"The purpose of reading is to comprehend texts for a variety of reasons, not just to read words correctly" (DeVries, 129). This sentence basically explains what reading is all about. Unfortunately, reading is not always an easy task. There is much more to reading than knowing the sounds letters make or knowing how to read a word. You must be able to comprehend a word in order to understand the meaning of text. Chapter six discusses word identification. In order for students to understand text, they must be able to automatically recognize a word and be able to analyze it. The most confusing part of this chapter for me was the semantic system. I have no idea how to teach that to students. I understand it, but I don't know how to teach it. Reading this chapter made me realize how complex the English language is and how difficult it must be for ELL students. They are expected to learn in a language that is claimed to be the most difficult to learn. There are so many words that sound the same and have different spellings or words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations. Students who struggle with reading probably feel the same way. Word identification is something that I know that I struggled with when I was young. I could read a word but that didn't mean I understood it. I could read an entire story to my teacher and not be able to tell her anything that I had just read. But instead of helping me, she told me I needed to pay more attention. I was paying attention, I just didn't get it. My biggest problem as a young reader was comprehension. It was my 3rd grade teacher who caught on to me. She knew I could read because I would read aloud in class, but I couldn't pass an A.R. test to save my life. She taught me context clues and practiced sight words and high frequency words with me. I could only do my homework because I would ask my parents or my siblings to read the directions to me, until this teacher stepped in.
Chapter 6 is about word identification. It is important for students to develop a large bank of sight words. I never understood the importance of this until my son was in kindergarten. I learned to make flashcards of my son’s weekly sight words in kindergarten. We spent time each day to review each word. I kept these cards for my younger daughter and they have made her kindergarten year much easier! This just shows how we learn from our past experiences! I found the section in Chapter 6 about the Components of Word Identification on page 131. I also appreciate the detailed information about informal and formal assessments.
My favorite part of Chapter 6 is the Picture Book activity on page 141 using Jan Brett books. Her books give so many detailed illustrations that they provide excellent clues to the students. The book also gives us a detailed list of Jan Brett’s books. I also love the idea of personal word walls. I have always been a big fan of a classroom word wall but I think that an individual word wall is an excellent idea for all grade levels.
Chapter six focused on teaching and assessing students’ ability in word identification. There are many different factors that will affect a students’ ability to use identification strategies to identify words in different books that they read. English Language Learners may not have the cultural experiences that some of the other students have had which will help them to identify words in a particular context. After reading this chapter I feel that the importance of building students background knowledge is vital if we want them to be able to use this knowledge to construct a new understanding when reading different material. Teaching students to use their MSV knowledge can be very helpful in word identification. During my internship for Reading and Language arts the reading specialist at the school would ask the three questions; “Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it make sense?” when students were reading passages for assessment. She would cue students to think about the context of the story to try to identify the words in the text. This can be a very useful tool when teaching students to use strategies to read new words. In the second grade classroom I was in sight words were emphasized daily. I thought that page 132 in the text had a really great method for teaching sight words using an authentic text. Students should read the piece as a whole with the teacher. Students should be able to see the words as the teacher points to each word as the book is being read. As a group you can read it again allowing students to read along or chime in when they recognize words. After reading the text multiple times the teacher can cut out sentences and then words for the students to put back together. Students will be able to see the words in multiple settings, and they will have to think about putting the words together to make sense so they will be exposed to the words in many authentic situations. I would use this technique to work on sight words, especially when I can find a story that includes words that many students are struggling with. The checklists are also very helpful as a formative assessment because teachers can monitor student growth very easily at multiple points throughout the school year to see how they are progressing. All of the activities at the end of the chapter are helpful, but I feel that creating word webs for technical words is extremely important and can be very helpful prior to learning about a new topic in science, social studies, or another content area that contains technical terms that may not be known to the students. Many of my English Language Learners benefit from creating a visual concept map because they are able to look at and sort the information easily.
Brandy, I am always amazed at the complexity of the English language when I read about the different exceptions, rules, blends, phonograms, etc. I cannot imagine how an English Language Learner must feel when they first enter a classroom in the United States. Many of them have not had many of the cultural experiences that are needed to bring in background knowledge to subject areas, and the language is completely new and complex. I think it is very important that we learn how to best help these students and to build a great variety of resources that we will be able to utilize when trying to instruct them.
It is great that you had a teacher who stepped in to help you. Stories like that show how important and influential teachers truly are to their students.
Trisha, Sight words are very important for students. Your children are very lucky to have a mom who recognizes the importance in learning these words, and then who took action to help them learn them. I enjoy Jan Brett's books. My daughter is 3 and she loves to "read." I will read a book and we will look at all the context clues and then she is able to "read" them again and I know the detailed illustrations help her recreate the story in her mind.
I also think personalized word walls are a great idea. We could even have students create "word wall journals" where they are able to write a word, use it in a sentence, and draw a picture to relate to it.
“A teacher is one who brings us tools and enables us to use them.” Ralph Waldo Emerson I liked this quote because it’s exactly what a teacher does. We give the students tools and then show them how to use them. I didn’t realize how important word recognition was or how teachers can help their students with this. I liked reading about the four cueing systems (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and graphophonic). Being able to read about different types of cueing systems makes me think back to my days in elementary school and seeing if my teachers used any of these with me when I was learning to read. I was one of the lucky people who had an easy time learning how to read, but one of my best friends had a lot of trouble reading. Reading this chapter on word identification makes me realize that that’s what one of the problems that my friend had with reading. My friend had good Paraprofessionals that helped her learn how to read and then she had bad Paraprofessionals that made her hate reading. Teachers should be aware if any of their students have problems with word recognition and then to help those students learn how to recognize words.
I like how you decided to help your son and daughter learn their words in Kindergarten. All of the work shouldn't be put on the teacher. Some of it should be on the parents too. You probably made the teachers life a little more easier when you decided to help your children learn their words.
This chapter dealt with word identification. Many students when reading especially picture books will put in their own words in order to make sense of the material. In this chapter I learned that there are several things students use to figure out the words. Receptive knowledge is the words the students are comfortable with when listening. Expressive vocabulary is what students use when they speak or write. Sight words are words that do not conform to the normal rules. Sight vocabulary is words that students recognize in half a second or less. Students may use context clues which mean that they use surrounding information to figure out the word. They can use visual analysis to break words into smaller chunks. Blending polysyllabic words is the ability to blend the smaller parts of words together to make whole words. Structural analysis is using prefixes and suffixes and knowing how that affects the words. There were two bits of information that really struck me and it was the bit about the 10 words that made up 25% of what we read and write. I was really surprised by that. I also enjoyed the information about sight words being taught in context. I remember my daughters bringing home words on a ring for memorization when she was in 1st and 2nd grade. Evidently the best way to teach them is through reading. The one question I have is how you keep track of that. If you see a group of your students struggling with a couple of sight words, do you specifically look for books with those words, and if you do is there a good way to do it rather than sifting through books in the library? There is so much to teaching children to read I feel a bit overwhelmed with tying it all together sometimes.
This chapter was very short and sweet but came through with its good points. It was packed with great information on word identification. I think a personal word wall could easily be used to help students at any time they need help. If students have access to a dictionary of their own to add to, that is blank to begin with, they can add new words to it throughout the school year. A ring of note cards with each letter of the alphabet would be handy as well. Unscrambling words is something that I have seen work very well. Every once in a while, my teacher has the students spell out their spelling words by unscrambling. The Four Cueing Systems is something that I was able to better understand, and understand why and how it is important when teaching. I have seen students clueless when it comes to words with more than one meaning, like run is used in the book. The students in the class I work in recently had the word "know" as a spelling word, but many spelled it "no" because they didn't understand it had two meanings. I think if the students are exposed a lot to the Four Cueing Systems, they can better understand word recognition.
In response to Janet H.: Of course all students are at different levels, so because of this my teacher that I work for began the lower readers in specially made books with typical, common words to get used to. During the first half of the school year these students used these books, but after they came back from Christmas they got to start in the book where the higher level readers began on the first reading assignment. Not everyone can be expected to be reading the same level, so stopping to teach them these words that they are unfamiliar with, will improve their reading greatly. Some of these readers now blow me away with how well they can read.
I also love the MSV approach. I use it will my children all the time but don't really think of it as MSV. I guess it is the teacher in me that just does that naturally. I never realized the importance of sight words until my first child entered elememtary school. I was completely unaware that he was already supossed to read! I made sure that my daughter was more prepared!
Thank you for the kind words! I was clueless when my first child reached kindergarten. I was under the assumption that he would learn the basics in kindergarten. Little did I know is that most kids can read by the time they begin elementary school! I can say that I have learned through experience! Thanks!
