Inquiry Project: Literacy Centers

For my Inquiry Project, I chose to investigate literacy centers. Before doing this project, I was aware of the centers located around the classroom, but I was not too familiar with literacy centers. Teachers typical have centers located around the classroom, and one center that is essential in the classroom is a literacy center. Literacy centers provide children with hands-on activities that reiterate the concepts that have already been taught in the classroom. Children are able to work with their classmates or independently in order to solve problems. Also, children are provided with an engaging and interactive environment in which they can practice the skills that they have already learned in class.

Teachers have an important role in preparing literacy centers; they must make sure that the center is organized, and the skills, concepts, and topics taught in class should be complemented in the center. Since the skills and topics have already been discussed in the class, literacy centers are an interesting and effective way for children to revisit important concepts. Teachers must give a lot of thought and investigation into what they plan on incorporating in their literacy center and much advanced planning has to occur in order for the center to be successful. Teachers should consider cost because literacy centers can become expensive. If classroom funds are available, teachers can use these in order to stock their literacy centers; if not they can solicit donations from parents and local businesses.

Literacy centers tend to focus on important aspects of literacy development including: phonics, phonemic awareness, spelling, reading, and writing. Even though these elements are addressed at many other times throughout the day, these elements are essential for children to establish in order to be successful. So, I think it is great that there is a lot of time spent address these developmental areas. Research has also found that “the integration of literacy centers can support improvement in reading comprehension, language, social, and writing development (Fountas & Pinell, 1996; 2000; Morrow, 1997; 2003).” Also, many teachers have recommended the use of literacy centers and say they are a very effective tool. Since it is proven that literacy centers can support the improvement of all of these skills, I think it is essential to have literacy centers in the classroom. 

           A typical literacy center includes: books or big books, a puzzle center that features alphabet puzzles, a listening station where children can follow along as books are read on CD, and a magnetic letter station that uses cookie sheets. All of these stations within the literacy center will provide the children with engaging activities in order to work on skills that have already been taught in the classroom. Other literacy centers include poem charts, and with poem charts, students use pointers to read poetry and rhymes out loud. 

          There are many benefits of having a literacy center in the classroom including: students learning the value of learning independently and collaboratively, this learning is accomplished through engaging in active self-discovery; students learn to take responsibility in and choosing their own learning task; teachers have more time to focus on individual students and their needs and this helps to structure class time more effectively; the flexibility allows the children to learn at their own level and have some choice in their activities; and enables teachers to facilitate small group instruction while other students are in the literacy center. The one benefit that really stuck out to me is that literacy centers allow teachers to meet with students for small group instruction. With all of the material that must be covered throughout the school year, this would be a good time to cover material in small group instruction while the other students are engaging in literacy centers. I think literacy centers are an excellent use of time. Instead of just having students do a worksheet or something, they can engage in activities in literacy centers that will be very beneficial to them. 

          I found a website from a teacher's first grade classroom that provided over 20 different literacy center activities; this website is incredibly beneficial and I enjoyed looking at all the ideas for literacy activities that this teacher had come up with. Also, I found the most useful assessment is to monitor student's participation in literacy to ensure that these centers are effective. I have learned a lot about literacy centers, and I am excited to incorporate these into my own classroom. All of the information that I have found through doing this project is extremely beneficial and I will definitely consider these in my own classroom. 

http://www.msrossbec.com/literacy_index.html
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/38302/

Assessment/Bringing it all Together, Scheduling

After reading about Running Records, I think this might be an efficient way to assess children as they are reading verbally from any text. Teachers are able to review what happened immediately, and this leads to a teaching decision on the spot or a plan for the next lesson. After I read this, I thought this would be a very beneficial way to plan lessons on the skills that students might be struggling with and to even help students with skills as they are happening. Running Records also suggests to avoid using a tape-recorder to tape the assessment because it will not provide the teacher with any visual information. Even though Running Records seemed a little confusing at first, I found that once teachers learn the terms and concepts, they will be better prepared to use Running Records and better at interpreting them.

