My philosophy of reading has changed a in a few areas. I realize that reading is impacted by so may other factors and vice versa. Reading impacts so many other academic endeavors. I know now how much speech can impact a reading impairment. Behavior problems may then stem from both of these. I saw examples of this in my special education students, but didn’t necessarily know the logic behind it. I specifically liked the article about raising urban student’s reading achievement. Many of the facts stated about African-American students and poverty were directly relatable for me. I understand the importance of reading books multiple times from a variety of genres to gain fluency and understanding. I was very engaged in the article about the Peter Effect. I believe universities need to do some of screener for reading engagement and motivation before accepting teachers into programs. The effects a teacher can have on a student’s reading attitude stays with him/her for the rest of their life. Participants from the study specifically spoke about having positive and negative experiences with reading from elementary school.

Teaching majority of students who read below grade level, I know how important it is to assess phonological and phonemic awareness when teaching students to read. Students will really struggle if they don’t have these foundational skills. I’ll continue to build my student’s schema. Mine is completely different from theirs because I grew up in a different culture and environment. This makes for many teachable moments between us! Sometimes this can also lead to misunderstanding especially with vocabulary in texts. I also believe that early instruction before kindergarten can significantly help in the reading process. Parent support, motivation, and engagement contribute to the progression of reading. Many parents of students I teach are not actively engaged with their child’s reading. I know some better approaches now to help cope with this. As a teacher, it’s hard to accept I can only to but so much about what happens when my students go home. Moving forward, I hope to teach my students some skills in regard to metacognition. Some of my students are unaware they lack social or intellectual skills. I need to try harder at helping my students acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses so that they may expand upon what they know.

The purpose of this article was to present a tool that can be used for assessing a student’s phonemic awareness and how to administer it. The article also presented strategies for improving a child’s phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is being aware that speech consists of a series of sounds. It is the best predictor of reading acquisition and spelling. It’s even better than an IQ test. Children lacking phonemic awareness will be unable to master print without proper intervention. The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation requires students to separate sounds of spoken words in the correct order. A teacher models how to segment the word “old,” and then the student and teacher together segment the words: ride, go, and man. The teacher verbally prompts the student with 22 words for the child to segment. The teacher records accuracy. There isn’t currently any research for the effectiveness of this test for ELL students.

There were a few activities presented in the article to strengthen phonemic awareness skills. Read-aloud books that have rhyme and alliteration can be used. Teachers can prompt their question answers with phonemes. For example, one day last week when my class was learning about the moon, I asked which phase of the moon only shows a tiny sliver. Students were having trouble with the answer so I said /cr/ and students got crescent. Songs can also be used repetitively even if students are making up nonsense lyrics. Elkonin boxes can be used where a student slides a chip across the segments to the right in each box as they say them. Eventually, the student would write the segments in the boxes.

I used Elkonin boxes when I student taught first grade with my lower readers. I was just thinking about my two lowest guided reading groups, and I would be curious to see how well they could segment phonemes on this test. They read on a first grade level, but are in third grade. They thrive off books that rhyme. Many of their books are also still repetitive. If they aren’t successful, I would consider doing Elkonin boxes with them. Right now, we focus a lot on word patterns and chunks.

The purpose of this article was to inform teachers how to get students to use metacognition in the classroom. Metacognition is the process used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. This may seem complex for young children, but I think some students are already doing it without knowing what it is. Students aware of their strengths and weaknesses are able to expand on their knowledge. If you asked students in my room about their strengths and weaknesses many of them would be able to tell you. Others might be a little bit cocky. Some may know, but aren’t sure of the steps they should take to make their weaknesses become strengths.

Some people are unaware when they lack intellectual and social skills. This reminds me of some of special education students. Of course they haven’t been told any of this, but I’m not sure some of them know they have a learning disability or don’t behave socially like other students. When people can’t produce the right answers, they’re unable to tell when anyone else is right or wrong. I think this could contribute to participation rates among students due to self-doubt.

Some effective strategies I could use in my classroom are asking the students what was most confusing about a lesson (especially in math). Also in math, I could model how to approach a question: what I would do first, how to check my work, and what I should do when I think I’m done. In regards to spelling tests, I liked the exam wrappers idea. Students reflect on their preparation strategies and adapt them looking forward to the next exam. Students could talk with their peers to see how and when they study their words in order to increase their scores. The article mentioned it shouldn’t be a process where some students “get it” and some “don’t.” I completely agree with this statement. I also think I do a  decent job of integrating short answer questions with multiple choice questions. This requires higher cognition. Teachers are constantly reflecting on their practice so I believe many of us think about the changes we need to make to meet student’s needs.

The purpose of this article was to inform teachers of a way literacy was improved in an urban environment. In2Books was a program used in the Dominican Republic to improve literacy instruction among low performing students living in an urban environment. Achievement gaps are most prominent in African-American and Latino students that live in an urban environment. The blame for this is put on lack of funding, poverty, student/teacher mobility, home to school disconnect, and lack of teacher prep. Currently working in an urban school with all African-American students, I would definitely say all of these issues exist and may factor in more than others, but they’re not necessarily to blame.

The I2B program linked students with adult pen pals to discuss 5 books that were read multiple times. Teachers had to change their regular classroom practice to engage in this routine. The adults would write higher order thinking questions, and the students would respond with answers form the text. Rookie and veteran classrooms that implemented the I2B program scored higher on reading assessments and standardized tests than classrooms that didn’t. Students enjoyed reading the books because they were diverse, on a range of levels, involved children solving problems, and the tone was up lifting. The books were a variety of genres , but it was important the issues discussed in the books were prevalent to the students. Students were also motivated to read and write because someone other than their teacher was reading what they wrote for conversational purposes not to grade it. I2B helped to build community in and out of the classroom as well as improve literacy especially in schools where the program was implemented for multiple years.

