ideas, sequence details, notice similarities and differences, and identify explicitly stated reasons.
2. Inferential Comprehension: This (and levels 3 and 4) differ from literal comprehension because students use their own knowledge, along with information presented in the text. Readers use clues in the text, implied information, and their background knowledge to draw inferences.
3. Critical Comprehension: Readers analyze symbolic meanings, distinguish facts from opinions, and draw conclusions.
4. Evaluative Comprehension: Readers judge the value of a text using generally accepted criteria and personal standards.

Text Complexity

A new way of examining comprehension to determine the cognitive demands of books, more specifically, how well readers can complete an assigned task with a particular text. There are multiple factors that affect text complexity

• Qualitative dimensions: Teachers examine a book’s layout: structure, language features, and purpose and meaning; and the demands placed on readers background knowledge.
• Qualitative measures: Teachers use readability formulas or other sources to determine a books grade appropriateness by calculating word length, word frequency, word difficulty, sentence length, text length, and other qualitative features. they often rely on computer software to determine reading levels, such as Lexile scores.
• Reader and task considerations: Teachers reflect on how they expect students to interact with the book, and on students’ literacy knowledge and strategy use as well as their motivation and interests.

Reader and Text Factors (what readers think about when they read)

Readers are actively engaged with the text they’re reading; they think about many things as they comprehend the text. For example, they do the following:

• Activate prior knowledge
• Estimate the text to uncover its organization
• Make predictions
• Connect to their own experiences
• Create mental images
• Draw inferences
• Notice symbols and other literary devices
• Monitor their understanding

Comprehension Factors and Roles in Comprehension

Inferences

An inference is a conclusion that can be made, based on evidence and reasoning. Readers seem to “read between the lines” to draw inferences, but what they actual do is synthesize their background knowledge with the authors clues to ask questions that point toward inferences. Teachers begin by explaining what inferences are, why they’re important, and how inferential thinking differs from literal thinking. They then teach these four steps in drawing inferences:

Comprehension Skills

These skills are related to strategies, but the big difference is that skills involve literal thinking; like a question that has one correct answer. Some skills readers use include:

• Recognizing details
• Noticing similarities and differences
• Identifying the topic sentence
• Comparing and contrasting main ideas and details
• Matching causes with effect
• Sequencing details
• Paraphrasing ideas

Teachers teach these skills and students practice until they become automatic procedures that don’t require conscious thought or interpretation.

In contrast, this is how the comprehension strategies fit into the reading process.

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Creating an Expectation of Comprehension

Teachers can’t assume that students will learn to comprehend simply by doing lots of reading. Instead, students develop and understanding of comprehension through a combination of instruction and authentic reading activities. Teachers create an expectation of comprehension in these ways:

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Ways to Teach Comprehension Strategies

Teachers teach individual comprehension strategies and then show students how to integrate several strategies simultaneously. Listed below is a list of ways to teach comprehension strategies

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Reciprocal Teaching

An instructional activity in which students become the teacher in small group reading sessions. Teachers model, then help students learn to guide group discussions using four strategies: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting. Once students have learned the strategies, they take turns assuming the role of teacher in leading a discussion about what has been read.

Assessing Comprehension

Teachers use the integrated instruction-assessment cycle to ensure their students are growing in their ability to understand complex texts. Teachers use these informal assessments, along with diagnostic tests to track reader comprehension:

Factors Affecting Student Motivation

Classroom Application

I think it’s very important to understand what affects student motivation; so that we can identify if there is a lack of motivation and how we can intervene. On the other side, we also know what motivates our students and we can integrate those ideas into our lessons. This way we can be proactive in terms of student motivation; we can instill it and also notice if/why it isn’t present.

Vocabulary for Chapter Seven

• Word consciousness: students interest in learning and using words.
• Synonyms: words that have nearly the same meaning as other words. They are useful because they are more precise.
• Antonyms: Words that express opposite meanings
• Homophones: Words that have different meanings and different purposes, but they’re either spelt or pronounced the same.
• Etymologies: Etymologies are word histories. Glimpses into the history of the English language offer very interesting information about word meanings and spellings. Even though words have centered English from around the world, the three main sources of words are English, Latin, and Greek.