I liked how the Matching tests and readers: Leveling early reading materials for assessment and instruction article mentioned the concept of "just-right" text, which we have already discussed in class using the term the Goldilocks approach. This level, their instructional reading level, is where the student can read about 9 out of 10 words and comprehend the meaning of the passage with little difficulty, and all students should receive reading instruction at this level. This article mentions that "Leveling reading materials is a complex task" (Rog & Burton, 2001/2002, p. 348). Even though it is such a complex task, I think the 10 levels based on the five considerations (vocabulary, size and layout of print, predictability, illustration support, and complexity of concepts) would be a very helpful tool to support teachers in making decisions about reading materials. Also, I found this article very useful because it provided the reader with descriptions of what texts look like at each level. Before reading this article, I would probably just look at the reading level provided on the book and not even think to evaluate the book myself. I have found that a lot of publishers use different leveling systems, so levels might be significantly different. As a teacher, it will be important to evaluate the books in my classroom and consider the levels of all the texts.

There were a few things that really stood out to me in the Looking inside classrooms: Reflecting on the "how" as well as the "what" in effective reading instruction article. "Across all grades, whole-group instruction was coded more often than small-group instruction (Taylor, Peterson, Pearson, & Rodriguez, 2002, p. 274). Even though this is the case, small-group instruction is found to be most effective in schools; large-group instruction might be easier than small-group instruction though. So, it is important as a teacher to remember that even though an activity might be easier to do, I should also consider what the most effective strategy might be. Also, I found that "Across all grades a relatively small amount of higher level questioning or writing related to stories read was observed" (Taylor et. al, 2002, p. 274). I was kind of shocked when I read this because I think there should be quite a bit of questioning after a story is read in order to make sure the student are comprehending what they are reading and thinking critically about the story. Also, I think it would be easy to do writing activities after reading a story, and it surprises me to see that a very small amount of this actually occurs. This article also mentioned that coaching, which we already discussed in this class is seen a lot less, and telling and recitation were how the teachers mainly interacted with the students. Since we talked about the importance of coaching and how beneficial it can be, I think it should be used as much as possible in the classroom. 

In the article, The schools we have. The schools we need., I the comparisons rather interesting. In the section about experience vs. ability, it mentioned that we often confuse lack of experience with lack of ability. It is easy to confuse these two concepts with each other, but teachers should be mindful when assessing their students. Even though some students might not have the skills when they first start school, teachers must realize that this might be because of a lack of experience. Since it is easy to confuse these two concepts, it is also easy to lower our expectations. As we have discussed on several occasions, it is essential to know your students. I think that if teachers know their students, they would not lower their expectations resulting from confusing lack of experience with lack of ability. This article also advises to not label the students, but instead support their learning; "Labeling was originally intended as a sort of shorthand for describing the needed instruction, but it just never paned out" (Allington, 2004, p. 18). As a teacher, I think it would be easy to get caught up in the labeling process and sorting children based on their abilities. So, this is something I definitely need to consider as a teacher. Allington provides a very useful way to provide student with understanding, "children will need substantially less interrogation and substantially more opportunities to observe and engage in conversation about books, stories, and other texts they have read" (Allington, 2004, p. 23). Just by giving students the opportunities to explore books and any other texts allows much conversation to occur which will be incredibly beneficial to students; this strategy should definitely be implemented in the classroom.