I too am a confused as to how to teach semantics. I understand letters for words, words form phrases, phrases form sentences, sentences form paragraph that also form meaning....but teaching this...??????? Activities involving word parts can focus on helping children to see that words with common roots have similar meanings or that affixes change the meanings of words. I understand that activities involving whole words can help children to develop vocabulary, by, for example, focusing on how words are used in stories or by encouraging them to keep records of interesting and related words. Activities involving sentences and discourse help children to use context to determine word meaning and to understand idioms and allusions. Just wondering what activities specifically work the best.
Reading, like listening, speaking, and writing, is a facet of communication. Reading builds on the wealth of oral language skills that children begin developing long before they enter school. Oral and written language share many common features: the same vocabulary, the same grammar, and similar purposes. However, to construct meaning from printed language (reading), students must be able to recognize in print the language they use orally. This is known as word identification. Just as with anything, this can prove to be very difficult for students and it affects their ability to read and comprehend material which sets them behind. I have never really struggled with word identification, but I have noticed it in my son. He will skip over words as he is reading because he doesn’t know what they are and he doesn’t take the time to try and sound them out. I often times have him read out loud to me so I know that he is covering all of the words so that he can get the full meaning of the text. My daughter is completely the opposite. She excels at reading and has very little trouble with word identification. She is younger than her brother, but I think at times she gives her brother that little push to work just a little bit harder.
In response to Trisha: I think that using sight word cards for Kindergarten students is a great idea. Exposing them to these words every day helps the students with fluency. I am so happy that you worked with your children each day, some parents don't understand how important it is.
Chapter 6 is a nice short chapter that provides great details on helping students learn to identify words. The information presented on page 129 really stressed the importance of building a large bank of sight words in order for students to be able to comprehend texts and enjoy reading. I found the research on how the brain can process letters and words at different rates depending on how they are organized to be fascinating. I have never really stopped to think about how much easier it is to process words organized into grammatically correct sentences than it is to identify random lists of words. For me this stressed the importance of teaching in context rather than having students learn from lists of words. The chapter described many important components of word identification in an easy to understand manner. I learn best visually and the text presents information in a way that I can easily comprehend. I also like how the chapter provided many activities to help students develop word identification skills. My reading internship mentor teacher used many of these activities in the classroom and not only were they helpful for the students, but the students also enjoyed them. I really believe that teaching context clues is an important part of helping students work on understanding the meaning of words in a passage. I have worked mainly with the upper elementary grades and this technique has been very helpful for students when trying to understand the meaning of a word in a given passage. Response to Jaclyn C: I agree that building background knowledge is a very important part of helping students to construct understanding. Knowing each student and what their level of background knowledge is can be a great way to help the students achieve success. I also think context clues are an important strategy and have worked with my internship classes on this topic several times and it has been a very useful strategy to help them figure out the meaning of a word.
This chapter was very interesting, I have gotten those emails that have the beginning and end of every word correct and all the letters in the middle mixed up, but never understood how I could still read them. The books says our brain attacks the words in chunks, as we move from reading letters, to words, to sentences, the speed at which we process what we are reading increases dramatically. The cueing systems are all reasons why it is important for us to expose children to all sorts of texts, language, and experiences from a very young age. Even if we cannot afford to do things such as travel or be very involved in extra-curricular activities, we can still help children become better readers and have better a better understanding of language by speaking to them in ways that will enhance their vocabulary and a variety of books. We know children are little sponges for vocabulary by the way they pick up and imitate everything we say even if it is not something we want them to repeat. Have there been studies done that show how being well spoken and having large receptive and expressive vocabularies affect reading abilities? I think that would be an interesting topic for a URE project. The assessment section was also very helpful. Yesterday I assessed my students on their blending abilities. I thought that this was going to be the hardest assessment for them because it was so long. Most of them flew right through it! My student who struggles with paying attention even caught on when I could keep her focused. I think she would have done better had the assessment not been so long. This chapter is one that I will be coming back to often in writing my lesson plans and looking for activities.
It sounds like you children have some positive sibling rivalry going on . I think that it would be a great public service announcement to have commercials showing parents that there are so many simple ways to help their children learn language and become better readers, and that the language they use around their child(ren) makes a huge difference! Learning doesn’t just magically start when they enter school, it starts in the home.
Chapter 6 deals with Word Identification. I enjoyed reading this chapter because it was short and sweet and it got right to the point, and I also liked it because I found a lot of the information very beneficial. The first thing I highlighted in the chapter was the term automaticity. It addressed it on the first page, and then again two pages later. “Automaticity is not only the ability to recognize a large bank of words by sight and to quickly decode unfamiliar words; it also includes the ability to comprehend the words in their context and thus comprehend passages” (DeVries, 131). To be honest, I thought automaticity only dealt with recognizing a large bank of words by sight. In order for automaticity to function, both knowledge and skills are needed. I liked reading through the four cueing systems: 1. Syntactic system 2. Semantic system 3. Pragmatic system 4. Graphophonic system. A proficient reader is able to use all of the four cueing systems, whereas a struggling reader may only use one or more. As a future educator, I need to be able to recognize which students not only use all four, but also the students who only use one or more. I want to teach the younger elementary students so identifying how a student reads will be very crucial because if they are overlooked, they will only struggle throughout their education career. Making a positive impact on students right away will be crucial. I thought Figure 6.2 was helpful because it identified the main components of word identification. I thought that was a great way to break it down to see word knowledge and word analysis skills.
I think word walls are a great idea! I talked to one of my elementary school teachers and she told me she has word walls for all subjects. She has a main word wall with sight words, but she also has them for math vocabulary, writing vocabulary, reading vocabulary, etc. She keeps them up there for the duration of the topic and then changes it for the next topic. I think that would be a neat way to help students remember all the terms for that chapter. I think the four cueing systems are a huge thing to know and incorporate into the classroom!
In chapter 6 the most interesting portion that I read was on the first page. “The brain is capable of identifying only four or five random letters per second. As the passage goes on it talks about how students can recognize organized letters with increased speed and accuracy. When reading this chapter the portion of the components of word identification section really hit home due to the fact that this is exactly what my son struggled with in first and second grade. He could rattle through the Dolch word list but when it came to recognizing the same words when reading it was very difficult. We would choose a book a week that he would repeatedly read and this really increased his word recognition skills when reading. I have had my tutor-ees do the same. Most of the topics in this book are areas that my students need help in. I appreciate the skill specific activities that can be used to help build their confidence and skill level. I have made a checklist for my students that will help me better assess where my students are and how I can better plan for the individual needs.
In response to Tyler G: I agree with the visual aspect of reading. Last semester I did not see much of guided reading and activities that will build word identification. This semester my mentor teacher for science and social studies has guided reading after and I stay to see how she does her groups. They do the Daily 5 which each student selects what they are going to be doing while she has her daily groups. They can do word work, read to self, read to someone else, work on study island and then they have to identify what the activity will focus on: Comprehension, fluency, phonemic awareness, phonics. The word work activities change weekly and the students really like doing them. I love the idea that she uses in her guided reading groups and seeing these activities makes it easier for me to understand and remember.
Once again, chapter 6 was very informative. I especially enjoyed reading the “Components of Word Identification” section starting on page 131 because I felt I could apply it directly to my tutoring. Last week during one of my tutoring sessions, I played a syllable board game from the Florida Center for Reading Research with my students. This game was suggested for 4th graders, but I thought it would be appropriate for my 5th grade students. The game comes with word cards and a simple board. Students draw one card from the pile and read off the word. Then they are to clap out the syllables and another player in the game will read the back of the card to let them know if they were right. If students get the right number of syllables they move their game piece forward and if they don’t get the right number of syllables they stay where they are. Much to my surprise, all three of my 5th grade tutoring students struggled reading the word cards. They couldn’t read or pronounce half of the words. This of course affected their ability to clap out the syllables in the words. After reading chapter 6, I realize that my tutoring students struggle with word analysis skills. During the syllable board game, I tried to assist my students in reading the word cards by covering sections of the word, pointing out prefixes and suffixes, and giving other clues. They still struggled to decode the words. I received some great activity ideas (Toss the Cube and Building Blocks of Words) from the end of chapter 6 and I plan on teaching my students word analysis strategies.
In response to Tara… Those were interesting facts mentioned on the first page of chapter 6. It is amazing how the brain can identify letters more easily when they are chunked into words instead of random letters. My tutoring students are also struggling with word identification. Just as you mentioned about your son, my students did fairly well on the Rebecca Sitton word list, but they struggle reading whole passages smoothly and decoding unfamiliar words. I’m glad to hear that guided reading worked to improve your son’s reading abilities. My tutoring group will start doing guided reading this next week and I hope we can see improvements in their reading abilities as the school year comes to an end. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us!