Three Tiers of Words

1. Basic words: these are common words that are used socially, in informal conversation at home or with friends. Examples: animal, clean
2. Academic vocabulary: words that are frequently used in language arts, social studies, science, and math. These are found in books and textbooks that students read; teachers use them in mini lessons, discussions, and assignments because students are expected to understand them in high-stakes testing. Examples: paragraph, preposition
3. Specialized terms: these are technical words that are content specific and often abstract. These aren’t used frequently enough to devote time to teaching them, but they’re the words that teachers explicitly teach during thematic units and in content area classes. Examples: minuend, osmosis

Levels of Word Knowledge

Students develop knowledge about a word gradually, through repeated oral and written exposure to it. They move from not knowing a word st all to recognizing that they’re seen the word before, and then to a level of partial knowledge where they have a general sense of the word or know the meaning. Finally, students know the word fully: they know multiple meanings of the word and can use it in a variety of ways. Below are these four levels fully explained.

Multiple Word Meanings

Many words have more than one meaning. For some words, multiple means develop from the noun and verb forms, but sometimes additional meanings develop through wordplay and figurative language. Example: The definition of Bank:

• A piled up mass of snow
• A place that safely hold your money
• The slope of land beside a lake or river
• Many more

Root Words and Affixes

Teaching students about root words and affixes shows them how words work. Many words come from a single root word. Latin is the most common source of English root words, along with Greek and English. Some root words are whole words, and others are word parts. Root words are free morphemes when they’re words. English treats a root word as a word that’s used independently and in combination with affixes. Example: Cent May stand alone but the root word cosmo is not independent.  Affixes are used in combination with root words and cannot stand alone. Example: century – cent is the root word and ury is the affix.

Affixes are bound morphemes that are added to root words. They come in two forms: prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes are placed at the beginning of a word and suffixes are places at the end of the word. Nether prefixes or suffixes are independent. Below is a list of common root words.

Vocabulary Instruction

Vocabulary instruction plays an important role in balanced literacy classrooms because of the crucial role it plays in both reading and writing achievement. Below are the most effective ways to teach vocabulary.

Explicit Instruction

Teachers explicitly yeah students about academic vocabulary, usually tier 2 words. Instruction should be rich, deep, and extended. Which means teachers provide multiple encounters with words; and involve students in words. The procedure is time consuming, but researchers report that students are more successful in learning and remembering word meanings this way.

Word Study Activities

Students examine new words and think more deeply about them as they participate in word-study activities. These include word posters, word maps, possible sentences, dramatizing words, word sorts, word chains, and semantic feature analysis.

Word Learning Strategies and How to Figure out Unfamiliar Words

When students come across an unfamiliar word while reading, they can do a variety of things: reread the sentence, analyze root word, sound out the word, etc. Some techniques, however, work better than others. These three strategies have been identified as the most effective:

• Using contextual clues
• Analyzing word parts
• Checking a dictionary

Capable readers know and use these strategies to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words as they read. In contrast, less capable readers have fewer strategies available: they often rely on one or two less effective strategies, like sounding it out or skipping it.

How to Assess Vocabulary

Step 1: Planning

Teachers consider students current level of vocabulary knowledge, identify the academic words they’ll teach, and plan mini lessons and word study activities. Sometimes they also asses students current knowledge of vocabulary related to the unit and plan ways to build students background knowledge when necessary. Students can also assess themselves at the beginning of the unit.

Step 2: Monitoring

Teachers use these informal assessment tools listed below to monitor students progress

Step 3: Evaluating

Teachers often choose more authentic measures to evaluate students vocabulary knowledge because they provide more useful information than formal tests do.

Step 4: Reflecting

Teachers take time at the end of a unit to reflect on their teaching, including the effectiveness of their instruction. They can also ask students to reflect of their growing word knowledge. If students self-assessed their own word knowledge using the levels of word knowledge at the beginning of the unit, the can complete the assessment again to gain insight on their learning.

Classroom Application

In my field placement that I’m doing this semester, the three 3^rd grade teachers broke their students down into three levels, and each teacher takes a level to teach. They call this “FLEX” time. Mrs. Benner (my cooperating teacher) said this stand for flexible because as students gain knowledge they can move to a different classroom that better suits their levels (or vice versa). While observing this, one of the students in Mrs. Benner’s group was close to moving up, and the student knew this. Together they assessed her progress and decided she was ready to move up. I would love to do something like this with my fellow teachers in the future.

Vocabulary for Chapter Six

• Reading fluency: the ability to read quickly, accurately, and with expression. To read fluently, students must have automaticity.

• Automaticity: The ability to recognize words automatically/on sight, without thought.