Guided Reading

The Guided Reading Approach: A Practical Method to Address Diverse Needs in the Classroom

Schaffer, L. M., & Schirmer, B. R. (2010). The Guided Reading Approach: A Practical Method to Address Diverse Needs in the Classroom. Odyssey: New Directions in Deaf Education, 11(1), 40-43. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

The article I found addressed students in the classroom who have diverse needs, in particularly deaf students. The article mentions that deaf students typically struggle with learning to read; like many students who have diverse needs, it is important to educate yourself on all of the students' needs in order to meet them most effectively. There is not much research relating to reading programs for deaf students, but one school in particular chose to incorporate the Guided Reading Approach for teaching reading on a daily basis. Since this approach was implemented with deaf students, some modifications were made in order for deaf students to be most successful with this approach. These modifications included: asking students to read using story sign, pre-teaching vocabulary, and retelling in American Sign Language. Also, with this approach it is important to focus on small group instruction and allows the teacher to choose from any reading material. The tool used for assessment for this approach is running records. Once these running records were completed, then the students were grouped by instructional level. I'm really glad that I read this article because it is inevitable that I will have students with diverse needs in my classroom; this article has been very helpful to help me think about different perspectives and how to incorporate them in the classroom.

Comprehension and Think Alouds

I thoroughly enjoyed the reading Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers, and I would love to implement some of the strategies Mrs. Hope uses in her classroom because these strategies seem to be extremely effective. Mrs. Hope said that "when we get a new piece of information, it's easier to remember it if we can stick it onto something that's already in our heads; making this connection helps us to understand what we are reading" (Gregory & Cahill, 2010, p. 516). I find that I use this strategy when I encounter new information, and I think would be very beneficial for students to think about learning new information in this way. This would allow the students to associate this new information with something they are familiar with, which will help them to understand the new concept. Another strategy mentioned in this article is visualization, which involves creating mental pictures while listening to a story. Whenever I read books or listen to stories, I always find myself doing this. Encouraging students to do this and to share their visualizations with their classmates will help all of the students to use their imagination and to even think critically about the story. I think these strategies would be really easy to incorporate into a classroom and also help the students with their comprehension abilities at the same time.

Like many of the other concepts we have discussed in class, there are many definitions for the term 'comprehension.' Even though this definition is quite complex, I found it the easiest to understand stating that "comprehension is a process in which readers construct meaning by interacting with text through the combination of prior knowledge and previous experience, information in the text, and the stance the reader takes in relationship to the text" (Pardo, 2004, p. 272). The article What every teacher needs to know about comprehension, points out a very important fact that if a child has more background knowledge relating to the text, that this child will be more likely to comprehend what is in the text. This aspect is important to consider in the classroom; since students come from all different backgrounds, all of their background knowledge will be relatively different. Pardo suggests many strategies for teachers to help support readers, and the strategies listed under teaching vocabulary words I found most useful. It is essential to teach students the words that students will encounter during their reading, instead of picking out the challenging words in textbooks that do not even relate to what they are reading. I know that when I was in school, we had spelling tests every week. We would learn about the words throughout the week and then have a test at the end of the week; these tests probably would have been a lot more beneficial if they were related to something that we were discussing or reading in that class. In my own classroom, I would definitely like to implement this strategy because I think it would be incredibly helpful to the students.

The reading The Comprehension Matrix: A Tool for Designing Comprehension Instruction provided the reader with three major factors that should be considered that affect comprehension. These factors include: the reader, the test, and the situation. It is important to keep these factors in mind because they might be the reason that a student is struggling with comprehension. I really like how Gill pointed out that "Teachers might also understand that comprehension is not something that either does or does not happen after one reads" (Gill, 2008, p. 109). I'm glad that this was included in our reading because if I would not have read this, I might think that comprehension is supposed to just happen. Gill provided us with examples of prereading, during-reading, and postreading activities that will help students with their comprehension throughout the story. Some prereading activities include asking questions, displaying objects related to the story, and leading discussions. During reading students can make predictions about the story, and after reading, students can create a timeline, a map, a television newscast, a newspaper report, a letter, a diary, or even a poem. All of these strategies would be incredibly helpful with reading comprehension, and I think doing these activities throughout the reading will help the students grasp a deeper understanding of the story.