I really liked the scenario at the beginning of the chapter because I can definitely relate it to my tutoring. One of my students hardly speaks any English so learning about these tips was really helpful. I liked the section that went into detail about the four cueing systems because they were all new to me and after reading about them they really made sense. I also found the assessment section to be very interesting. I think it's great to have multiple assessment strategies so not every one is exactly the same. I wasn't aware before reading this that there are so many areas that need to be assessed! Just like the previous chapters, my favorite part is the intervention sections that give strategies and activites to do with your students. I'm glad they gave information about guided reading since I'll soon be starting that with my tutoring students. I'm really going to be referring back to this chapter when i'm making my lesson plans because these activities are wonderful for my ELL student.
I found this chapter to have some good points and great activities. I think the thing that jumped out at me the most is in the intervention section where it says that "word identification skills should not be taught through mechanical isolated skill sheets. Instead, skills should be taught in context." (Gipe 1995;Moustafa & Maldonado-Colon, 1999; Pinnell & Fountas,1998; Rasinski & Padak 2003; Taberski, 2000) After reading this, I realize that I see an enormous amount of worksheets being done throughout all of the grades that I work in. I think that students who have worksheet after worksheet become bored with the whole idea of learning. The cueing systems were an interesting read as well. I have helped students pronounce words in various situations and I always ask them if they have an idea of what it means. Sometimes after hearing the word they recall it, and sometimes I tell them to reread the sentence again to find the meaning. I know in 4th grade reading the students are given alot of work in identifying what the context clues are in relation to the vocabulary for the guided reading stories.
We have a student at school that can read words in isolation, but cannot read the same words when they are in a sentence. I thought it would be a good idea to incorporate short phrases with the sight words but I don't think that has happened yet.
Chapter 6 is all about word recognition. Right under the scenario there is a statement that just brought life to the idea of reading. "The purpose of reading is to comprehend texts for a variety of reasons, not just to read the words correctly." It is true we want students to have a great sight word vocabulary, be able to decode words they don't know using different clues, read fluently, but most of all we want our students to be able to comprehend. All of the other steps are needed in order for this to happen. That is why word recognition is so crucial. I really enjoyed reading about the 4 cueing systems. I have been able to see all these practices put into place in the classroom. I have to agree that it is crucial to have a great sight word vocabulary. Working with my kindergarten group, they have complete desire to read therefore when I am picking the guided reading books, they are very simple with repetition words. They use the picture clues to help them distinguish what some of the words are. The other part of the chapter that I really liked was all of the activities, I think that the personal word wall was a great idea. Has anyone done any of the activities it listed in the back or have seen them done? What were the results?
I also agree that using several different assessment strategies periodically is crucial and you can get a better idea of where the lack is going. I also find joy in looking forward to the last part of the chapter when it goes through intervention and activities. I love this part to. Have you used any of the activities?
Finally, your love for the scenarios and the hope and ideas that it gives us, is very beneficial.
In response to Hannah B...Don't you love those Florida Center for Reading Research activities? I have not done the syllable board game you mentioned yet, but now I will have to try it with my 4th graders. It is wonderful that it helped you identify a need with your students. Thanks for the suggestion! Julie
Word identification is a vital component to being able to read. This chapter was a good, practical insight for us to find ways to address word identification problems. I really appreciated the activites that emphasize sight vocabulary. The section on small group activities for teaching identification skills was perfect for us as tutors. In my particular group of 4th graders, these students seem to be strong on word identification skills, but many of the activities provided here can still help as I work to take their vocabulary skills to the next level.
I seem to always find some of the information in the very beginning pages of each chapter the most interesting. For instance, in this chapter the introduction mentions that the brain can only identify approximately four or five random letters per second. Who thinks to research these things?! That is actually pretty pertinent information for an educator to know and if you put it to the test for yourself it's about right. People's brains and their capabilities amaze me...but that's an entirely different subject :) Anyway, the concept of a young reader having "tunnel vision" while they read is fairly apparent if you watch children that struggle with words. It takes them so much time just to decode a word and say it that by the time they are through a sentence they have no clue what that sentence actually said. This all makes sense in the realm of comprehension problems with poor readers. How can we ever expect our students to understand what they are reading if they have a hard enough time just simply performing the actual reading skill? It's amazing how vital reading is to every other academic skill children are required to master. I think it is really important for students to have a large repertoire of sight words, but at some point they are going to run into words that are not part of that group. That is when they will have to know other techniques to identify the words. Blending sounds, using context clues, and recognizing parts of words will be valuable skills for children to learn. I love using word walls and also having students unscramble sentences. These are both used a lot in the school where I am interning this semester. The students I'm working with are also continuously working with prefixes and suffixes which helps them to understand the way a word is being used in a sentence. All of these skills will ultimately help students learn to comprehend what they read. That is after all the goal we're searching for.
The first sentence of the introduction states that the purpose of reading is to comprehend texts for a variety of reasons, not just to read words correctly. I think that the sentence sums up reading as a whole. I see this in my tutoring. Two of my fifth graders can read through the words but they only understand half of what they read. My goal this semester is to increase their comprehension. I will definitely refer back to this chapter when I need ideas to help them. Guided reading is going to be a great tool for helping with comprehension. The students will get to read the story together and be able to discuss the aspects of the story. Also we will work on the vocabulary within the story before so they know the meaning behind the words being read. I really liked the idea of a Tic-Tac-Toe game Ms. Stoppel used to demonstrate guided reading. I think my fifth graders would have lots of fun with this. They love games. I have a word wall on my trifold. If there is a word that is unknown to one of my fifth graders during read aloud, guided reading, or independent reading, they will stop me and we will put it on the word wall, find the definition and find its meaning the story. The boys have really enjoyed this so far. I really like the idea of the personal word walls described in the book. I’m going to create one for each of my students I’m tutoring. It will be a great resource not only during tutoring but every time they read. Another activity I thought would be great is the toss the cube. My students love anything competitive so using that on my side this game would motivate them to use their vocabulary knowledge.
I agree students are given to many worksheets! When giving my students the Garfield reading inventory. I noticed that my fifth graders didn't mind reading but they always circled the mad Garfield. I think that's sad. Students have worksheets shoved in their face all the time. We need to create assessments that are more meaningful and the students enjoy doing.
I agree with you about the first sentence of the chapter. Comprehension often seems to be the part of reading that most elementary students struggle with the most. I think students that never get a hold of that skill are usually the adults that don't like to read. I know adults that have told me they don't read because they can't remember what they just read. That is a clear sign they never picked up that skill while in school. Like you, I also have tutoring students that need better comprehension skills. If I could just get my boys to sit still while they read I think that would be a big initial help :) I also like that you use the word wall on your trifold for your read alouds!
As I read this chapter, I remembered an experience from my childhood. I loved Charlie Brown comic books, and checked out many from our public library. When I think back on it, I realize that the language used by the characters was often way more mature than children of that age would have spoken, especially Linus. He had a way of speaking that was almost adult-like. One of the words that confused me at the time was “fanatic”. I had no context for the word, and whenever I encountered it in the book I read it as “fan-a-tic”, with the syllable in the wrong place. It wasn’t until years later that I understood what a fanatic was. Even though I had sounded out the word, I wasn’t pronouncing it correctly, and didn’t know the meaning.
Students who struggle to read, in terms of having small sight vocabularies, trouble deducing meaning from contextual clues, and inability to blend sounds to create a single word are all at risk of becoming frustrated with reading. Chapter 6 gives us tools to help in each of these areas. My two tutoring students, while showing fairly good comprehension skills, exhibit several of these difficulties. I’m looking forward to trying the Dolch Bingo activity, as well as using the technical terminology from the science lessons in a word-web.
I am still a bit apprehensive about my ability to recognize some of these problems in a struggling reader from the tests I have given. However, I feel a bit more confident after reading this chapter.
In response to Jaclyn C. I'm planning on using the word web for our science class. Right now we've started learning about electrical circuits, and I could tell immediately that one of my tutoring students was already lost. It's great to have an activity I can tie in with another lesson.
Reading this chapter for me could not have come at a better time! My kindergarten students that I am currently tutoring we are and will be doing a lot of the activities that was presented in the chapter. Sight words will be something that we will be focusing on. I like the Dolch List Bingo activity on pages 142, it is a good guide to use and to then personalize it to fit the needs of your students. This week we are also starting their own personalized dictionary/word wall that they will be able to take with them at the end of the tutoring sessions. My Reading mentor teacher last semester used many of these activities in her bug tub centers. The sentence scramble was always a hit with the first grade students. The appendix in this chapter is so useful.
Tyler, sounds like you have a great Reading Mentor teacher too. This chapter did indeed provide some really good word identification activities to enhance their skills. Teaching context clues is extremely important when teaching the students to understand the meaning of words in a passage. My mentor teacher did a lot of activities with context clues and it showed how much the students understood the passages better when doing the context clues activities she provided them.