Currently, my students and I read many different genres throughout the school year with the Ready Gen curriculum. I appreciate all the exposure they get through this. If we aren’t reading a chapter book many times we’ll do multiple readings of the same book with different purposes. I think it would be cool for my students to be pen pals with another third grade class. I could link with a friend of mine from the first school I taught at. Most of the students are Latino there so this would expose my students to another culture. I remember having pen pals when I was in school. It was always exciting to open a letter that was written just for me. I was also thinking of doing a whole class pen pal digital project with my sister-in-law in Maryland. She teaches kindergarten, but it would still be insightful to write back and forth because I know her students aren’t exposed much to urban life and vice versa with my students being exposed to their lifestyles. Maybe we could even Facetime at the end of the year!

The purpose of the Anderson article was to inform us about schema theory. Reading comprehension isn’t concrete and imaginable. A person’s schema forms relationships among story elements to comprehend text. A child’s schema is based on the culture they’re born and raised in. The comprehension of text varies person to person because of this. I notice this sometimes myself in conversation among friends. I was raised in a rural environment whereas my friends from Philly grew up in an urban environment. I once said to my roommate, “The milk is all.” She replied, “All what?” I meant the milk was all gone, but she had no idea what I was talking about. Back home, my family would know I was saying the milk was empty. That’s more of an example of language comprehension, but still touched on our schema.

Reading involves simultaneous analysis at different levels. It also requires us to do six different skills such as putting information into a “slot,” paying close attention to text, making inferences, memory recall, summarizing important information, and creating hypotheses about missing information. Schema is based on perspective which relates to a child’s culture. For example, my students and I came across the word beaker in a story. Upon showing them one on Google images they still had no idea what it was used for so I explained it, and we watched a Youtube video of one being used. When we came across the word culvert students also didn’t know what one was. When I showed them this they said they’ve seen one down the block. One student even mentioned a homeless guy living in one. I teach predominantly African-American children so our schemas are very different, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. We have some of the best conversations and teachable moments because of it.

Moving forward, I hope to spend more time introducing books to my class before we read them to gauge what they know. I currently encourage my students to make predictions when we’re done shared reading each day. I hope to get a better feel for what they know before reading instead of during reading so I can help them more when it comes to what they need to learn. I liked the sentence toward the end of the article about minority students failing comprehension of reading material because their schema doesn’t match majority of the culture. I think these students comprehend in a different way so as teachers we have to be open minded to hearing what they interpreted and work on building their schema.

The purpose of this article was to explain how reading has evolved and how it’s not a concrete concept. The article stated that reading was originally thought of as a perceptual process not linguistic. It focused more on the interpretations not the verbal component. I was also intrigued when the article mentioned the different kinds of stress we put on words. For example, bold words or words written in caps lock. This is learned at a pretty young age because most of my students come to third grade knowing what kind of insight the print is trying to give them.

Along with children picking up the language in which they’re born in, they also invent their own language. We hear babies “talking” to each other often especially young siblings. Children can usually speak in full sentences before they go to kindergarten without receiving direct instruction solely from being immersed in their environment.

One skill I would like to apply more to my teaching is looking at my student’s miscues on their DRA’s to determine which kind they’re making (syntactic, semantic, or graphophonemic). I want to be able to give them more individualized instruction based off which type of miscues they tend to make.

The article mentioned schema changing slightly each time it’s activated or when someone experiences something new. Nonfiction texts trigger more schema. I’m guessing this is because they’re real and true so they’re more relatable to. I also liked when the article mentioned a dialect being a difference not a deficit. Teaching in a predominantly African-American school, many of my students use variations of slang when reading however, I never hold this against them. I was also thinking about my students that see the speech teacher. They often times sound like they pronounce words incorrectly, but upon reviewing their IEP’s I’m aware of what to listen for.

There were three quotes that stuck out to me toward the end of the article. It mentioned honoring one voice silences another. I see the controversy in the classroom between student led and teacher led instruction. There needs to be a balance between the two. Literacy offers empowerment, but doesn’t guarantee it. Literacy has to be used to its full proper potential contributing to someone being successful. Lastly, there isn’t one right answer to to a question worth asking. Every question can be answered multiple ways so be open minded when responding to students.

My name is Tracey Fox and I am a third grade teacher at Edward Gideon Elementary School in Philadelphia. I am in my third year of teaching. The purpose of this blog is for us to be able to collaborate and share ideas about the psychology of reading. I’m applying some concepts I got from the article “The Nature of the Reading Process” to my classroom.

I read in the article the more times a child has exposure to repetitive print the higher their word recognition is. This backs up the reasoning as to why it is best practice as teachers to have students read the same passage multiple times in guided reading. Sometimes my students read the book for up to three days. During shared reading we also sometimes reread the same story, but with a different purpose. I actually catch the students whisper reading aloud with me during the second or third read. I think this year I should try rereading some of the interactive read-alouds that I use for social studies and science.

Another part of the article that stuck out to me was that reading triggers previous experiences (schema) or future actions. My students and I have such different experiences we have been through. When we read some passages I take for granted comprehending the story whereas, my students don’t necessarily understand or can’t grasp it. For example, we were reading a historical fiction book that mentioned the bathroom being outside. I had to show them pictures on Google images of what this looked like. My schema has also been evolving since I moved to Philly. I had no idea what a “papi store” was until I physically went there with my students. I realized it is almost like a convenient store. Where I grew up we didn’t have corner stores. I enjoy immersing myself in my student’s culture so I can learn more about them and their experiences.

Lastly, it’s important to remember that reading isn’t a set and stone, step-by-step procedure. Children learn skills simultaneously and will grasp some before others.