Before doing these readings, I had never really heard of think-alouds; however, I like the way our textbook defines think-alouds as "a way of modeling or "making public" the thinking that goes on inside your head as you read" (Cunningham & Allington, 2010, p. 126). The textbook provides many examples of how teachers can start off by helping the students to make connections to other things that they are familiar with. These statements will help the students think critically about the material that they are being introduced to as well as finding a way for them to relate it to something that they know. Even though this task is very simple, I think it would be incredibly helpful for students to understand what they are hearing.

Vocabulary and Read-Alouds

Before doing these readings, I never knew how important it was to actually model vocabulary for children; I knew that it was essential to engage in meaningful conversations with children, but I did not realize the importance of the vocabulary we use. The first part of the reading about sophisticated word use that really stuck out to me was how easy it is to model sophisticated words in the classroom; the example about Ms. Barker's classroom made me realize that the routines that the children go through throughout the day is a good time to model this vocabulary. The children are already familiar with the activities they will be doing, so I think it is a great idea to incorporate more sophisticated vocabulary during these times. Through reading this article, I have realized that I tend to "dumb down" what I say when I communicate with children, and in order to help children build their vocabulary it is essential to model this sophisticated vocabulary. Also, I have realized that my vocabulary is not too sophisticated, so I need to build my own vocabulary in order to be able to model it effectively with children.

In the Vocabulary Lessons article, research found that "5th grade students who engage in just 10 minutes of independent reading a day read 622,000 more words each year than students who do no independent reading" ( Blachowicz & Fisher, 2004, p. 67). Even though I should not be that surprised because I know that a lot of words can be read in 1 minute, I still find this shocking. I think it is essential for schools to have some sort of D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read) program, even if it is just for 10 minutes a day. This would help children develop their vocabulary and expose them to so many new words. Also, since some of these children are not engaging in purposeful conversations at home, they are missing out on a lot of vocabulary; if schools implemented this program, it would significantly help with all of the students' vocabulary development. Another aspect of this article that I found particularly important is teaching children how to use a dictionary. This tool is incredibly important in vocabulary development, and if children do not know how to use it, they are missing out on a great resource.

The book provides the reader with many useful examples of how to incorporate vocabulary into the classroom. Also, the book suggests to provide as much real experience as possible, that way the children will be able to relate what they are learning to their own lives. The book suggested to bring in real things and anchor words to them, after all of these items are brought in, the class could play a game of 20 questions asking about one particular object. This would allow the children to think about the items that they are already familiar with and attempt to apply these characteristics to the new objects. I think games are a great way to keep the children engaged and build their vocabulary at the same time.

Word Study

In a class that I took last semester on language and literacy, we spent a lot of time discussing phonemic awareness. Before taking that class, I was unaware of the concept of phonemic awareness and I did not fully understand what a phoneme was. We spent an entire class period trying to determine the number of phonemes in our own names, and in doing this experimentation we all realized how difficult it is to actually determine this. Since a class full of college students struggled with this concept, it shouldn't be surprising that children would struggle with this concept. While doing this activity, I tried to think back to learning about phonemes when I was in elementary school. I do not ever remember learning about phonemes; however, I do remember sounding out words in order to be able to read them. I'm assuming that my teachers did many activities to promote phonemic awareness, but did not label what we were doing as phonemic awareness.

In Supporting phonemic awareness development in the classroom, we are provided with examples of what phonemic awareness instruction should look like in the classroom. Phonemic awareness activities should be child appropriate, deliberate and purposeful, and viewed as only one part of a much broader literacy program. The reading suggests a number of effective activities such as songs, games, riddles, and storytelling that will help to promote the student's phonemic awareness even if they are unaware of this. Since most children love games, it would be easy to incorporate these games in the classroom in order to keep the children engaged and also work on phonemic awareness. Also, children seem to really enjoy singing songs and even creating songs, and as I learned from this reading this would be a great way for the children to develop their phonemic awareness. In a couple of my other classes, we have discussed that some lessons that are incidental  end up being very successful. I have learned that it is important not to rely on this though, and deliberate activities, especially those supporting phonemic awareness, will be much more successful in the classroom. This article addresses how much time should be spent on phonemic awareness instruction in the classroom, and I found that it is not so much about the time spent on this concept but rather the quality of the activities that the children are engaging in to develop this phonemic awareness that is most important. I hope that my own classroom will portray this: "In linguistically rich classrooms, phonemic awareness activities will be incorporated intentionally into literature sharing experiences, music experiences, movement experiences, and other experiences throughout the day" (Yopp & Yopp, 2000, p. 135).