Chapter 6 has probably been one of my favorite chapters thus far. "Sight words" is a term that I had never really heard used until I got to high school and was the kindergarten aide. I can honestly say I don't remember ever using sight words when I was younger but I can clearly see the benefit now that I've seen it used. Being familiar with the sight words makes it so much easier for a child to read. If he/she looks at a paragraph and sees that they recognize half the words it's going to be less intimidating. I enjoyed the sentence stating that the purpose is to comprehend and not just to pronounce the word. Yes, I think pronouncing the words correctly is important but if the child has no idea what the word means there's a good chance they won't understand what they read. My first graders and split on comprehension right now. Two are reading at quite high levels and two are lower but one from each group struggles to comprehend the passage. Yes, the pronounced the words correctly most of the time but they didn't understand what they read. I can't remember struggling to read but I know a lot of people do. Working with these students this semester has really opened my eyes to some of the problems that can occur.
Sara, I agree with what you said at the end of your post. I'm also not sure how well I'm doing at using the assessments to determine what to teach. Glad I'm in this class to help me become a better reading teacher!
The scenario at the beginning of the chapter was very inspiring and helpful. Obviously, it is important to know each student and his/her specific weakness, as Mr. Youngbear did with Alberto. Being equipped with this information can help an educator involve the student in specific activities that will lead to his/her success and growth. One way for educators to determine what skills of reading a student may need to work on is to use the four cueing systems (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and graphophonic) described within this chapter. After reading the semantic system, and learning again about homonyms, I thought about how often I still see adults make mistakes with using the wrong pronunciation of a word or wrong form of a word, such as to, too, and two. I think introducing students to this knowledge early will especially benefit them.
The section that really stuck out to me was the context clues passage on page 133. I am tutoring fifth grade students, and by this age, the students are practicing using context clues in many instances. To practice this skill, I am eager to use the Cloze passage activity listed in the back of the chapter. From this chapter, this idea was the one that hit closest to home with my tutoring students now, but I am very excited to refer back to this book in future experiences with younger students and try the activities listed in the back. One of my favorites for younger students was the unscrambling game. I think allowing the student to not only be able to listen to and see the word, but also letting the student discover the words in a hands-on manner will help them recognize and remember the word later on during reading.
When my son was in 1st and 2nd grade they had site words they brought home from school and every week they added to them. They were hooked together with one of those key rings that unhooked. We would go over them every night. By the end of the first semester, he didn’t need to look over them over more as he knew them all.
I think this should be something all beginning readers should do. What a great way to learn your site words, little by little, with a lot of repetition.
In response to Sara Childs, I thought the personal experience you shared at the beginning of your post was excellent. I think you made a great point, just because a student sounds out a word, according to its spelling, does not mean that he/she will pronounce it right. Because of phonograms and the multiple vowel sounds, students will wrongly pronounce words by mistake at some point.
I thought this chapter was full of useful information, especially for our tutoring purposes. I thought the Dolch Bingo activity at the end of the chapter looked like fun as well; I also really liked the Toss the Cube game also. I teach fifth grade students, so I was glad to see these provided activities. I feel sometimes as though my ideas may make them seem too young, and they won’t want to participate, so I am thankful for any and all suggestions!
Finally, I feel the same way about my assessment skills and skills to recognize students’ true weaknesses, this chapter was a great help. I was worried about making a mistake while giving the assessments during tutoring, but thus far, it has proven to have worked out well, so I am gaining confidence as the sessions go on! Good luck!
This chapter focuses on word identification – an important part of the reading process. The authors stressed the importance of sight words. Until reading this chapter and being in my internship classrooms I never realized how much emphasize was placed on sight words. One of my mentor teachers made sight word rings. Students could practice during free time, when they finished early, or to take home and practice with their parents. I thought this was a great idea! From the few weeks we’ve been tutoring I have realized my students can read an entire story word for word, and at a high level but most of my student are not able to tell me about what they just read. This chapter also opened my eyes to how complex the English language is. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for ELL students. I plan on referring back to this chapter when writing my lesson plans and searching for activities.
In response to Janel, e-mails like those you mentioned always puzzled me! It is amazing how our brain works. I agree that it’s going to be important to make our classroom literacy rich so students get lots of exposure to vocabulary and the language. I would also be interested in finding the answer to your question that you posed – very interesting!
This chapter was about word identification and sills necessary for reading comprehension. The reading showed how we, as tutors can help students by using patterns in words and also helping students recognize rime, onset, prefixes, suffixes, and root words. We also need to make sure our tutees are comfortable with their context clues so when they encounter an unknown word they can figure it out.
There were some really good ideas in this chapter that I am going to utilize in my tutoring session with my 1st graders. Each session, we do an activity off of their guided reading but not for reading for meaning. I am going to add that to our activity list.
Something I have noticed in the classrooms that I sub in is that the students who are advanced readers seem to make it harder for the other students to get better. When there is a read-aloud for a subject, and one student struggles on a word, instead of letting the student figure it out, a student will just tell them the word. I get so frustrated because I want that student to have the opportunity to use his skills and figure the word out on his / her own! I finally got to the point where I told the students to be quiet, and if someone needed help, I would help them if they asked for it; otherwise give them time to figure it out themselves. This is what is wrong in today’s classroom. Our struggling students are getting by because other students are doing the work for them!
While reading the differences between The Four Cueing Systems I had one question: Would the graphophonic system be the same as phonemic awareness given they both refer to relationships between letters and their sounds? While reading about Word Analysis Skills I thought of the activity I found on FCRR.org…During my tutoring session on Thursday I introduced the students to a multisyllabic words/Phonic activity for Grades 4-5. It gives students a long vowel and they must determine the spelling in the blanks with the long vowel sound. Example: (/e/, b__tw__n, between). Students struggled a bit at first but they seemed to enjoy the activity as they got used to it. All the activities at the end of the chapter will be great ideas and tools for the tutoring session. One that I recognized was Wordless books. In Children’s Literature we read through wordless picture books several times and it was difficult to write a story to go along with them. I will try this activity with my students during the tutoring session to help with vocabulary.
I understand your frustration about students who blurt out a word. Some students who need help with reading will look for that passageway to have an advanced student help them. I would make sure that you're giving the struggling reader some independent time to read so you don't have to worry about another student blurting out the word. Make sure you encourage students to read wherever they are! Instead of playing the Nintendo DS in the car, read a magazine or newspaper... even the car manual! Look for that print rich environment and your students will benefit greatly.
In response to Trisha W - Sight words are important. I student teach 4th grade and if it wasn't for those sight words some of my students who are below level would be even lower. There lower grade level teachers taught them those sight words.
Chapter 6 placed emphasis on word identification and the skills needed for students to understand what they are reading. Word recognition includes the recognition of prefixes, suffixes, root words etc. We have to teach children word recognition so they may have a better understanding of what they are reading and understanding what words mean helps their comprehension. I teach children in my internship course to take a close look at the words so they can get a feel of what they’re reading. If I am reading directions and I mistake a word with a different prefix, I can easily miss the important steps or miscomprehend the material. So I stress word recognition for reading comprehension to students! This chapter really gave me some good ideas that I am going to try during my Reading and Language Arts time. One thing I try not to do is carry my students through their reading time by telling them the words but I allow them to read their AR books and then I ask questions. I also ask vocabulary questions because I want to know they were paying attention to those words in the book. No questions regarding this chapter.
Janna C., Emerson’s quote is exactly how I feel an effective teacher should be like. We can give the students all the tools in the world, but if we don’t teach them how to use those tools, they will have a difficult time putting it all together.
Chapter 6 was about the importance of students being able to recognize words. As I gave my fourth graders the Rebecca Sitton word list, I was amazed at the number of words they knew. We were to give 100 words, well; I ended up giving them the 4th, 5th and 6th grade word lists. They didn’t have any trouble with any of the lists. Those words were easy for the boys, but the words in the chapter book we are reading are a little difficult. In one of my upcoming lessons, I’m putting together a Cloze passage for the students to complete. This will help them with those words that are unknown to them and are unable to decipher because they either don’t have a prefix or suffix to support the word. I found a lot of helpful activities in this chapter to help with tutoring especially on page 139 for guided reading. It has step by step instructions on how the lesson should flow.
Chapter 6 was about word identification. I am finding that with my tutoring group, the one thing that both of my students have told me is that they struggle with the words when reading. So my objective during my tutoring is to help them learn the words that they really struggle with as well as becoming the fluent readers that they can be. The chapter provided some great examples and activities that I can use to help them with word identification. I really found the assessment suggestions to be very helpful. I came away from the chapter with a greater sense of what I needed to do to help my students succeed.