• Speed: students must develop adequate reading speed or rate to have the cognitive resources available to focus on meaning.

• Prosody: Reading expressively, students use their voices to add meaning to the words. Prosody includes **expression, phrasing, volume, smoothness, pacing.

• High-frequency words: Common words that readers use frequently, these change as children’s reading levels increase. Examples for a kindergarten class includes: he, a, am, at, can, is, my.

• Phonic analysis: Students use what they’ve learned about phoneme-grapheme correspondents and phonics rules to decode words using phonic awareness strategies.

• Syllabic analysis: More advanced students can decode words by breaking them into syllables, and identify the sound of each, to identify them.

• Morphemic analysis: Students use this to identify multisyllabic words. They locate the root word by peeling off prefixes and suffixes and identify the root word, then add the prefixes and/or suffixes back.

• Decoding by analogy: Students use this to identify words by associating them with words they already know. For example, students can decode small because they know the phonogram all and think of a word like ball and decode from there.

• Writers voice: Writers voice reflects the person writing, it’s essentially how you speak and your tone to an audience via writing. As students gain experience as readers their writers voice will emerge, especially while writing about topics they know well.
• **expression, phrasing, volume, smoothness, pacing defined.
  • Reading with enthusiasm and varying expression
  • chunking into phrases
  • smooth rhythm and quickly self correcting breakdowns.
  • reading a conversational speed.

Assessing Reading Fluency

Teacher informally monitor students’ reading fluency by listening to them read aloud during guided reading lessons, reading workshop, or other reading activities. Teachers specifically monitor automaticity, speed, and prosody and this is usually done quarterly or by semester.

Activities to Increase Reading Practice

• Reading aloud
• word walls and sight words
• readers theatre
• guided reading
• choral reading

There are much more activities but, these are a few.

Dysfluent readers and writers

Students usually become fluent readers by fourth grade. However, 10-15% of older students have difficulty recognizing words, and their reading achievement is slowed. Dysfluent readers struggle decoding words, speed, or prosody. It is crucial that teachers intervene and help overcome students struggles with fluency because they need to focus on meaning. The same conclusions can be drawn with dysfluent writers.

Ostacles to fluency

students who struggle with fluency may have a single problem, such as slow speed, or they may face numerous obstacles in both reading and writing. Providing targeted instruction is often necessary to help students overcome their obstacles. The most effective interventions include:

Obstacle #1: Lack of automaticity

Teachers use explicit instruction to teach students to read to read and write high-frequency words. Each week they focus on five words and involve students in these activities.

Obstacle #2: Unfamiliarity with word-identification strategies

Teachers include these components in their intervention programs to develop students’ ability to read and spell words.

Obstacle #3: Slow reading speed

The most important way that teachers intervene is by providing daily practice opportunities, such as choral reading, guided reading, and readers theatre, to develop students’s reading speed and stamina. Another way to improve reading speed is the repeated reading procedure, where students practice reading a text aloud three to five times, striving to improve their reading speed and reduce errors. Students time this and track their progress. Students also work on stamina through sustained silent reading, where they are working on how long they can read for.

Obstacle #4: Slow writing speed

The best way to improve this is through a lot of writing. Dysfluent writers often have trouble sustaining a writing project through the writing process. These four activities help effectively.

Obstacle #5: Lack of prosody

Teachers emphasize prosody by modeling expressive reading every time they read aloud and using the think-aloud procedure to reflect on how they varied their expression, chunked words into phrases, modulated the loudness of their voice, or varied their pacing. They talk about the importance of prosody for both fluency and comprehension and show students how meaning is affected when they read in a monotone or slow down their reading speed. Phrasing helps a lot with prosody as well because it helps the words flow smoothly.

Obstacle #6: Voiceless writing

doing a lot of reading and writing helps dysfluent writers develop their voices. As they read books and listen to the teacher read others aloud, students develop an awareness of the writers voice. Through minilessons and word-study activities students become aware of techniques they can apply in their own writing voices will come through.

Classroom application

The biggest take away from this chapter is the obstacles that dysfluent students face. Learning what these are and how to both recognize and intervene with these obstacles is a very big part of reading and writing. Without fluency my students will struggle greatly in all of their further schooling. I also am minoring in special education and will be learning about intellectual disabilities such as dyslexia. I think having that special education knowledge as well as the knowledge of the obstacles they may be already facing, will blend together nicely and help me help my students to the fullest I am able.