When young readers are struggling with how to sound out particular words, I find myself wanting to finish the word from them instead of letting them do it on their own. I have found how important it is to be patient with children and understand that it is essential for them to learn how to sound out words on their own. In the reading about coaching word recognition, we are provided with two types of cues that can be used to coach children during the process of reading. These cues are: general cues to promote thought and cues to promote specific action. After reading about these cues, I want to try using them while reading with children. I think the cues will not only allow me to be more patient when reading with children, but these cues will also help children with their word-recognition and help children to identify parts of each word that they are reading. The book provides us with many examples that would be easy to incorporate into the the classroom. I particularly liked the Guess the covered Word activity, where the teacher would write four or five sentences on the board and cover the last word in each sentence. This activity will help children to identify word patterns, initial sounds, and word length. It would be a fun way to start the class because the children would be playing a game and also work on their phonemic awareness.

Instructional Activities for Fluency

http://www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm

Fluency

Before doing the readings on fluency, I had not given much thought to the actual definition of fluency. When I thought about fluency, I immediately thought about other languages; I thought about people saying they were fluent in other languages, and I always thought this just meant that they knew how to speak completely in that language and that was about all. After beginning the readings on fluency, I realized that I was completely wrong in my thinking of the definition of fluency. Even though all of the readings had slightly different definitions, there were similarities in all of these definitions. I found that Deeney's article defined fluency with four components: accuracy, rate, prosody, and comprehension. Rasinski's definition also included the components of accuracy and prosody. Also, Cunningham & Allington's definition of fluency included the component of accuracy. Not only was I unaware of the definition of fluency, I also had no idea that reading fluency even existed. These readings have opened my eyes to the concept of reading fluency, and this knowledge will be very important in becoming a teacher.

In the article about one-minute fluency measures, I found that these measures were only really assessing two components of  fluency: accuracy and rate; instead of interpreting a deeper view of fluency, one-minute fluency measures interpret a reduced view of fluency. Even though these one-minute measures might not be the best for measuring fluency, these measures can be used for the teacher to discover what level reader the students are and to identify which students might be struggling. This reading also provided many suggestions that can be used with the one-minute measures that might help teachers obtain a deeper fluency assessment. I thought these suggestions, such as getting the most out of the one-minute measures and including fluency with other assessments, would be very helpful to the students and would also be relatively easy to incorporate into the classroom. I thought about including these strategies in my own classroom. I think it might be beneficial to do the one-minute measures at the beginning of the school year to see where the children are with their reading skills, then with other reading assessments fluency could be assessed at the same time. I think this would be beneficial for the teacher and the students; the teacher would only have to do the reading assessments while also assessing for fluency, and the students would have to be assessed all the time.

One aspect that caught my attention in Rasinski's article was the part about reading fast versus reading fluently. I think sometimes it would be really easy to confuse those two aspects. In our society, everything is always so rushed and we try to accomplish tasks as fast as possible. As a teacher, it is very important to not encourage the children to read faster than they read previously; this will lead the students to not understand what they have just read and the reading will have no meaning to them. Even though it might take the students a little more time to read, it will be more beneficial for the students to understand and comprehend what they are reading. Another aspect that caught my attention was in chapter 4, this reading encouraged teachers to model fluent and expressive reading. As we have already talked about in this class, modeling behavior is extremely important for children to understand how to do something. If we as teachers model reading expressively, this will encourage the students to read expressively as well.