In response to Trisha w.... I agree with you that sight words are very important. I think that students need a large bank of sight words in there vocabulary so that when they are reading they recognize them instantly. Flashcards are a great way to help students learn these words. When my daughter was in kindergarten she brought home different words each week that she was to work on. The ones that she struggled with I made cards for so that we could work extra on them.
My daughter is in kindergarten and is learning sight words through context. I was so impressed when she brought home her shared story to read and she was able to read her "red' words,as she called them, without even hesitating! I have to agree that this is a very effective way for students to learn sight words.
This chapter was interesting to me because as I relate it to my tutoring sessions, I am seeing that the problem I am seeing more frequently is not sight words, it is phonemic awareness and phonics. One of the strategies I see one student use is the blending of polysyllabic words discussed in the chapter. All of my students did pretty well on their sight word assessment also. I think the assessing blends section of this chapter will be something I will need to consider doing with one of my students in the coming weeks. I was also excited to see the section on guided reading in this chapter because that is something I am unsure of how to address, especially when you have 4 students all at different reading levels. And again I am loving the activities in this book!
As the title states “Word Identification” this chapter explains it all. This chapter explained about the word knowledge of students and see what they know and context analysis. The tools that were mention in the reading for assessing was very helpful. From what I remember when it discussed about suffixes and prefixes it was difficult to remember and when I substituted I taught this lesson with students and it seems now there are better tools to teach students. At the end of the chapter it gave great ideas for lesson plans. I didn’t have any questions and it related to my Reading internship with working with a student on sight words and assessing the information. I think that reading material was very helpful on how to assessing students. I thought that the score sheet was very helpful on 6.4 for showing how the student would improve. I think I would use this tool in my future classroom.
My students also feel that they struggle with words when reading. But when it came to the words to read from Rebecca Sitton they did very well. I'm researching on different strategies to help these students so they can overcome this.
My students did really well with the Rebecca Sitton Word lists too. One my students is in the school spelling bee and he brought me the list that they are studying from. There are some tough words on there. This weekend at Borders I purchased a word wall and I'm using the spelling bee words as part of their word wall.
This chapter was about word identification. The part about formal and informal assessments was very interesting as well. All students need to build a good amount of sight words. They can make their school experiences much easier. Building a student’s background knowledge is such an important factor in the classroom. They need to understand what they already know and how to integrate that into their learning. Using the MSV like we did in Reading and Language arts class has really helped my tutoring students. I think it helps me as a teacher type person to understand whether it looks and sounds right and whether it makes sense or not. I think sometimes in anything we are learning about, we need to ask ourselves this. In my science internship she always is telling the students to look back over the sentences they read and write and make sure they sound right. She told them that it may look right to their eyes but does it sound right and make sense? The cueing systems wer also real interesting to read about. I never knew about these and how they work in the classroom setting. This chapter was full of so much information that I can never say it enough that I am not letting this book go anywhere when I get done with it except in my teacher resource pile that I will take with me when I get a teaching job. I think it is such a great asset to me.
In response to Trisha W– I think a personal word wall would be a very good asset to all students. They can have their own word wall maybe in a journal or something and that way they can go back and refer to them whenever they need them. I love the Jan Brett books. We collect them. My children love them along with many other types of books. We just spent like almost $200.00 at the local book fair on books because we enjoy them so much and also because I wanted to build my library for my tutoring students.
Chapter 6 focuses on word identification. In order for a student to comprehend what they are reading, they must be able to recognize and analyze a word. It is vital that students develop a large amount of sight words to help with word identification. My reading mentor teacher had flashcards of the sight words for the students and she also had them posted around the room. This made it so much easier for the students to gather the needed sight words. It was interesting to read about the semantic system, as I had never heard of this before. I really liked the idea of each student having their own personal word wall. I think that is a great tool for students that really invite them into learning new words. It is important to remember that English as a Second Language learners may not have the same background experiences of the other students when learning sight words. Teachers absolutely need to be aware of the students’ background knowledge when presenting them with new reading material and words. An interesting fact that I pulled from this chapter was that 10 words make up 25% of what we read and write! That is amazing! I really didn’t have any questions about this chapter. Did anyone have any other games or activities that can help with word identification?
In response to April- I really liked that you pointed out how wonderful an MSV chart can be for word identification. I had never heard of an MSV chart until Reading and Language Arts Methods and I think they are great tools for students in learning if something looks right, sounds right, and makes sense. I completely agree that this book has a vast amount of useful information that will be an invaluable source for me when I enter my own classroom.
Ch6. Goes through the importance of using sight words and developing the sight words. The student I am tutoring is great with the sight words however sometimes he gets reading to fast or just focusing on the word and not putting the meanings of all the words together. After sight words have been learned it is important to work on comprehension and make sure the student is understanding what they read. The chapter gave examples of how to use picture books in lessons. I would like to find a picture book and have my student write a story to go along with the pictures, and then read in to his parents. It would really help him think about what is going on in the story.
To Kelsey I agree the more sight words a child can build the better. I think that it is helpful for a student to have a sight words book and as the teacher goes over a new word they can add it for the younger grades the teacher can have the word printed on a note card for the child to paste into a book and for the older students who have developed readable hand writing the can write the word into their book. For ELL students you could add a picture with the word such as boy
Chapter six is about word identification. This chapter covers site words, reviews cueing systems (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and graphophonic), site words, etc. It also explains different types of assessments a teacher can use. I really liked the explanations in all of the different sections. As I read I realize how much students are learning at such a young age and all through their school years! The descriptions of each type of formal and informal assessment were very helpful and I’m sure I will use them my future classroom. I also liked the different activities at the end of the chapter. They will all be very helpful and I think they would be a lot of fun for students to play. Working in a first grade classroom last semester opened my eyes to how much students learn! I had the opportunity to help assess site words as well as work with students on phonograms and individual letter sounds in centers. Through this experience I found that the checklist on page 134 would be very helpful when working with students.
In response to Lauren…That is a great idea to have the students create a story using a picture book! I definitely agree too that it is really important to make sure the students understand and know what the passage/words they just read mean instead of just naming words! I’ve worked with students that can read quickly and pretty well but cannot remember what they read! This skill is very important to learn at the beginning because if they don’t it will be really hard later on in life to make the student stop and check comprehension of what they read!
I thought chapter 6 was a great chapter and it was full of ideas for word identification activities to use in your classroom. I really liked how it mapped everything out for you and gave you great examples of how to use these new activities. I also really liked how it reviewed the parts of the cueing system. Those are explanations that I wrote down and will make sure I'm covering those ideas in the classroom. It's very important that our children learn these concepts at a young age because if they don't it's only going to make reading harder for them, and they won't learn to enjoy reading at all. It's very important we remember these concepts and activities and use them in our classroom.
"The purpose of reading is to comprehend texts for a variety of reasons, not just to read words correctly" (DeVries, 129). This sentence basically explains what reading is all about. Unfortunately, reading is not always an easy task. There is much more to reading than knowing the sounds letters make or knowing how to read a word. You must be able to comprehend a word in order to understand the meaning of text. Chapter six discusses word identification. In order for students to understand text, they must be able to automatically recognize a word and be able to analyze it.
ReplyDeleteThe most confusing part of this chapter for me was the semantic system. I have no idea how to teach that to students. I understand it, but I don't know how to teach it.
Reading this chapter made me realize how complex the English language is and how difficult it must be for ELL students. They are expected to learn in a language that is claimed to be the most difficult to learn. There are so many words that sound the same and have different spellings or words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations. Students who struggle with reading probably feel the same way.
Word identification is something that I know that I struggled with when I was young. I could read a word but that didn't mean I understood it. I could read an entire story to my teacher and not be able to tell her anything that I had just read. But instead of helping me, she told me I needed to pay more attention. I was paying attention, I just didn't get it. My biggest problem as a young reader was comprehension. It was my 3rd grade teacher who caught on to me. She knew I could read because I would read aloud in class, but I couldn't pass an A.R. test to save my life. She taught me context clues and practiced sight words and high frequency words with me. I could only do my homework because I would ask my parents or my siblings to read the directions to me, until this teacher stepped in.
Chapter 6 is about word identification. It is important for students to develop a large bank of sight words. I never understood the importance of this until my son was in kindergarten. I learned to make flashcards of my son’s weekly sight words in kindergarten. We spent time each day to review each word. I kept these cards for my younger daughter and they have made her kindergarten year much easier! This just shows how we learn from our past experiences! I found the section in Chapter 6 about the Components of Word Identification on page 131. I also appreciate the detailed information about informal and formal assessments.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part of Chapter 6 is the Picture Book activity on page 141 using Jan Brett books. Her books give so many detailed illustrations that they provide excellent clues to the students. The book also gives us a detailed list of Jan Brett’s books. I also love the idea of personal word walls. I have always been a big fan of a classroom word wall but I think that an individual word wall is an excellent idea for all grade levels.
Chapter six focused on teaching and assessing students’ ability in word identification. There are many different factors that will affect a students’ ability to use identification strategies to identify words in different books that they read. English Language Learners may not have the cultural experiences that some of the other students have had which will help them to identify words in a particular context. After reading this chapter I feel that the importance of building students background knowledge is vital if we want them to be able to use this knowledge to construct a new understanding when reading different material.
ReplyDeleteTeaching students to use their MSV knowledge can be very helpful in word identification. During my internship for Reading and Language arts the reading specialist at the school would ask the three questions; “Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it make sense?” when students were reading passages for assessment. She would cue students to think about the context of the story to try to identify the words in the text. This can be a very useful tool when teaching students to use strategies to read new words.
In the second grade classroom I was in sight words were emphasized daily. I thought that page 132 in the text had a really great method for teaching sight words using an authentic text. Students should read the piece as a whole with the teacher. Students should be able to see the words as the teacher points to each word as the book is being read. As a group you can read it again allowing students to read along or chime in when they recognize words. After reading the text multiple times the teacher can cut out sentences and then words for the students to put back together. Students will be able to see the words in multiple settings, and they will have to think about putting the words together to make sense so they will be exposed to the words in many authentic situations. I would use this technique to work on sight words, especially when I can find a story that includes words that many students are struggling with. The checklists are also very helpful as a formative assessment because teachers can monitor student growth very easily at multiple points throughout the school year to see how they are progressing.
All of the activities at the end of the chapter are helpful, but I feel that creating word webs for technical words is extremely important and can be very helpful prior to learning about a new topic in science, social studies, or another content area that contains technical terms that may not be known to the students. Many of my English Language Learners benefit from creating a visual concept map because they are able to look at and sort the information easily.
Brandy,
ReplyDeleteI am always amazed at the complexity of the English language when I read about the different exceptions, rules, blends, phonograms, etc. I cannot imagine how an English Language Learner must feel when they first enter a classroom in the United States. Many of them have not had many of the cultural experiences that are needed to bring in background knowledge to subject areas, and the language is completely new and complex. I think it is very important that we learn how to best help these students and to build a great variety of resources that we will be able to utilize when trying to instruct them.
It is great that you had a teacher who stepped in to help you. Stories like that show how important and influential teachers truly are to their students.
Trisha,
ReplyDeleteSight words are very important for students. Your children are very lucky to have a mom who recognizes the importance in learning these words, and then who took action to help them learn them. I enjoy Jan Brett's books. My daughter is 3 and she loves to "read." I will read a book and we will look at all the context clues and then she is able to "read" them again and I know the detailed illustrations help her recreate the story in her mind.
I also think personalized word walls are a great idea. We could even have students create "word wall journals" where they are able to write a word, use it in a sentence, and draw a picture to relate to it.
“A teacher is one who brings us tools and enables us to use them.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
ReplyDeleteI liked this quote because it’s exactly what a teacher does. We give the students tools and then show them how to use them. I didn’t realize how important word recognition was or how teachers can help their students with this. I liked reading about the four cueing systems (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and graphophonic). Being able to read about different types of cueing systems makes me think back to my days in elementary school and seeing if my teachers used any of these with me when I was learning to read. I was one of the lucky people who had an easy time learning how to read, but one of my best friends had a lot of trouble reading. Reading this chapter on word identification makes me realize that that’s what one of the problems that my friend had with reading. My friend had good Paraprofessionals that helped her learn how to read and then she had bad Paraprofessionals that made her hate reading. Teachers should be aware if any of their students have problems with word recognition and then to help those students learn how to recognize words.
In response to Trisha W:
ReplyDeleteI like how you decided to help your son and daughter learn their words in Kindergarten. All of the work shouldn't be put on the teacher. Some of it should be on the parents too. You probably made the teachers life a little more easier when you decided to help your children learn their words.
This chapter dealt with word identification. Many students when reading especially picture books will put in their own words in order to make sense of the material. In this chapter I learned that there are several things students use to figure out the words. Receptive knowledge is the words the students are comfortable with when listening. Expressive vocabulary is what students use when they speak or write. Sight words are words that do not conform to the normal rules. Sight vocabulary is words that students recognize in half a second or less. Students may use context clues which mean that they use surrounding information to figure out the word. They can use visual analysis to break words into smaller chunks. Blending polysyllabic words is the ability to blend the smaller parts of words together to make whole words. Structural analysis is using prefixes and suffixes and knowing how that affects the words. There were two bits of information that really struck me and it was the bit about the 10 words that made up 25% of what we read and write. I was really surprised by that. I also enjoyed the information about sight words being taught in context. I remember my daughters bringing home words on a ring for memorization when she was in 1st and 2nd grade. Evidently the best way to teach them is through reading. The one question I have is how you keep track of that. If you see a group of your students struggling with a couple of sight words, do you specifically look for books with those words, and if you do is there a good way to do it rather than sifting through books in the library? There is so much to teaching children to read I feel a bit overwhelmed with tying it all together sometimes.
ReplyDeleteJaclyn, Word webs are a great tool. They help students create connections that they might not yet have.
ReplyDeleteThis chapter was very short and sweet but came through with its good points. It was packed with great information on word identification. I think a personal word wall could easily be used to help students at any time they need help. If students have access to a dictionary of their own to add to, that is blank to begin with, they can add new words to it throughout the school year. A ring of note cards with each letter of the alphabet would be handy as well. Unscrambling words is something that I have seen work very well. Every once in a while, my teacher has the students spell out their spelling words by unscrambling. The Four Cueing Systems is something that I was able to better understand, and understand why and how it is important when teaching. I have seen students clueless when it comes to words with more than one meaning, like run is used in the book. The students in the class I work in recently had the word "know" as a spelling word, but many spelled it "no" because they didn't understand it had two meanings. I think if the students are exposed a lot to the Four Cueing Systems, they can better understand word recognition.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Janet H.:
ReplyDeleteOf course all students are at different levels, so because of this my teacher that I work for began the lower readers in specially made books with typical, common words to get used to. During the first half of the school year these students used these books, but after they came back from Christmas they got to start in the book where the higher level readers began on the first reading assignment. Not everyone can be expected to be reading the same level, so stopping to teach them these words that they are unfamiliar with, will improve their reading greatly. Some of these readers now blow me away with how well they can read.
In response to Jaclyn:
ReplyDeleteI also love the MSV approach. I use it will my children all the time but don't really think of it as MSV. I guess it is the teacher in me that just does that naturally. I never realized the importance of sight words until my first child entered elememtary school. I was completely unaware that he was already supossed to read! I made sure that my daughter was more prepared!
In response to Janna:
ReplyDeleteThank you for the kind words! I was clueless when my first child reached kindergarten. I was under the assumption that he would learn the basics in kindergarten. Little did I know is that most kids can read by the time they begin elementary school! I can say that I have learned through experience! Thanks!
I too am a confused as to how to teach semantics. I understand letters for words, words form phrases, phrases form sentences, sentences form paragraph that also form meaning....but teaching this...??????? Activities involving word parts can focus on helping children to see that words with common roots have similar meanings or that affixes change the meanings of words. I understand that activities involving whole words can help children to develop vocabulary, by, for example, focusing on how words are used in stories or by encouraging them to keep records of interesting and related words. Activities involving sentences and discourse help children to use context to determine word meaning and to understand idioms and allusions. Just wondering what activities specifically work the best.
ReplyDeleteReading, like listening, speaking, and writing, is a facet of communication. Reading builds on the wealth of oral language skills that children begin developing long before they enter school. Oral and written language share many common features: the same vocabulary, the same grammar, and similar purposes. However, to construct meaning from printed language (reading), students must be able to recognize in print the language they use orally. This is known as word identification. Just as with anything, this can prove to be very difficult for students and it affects their ability to read and comprehend material which sets them behind. I have never really struggled with word identification, but I have noticed it in my son. He will skip over words as he is reading because he doesn’t know what they are and he doesn’t take the time to try and sound them out. I often times have him read out loud to me so I know that he is covering all of the words so that he can get the full meaning of the text. My daughter is completely the opposite. She excels at reading and has very little trouble with word identification. She is younger than her brother, but I think at times she gives her brother that little push to work just a little bit harder.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Trisha:
ReplyDeleteI think that using sight word cards for Kindergarten students is a great idea. Exposing them to these words every day helps the students with fluency. I am so happy that you worked with your children each day, some parents don't understand how important it is.
Chapter 6 is a nice short chapter that provides great details on helping students learn to identify words. The information presented on page 129 really stressed the importance of building a large bank of sight words in order for students to be able to comprehend texts and enjoy reading. I found the research on how the brain can process letters and words at different rates depending on how they are organized to be fascinating. I have never really stopped to think about how much easier it is to process words organized into grammatically correct sentences than it is to identify random lists of words. For me this stressed the importance of teaching in context rather than having students learn from lists of words.
ReplyDeleteThe chapter described many important components of word identification in an easy to understand manner. I learn best visually and the text presents information in a way that I can easily comprehend. I also like how the chapter provided many activities to help students develop word identification skills. My reading internship mentor teacher used many of these activities in the classroom and not only were they helpful for the students, but the students also enjoyed them. I really believe that teaching context clues is an important part of helping students work on understanding the meaning of words in a passage. I have worked mainly with the upper elementary grades and this technique has been very helpful for students when trying to understand the meaning of a word in a given passage.
Response to Jaclyn C:
I agree that building background knowledge is a very important part of helping students to construct understanding. Knowing each student and what their level of background knowledge is can be a great way to help the students achieve success. I also think context clues are an important strategy and have worked with my internship classes on this topic several times and it has been a very useful strategy to help them figure out the meaning of a word.
This chapter was very interesting, I have gotten those emails that have the beginning and end of every word correct and all the letters in the middle mixed up, but never understood how I could still read them. The books says our brain attacks the words in chunks, as we move from reading letters, to words, to sentences, the speed at which we process what we are reading increases dramatically.
ReplyDeleteThe cueing systems are all reasons why it is important for us to expose children to all sorts of texts, language, and experiences from a very young age. Even if we cannot afford to do things such as travel or be very involved in extra-curricular activities, we can still help children become better readers and have better a better understanding of language by speaking to them in ways that will enhance their vocabulary and a variety of books. We know children are little sponges for vocabulary by the way they pick up and imitate everything we say even if it is not something we want them to repeat. Have there been studies done that show how being well spoken and having large receptive and expressive vocabularies affect reading abilities? I think that would be an interesting topic for a URE project.
The assessment section was also very helpful. Yesterday I assessed my students on their blending abilities. I thought that this was going to be the hardest assessment for them because it was so long. Most of them flew right through it! My student who struggles with paying attention even caught on when I could keep her focused. I think she would have done better had the assessment not been so long.
This chapter is one that I will be coming back to often in writing my lesson plans and looking for activities.
In Response to Ashley R.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you children have some positive sibling rivalry going on . I think that it would be a great public service announcement to have commercials showing parents that there are so many simple ways to help their children learn language and become better readers, and that the language they use around their child(ren) makes a huge difference! Learning doesn’t just magically start when they enter school, it starts in the home.
Chapter 6 deals with Word Identification. I enjoyed reading this chapter because it was short and sweet and it got right to the point, and I also liked it because I found a lot of the information very beneficial. The first thing I highlighted in the chapter was the term automaticity. It addressed it on the first page, and then again two pages later. “Automaticity is not only the ability to recognize a large bank of words by sight and to quickly decode unfamiliar words; it also includes the ability to comprehend the words in their context and thus comprehend passages” (DeVries, 131). To be honest, I thought automaticity only dealt with recognizing a large bank of words by sight. In order for automaticity to function, both knowledge and skills are needed. I liked reading through the four cueing systems: 1. Syntactic system 2. Semantic system 3. Pragmatic system 4. Graphophonic system. A proficient reader is able to use all of the four cueing systems, whereas a struggling reader may only use one or more. As a future educator, I need to be able to recognize which students not only use all four, but also the students who only use one or more. I want to teach the younger elementary students so identifying how a student reads will be very crucial because if they are overlooked, they will only struggle throughout their education career. Making a positive impact on students right away will be crucial. I thought Figure 6.2 was helpful because it identified the main components of word identification. I thought that was a great way to break it down to see word knowledge and word analysis skills.
ReplyDeleteIn response to loriamaro:
ReplyDeleteI think word walls are a great idea! I talked to one of my elementary school teachers and she told me she has word walls for all subjects. She has a main word wall with sight words, but she also has them for math vocabulary, writing vocabulary, reading vocabulary, etc. She keeps them up there for the duration of the topic and then changes it for the next topic. I think that would be a neat way to help students remember all the terms for that chapter. I think the four cueing systems are a huge thing to know and incorporate into the classroom!
In chapter 6 the most interesting portion that I read was on the first page. “The brain is capable of identifying only four or five random letters per second. As the passage goes on it talks about how students can recognize organized letters with increased speed and accuracy. When reading this chapter the portion of the components of word identification section really hit home due to the fact that this is exactly what my son struggled with in first and second grade. He could rattle through the Dolch word list but when it came to recognizing the same words when reading it was very difficult. We would choose a book a week that he would repeatedly read and this really increased his word recognition skills when reading. I have had my tutor-ees do the same. Most of the topics in this book are areas that my students need help in. I appreciate the skill specific activities that can be used to help build their confidence and skill level. I have made a checklist for my students that will help me better assess where my students are and how I can better plan for the individual needs.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Tyler G:
ReplyDeleteI agree with the visual aspect of reading. Last semester I did not see much of guided reading and activities that will build word identification. This semester my mentor teacher for science and social studies has guided reading after and I stay to see how she does her groups. They do the Daily 5 which each student selects what they are going to be doing while she has her daily groups. They can do word work, read to self, read to someone else, work on study island and then they have to identify what the activity will focus on: Comprehension, fluency, phonemic awareness, phonics. The word work activities change weekly and the students really like doing them. I love the idea that she uses in her guided reading groups and seeing these activities makes it easier for me to understand and remember.
Once again, chapter 6 was very informative. I especially enjoyed reading the “Components of Word Identification” section starting on page 131 because I felt I could apply it directly to my tutoring. Last week during one of my tutoring sessions, I played a syllable board game from the Florida Center for Reading Research with my students. This game was suggested for 4th graders, but I thought it would be appropriate for my 5th grade students. The game comes with word cards and a simple board. Students draw one card from the pile and read off the word. Then they are to clap out the syllables and another player in the game will read the back of the card to let them know if they were right. If students get the right number of syllables they move their game piece forward and if they don’t get the right number of syllables they stay where they are. Much to my surprise, all three of my 5th grade tutoring students struggled reading the word cards. They couldn’t read or pronounce half of the words. This of course affected their ability to clap out the syllables in the words. After reading chapter 6, I realize that my tutoring students struggle with word analysis skills. During the syllable board game, I tried to assist my students in reading the word cards by covering sections of the word, pointing out prefixes and suffixes, and giving other clues. They still struggled to decode the words. I received some great activity ideas (Toss the Cube and Building Blocks of Words) from the end of chapter 6 and I plan on teaching my students word analysis strategies.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Tara…
ReplyDeleteThose were interesting facts mentioned on the first page of chapter 6. It is amazing how the brain can identify letters more easily when they are chunked into words instead of random letters. My tutoring students are also struggling with word identification. Just as you mentioned about your son, my students did fairly well on the Rebecca Sitton word list, but they struggle reading whole passages smoothly and decoding unfamiliar words. I’m glad to hear that guided reading worked to improve your son’s reading abilities. My tutoring group will start doing guided reading this next week and I hope we can see improvements in their reading abilities as the school year comes to an end. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us!
I really liked the scenario at the beginning of the chapter because I can definitely relate it to my tutoring. One of my students hardly speaks any English so learning about these tips was really helpful. I liked the section that went into detail about the four cueing systems because they were all new to me and after reading about them they really made sense. I also found the assessment section to be very interesting. I think it's great to have multiple assessment strategies so not every one is exactly the same. I wasn't aware before reading this that there are so many areas that need to be assessed! Just like the previous chapters, my favorite part is the intervention sections that give strategies and activites to do with your students. I'm glad they gave information about guided reading since I'll soon be starting that with my tutoring students. I'm really going to be referring back to this chapter when i'm making my lesson plans because these activities are wonderful for my ELL student.
ReplyDeleteI found this chapter to have some good points and great activities. I think the thing that jumped out at me the most is in the intervention section where it says that "word identification skills should not be taught through mechanical isolated skill sheets. Instead, skills should be taught in context." (Gipe 1995;Moustafa & Maldonado-Colon, 1999; Pinnell & Fountas,1998; Rasinski & Padak 2003; Taberski, 2000) After reading this, I realize that I see an enormous amount of worksheets being done throughout all of the grades that I work in. I think that students who have worksheet after worksheet become bored with the whole idea of learning.
ReplyDeleteThe cueing systems were an interesting read as well. I have helped students pronounce words in various situations and I always ask them if they have an idea of what it means. Sometimes after hearing the word they recall it, and sometimes I tell them to reread the sentence again to find the meaning. I know in 4th grade reading the students are given alot of work in identifying what the context clues are in relation to the vocabulary for the guided reading stories.
In response to Tara:
ReplyDeleteWe have a student at school that can read words in isolation, but cannot read the same words when they are in a sentence. I thought it would be a good idea to incorporate short phrases with the sight words but I don't think that has happened yet.
Chapter 6 is all about word recognition. Right under the scenario there is a statement that just brought life to the idea of reading. "The purpose of reading is to comprehend texts for a variety of reasons, not just to read the words correctly." It is true we want students to have a great sight word vocabulary, be able to decode words they don't know using different clues, read fluently, but most of all we want our students to be able to comprehend. All of the other steps are needed in order for this to happen. That is why word recognition is so crucial. I really enjoyed reading about the 4 cueing systems. I have been able to see all these practices put into place in the classroom. I have to agree that it is crucial to have a great sight word vocabulary. Working with my kindergarten group, they have complete desire to read therefore when I am picking the guided reading books, they are very simple with repetition words. They use the picture clues to help them distinguish what some of the words are.
ReplyDeleteThe other part of the chapter that I really liked was all of the activities, I think that the personal word wall was a great idea.
Has anyone done any of the activities it listed in the back or have seen them done? What were the results?
Once, again this chapter is full of information.
In response to Holly D,
ReplyDeleteI also agree that using several different assessment strategies periodically is crucial and you can get a better idea of where the lack is going. I also find joy in looking forward to the last part of the chapter when it goes through intervention and activities. I love this part to. Have you used any of the activities?
Finally, your love for the scenarios and the hope and ideas that it gives us, is very beneficial.
In response to Hannah B...Don't you love those Florida Center for Reading Research activities? I have not done the syllable board game you mentioned yet, but now I will have to try it with my 4th graders. It is wonderful that it helped you identify a need with your students. Thanks for the suggestion! Julie
ReplyDeleteWord identification is a vital component to being able to read. This chapter was a good, practical insight for us to find ways to address word identification problems. I really appreciated the activites that emphasize sight vocabulary. The section on small group activities for teaching identification skills was perfect for us as tutors. In my particular group of 4th graders, these students seem to be strong on word identification skills, but many of the activities provided here can still help as I work to take their vocabulary skills to the next level.
ReplyDeleteI seem to always find some of the information in the very beginning pages of each chapter the most interesting. For instance, in this chapter the introduction mentions that the brain can only identify approximately four or five random letters per second. Who thinks to research these things?! That is actually pretty pertinent information for an educator to know and if you put it to the test for yourself it's about right. People's brains and their capabilities amaze me...but that's an entirely different subject :) Anyway, the concept of a young reader having "tunnel vision" while they read is fairly apparent if you watch children that struggle with words. It takes them so much time just to decode a word and say it that by the time they are through a sentence they have no clue what that sentence actually said. This all makes sense in the realm of comprehension problems with poor readers. How can we ever expect our students to understand what they are reading if they have a hard enough time just simply performing the actual reading skill? It's amazing how vital reading is to every other academic skill children are required to master. I think it is really important for students to have a large repertoire of sight words, but at some point they are going to run into words that are not part of that group. That is when they will have to know other techniques to identify the words. Blending sounds, using context clues, and recognizing parts of words will be valuable skills for children to learn. I love using word walls and also having students unscramble sentences. These are both used a lot in the school where I am interning this semester. The students I'm working with are also continuously working with prefixes and suffixes which helps them to understand the way a word is being used in a sentence. All of these skills will ultimately help students learn to comprehend what they read. That is after all the goal we're searching for.
ReplyDeleteMelinda S.
ReplyDeleteThe first sentence of the introduction states that the purpose of reading is to comprehend texts for a variety of reasons, not just to read words correctly. I think that the sentence sums up reading as a whole. I see this in my tutoring. Two of my fifth graders can read through the words but they only understand half of what they read. My goal this semester is to increase their comprehension. I will definitely refer back to this chapter when I need ideas to help them. Guided reading is going to be a great tool for helping with comprehension. The students will get to read the story together and be able to discuss the aspects of the story. Also we will work on the vocabulary within the story before so they know the meaning behind the words being read. I really liked the idea of a Tic-Tac-Toe game Ms. Stoppel used to demonstrate guided reading. I think my fifth graders would have lots of fun with this. They love games. I have a word wall on my trifold. If there is a word that is unknown to one of my fifth graders during read aloud, guided reading, or independent reading, they will stop me and we will put it on the word wall, find the definition and find its meaning the story. The boys have really enjoyed this so far. I really like the idea of the personal word walls described in the book. I’m going to create one for each of my students I’m tutoring. It will be a great resource not only during tutoring but every time they read. Another activity I thought would be great is the toss the cube. My students love anything competitive so using that on my side this game would motivate them to use their vocabulary knowledge.
In response to Royce K,
ReplyDeleteI agree students are given to many worksheets! When giving my students the Garfield reading inventory. I noticed that my fifth graders didn't mind reading but they always circled the mad Garfield. I think that's sad. Students have worksheets shoved in their face all the time. We need to create assessments that are more meaningful and the students enjoy doing.
Melinda,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about the first sentence of the chapter. Comprehension often seems to be the part of reading that most elementary students struggle with the most. I think students that never get a hold of that skill are usually the adults that don't like to read. I know adults that have told me they don't read because they can't remember what they just read. That is a clear sign they never picked up that skill while in school. Like you, I also have tutoring students that need better comprehension skills. If I could just get my boys to sit still while they read I think that would be a big initial help :) I also like that you use the word wall on your trifold for your read alouds!
As I read this chapter, I remembered an experience from my childhood. I loved Charlie Brown comic books, and checked out many from our public library. When I think back on it, I realize that the language used by the characters was often way more mature than children of that age would have spoken, especially Linus. He had a way of speaking that was almost adult-like. One of the words that confused me at the time was “fanatic”. I had no context for the word, and whenever I encountered it in the book I read it as “fan-a-tic”, with the syllable in the wrong place. It wasn’t until years later that I understood what a fanatic was. Even though I had sounded out the word, I wasn’t pronouncing it correctly, and didn’t know the meaning.
ReplyDeleteStudents who struggle to read, in terms of having small sight vocabularies, trouble deducing meaning from contextual clues, and inability to blend sounds to create a single word are all at risk of becoming frustrated with reading. Chapter 6 gives us tools to help in each of these areas. My two tutoring students, while showing fairly good comprehension skills, exhibit several of these difficulties. I’m looking forward to trying the Dolch Bingo activity, as well as using the technical terminology from the science lessons in a word-web.
I am still a bit apprehensive about my ability to recognize some of these problems in a struggling reader from the tests I have given. However, I feel a bit more confident after reading this chapter.
In response to Jaclyn C.
ReplyDeleteI'm planning on using the word web for our science class. Right now we've started learning about electrical circuits, and I could tell immediately that one of my tutoring students was already lost. It's great to have an activity I can tie in with another lesson.
Reading this chapter for me could not have come at a better time! My kindergarten students that I am currently tutoring we are and will be doing a lot of the activities that was presented in the chapter. Sight words will be something that we will be focusing on. I like the Dolch List Bingo activity on pages 142, it is a good guide to use and to then personalize it to fit the needs of your students. This week we are also starting their own personalized dictionary/word wall that they will be able to take with them at the end of the tutoring sessions. My Reading mentor teacher last semester used many of these activities in her bug tub centers. The sentence scramble was always a hit with the first grade students. The appendix in this chapter is so useful.
ReplyDeleteTyler, sounds like you have a great Reading Mentor teacher too. This chapter did indeed provide some really good word identification activities to enhance their skills. Teaching context clues is extremely important when teaching the students to understand the meaning of words in a passage. My mentor teacher did a lot of activities with context clues and it showed how much the students understood the passages better when doing the context clues activities she provided them.
Chapter 6 has probably been one of my favorite chapters thus far. "Sight words" is a term that I had never really heard used until I got to high school and was the kindergarten aide. I can honestly say I don't remember ever using sight words when I was younger but I can clearly see the benefit now that I've seen it used. Being familiar with the sight words makes it so much easier for a child to read. If he/she looks at a paragraph and sees that they recognize half the words it's going to be less intimidating.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the sentence stating that the purpose is to comprehend and not just to pronounce the word. Yes, I think pronouncing the words correctly is important but if the child has no idea what the word means there's a good chance they won't understand what they read. My first graders and split on comprehension right now. Two are reading at quite high levels and two are lower but one from each group struggles to comprehend the passage. Yes, the pronounced the words correctly most of the time but they didn't understand what they read.
I can't remember struggling to read but I know a lot of people do. Working with these students this semester has really opened my eyes to some of the problems that can occur.
Sara,
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said at the end of your post. I'm also not sure how well I'm doing at using the assessments to determine what to teach. Glad I'm in this class to help me become a better reading teacher!
The scenario at the beginning of the chapter was very inspiring and helpful. Obviously, it is important to know each student and his/her specific weakness, as Mr. Youngbear did with Alberto. Being equipped with this information can help an educator involve the student in specific activities that will lead to his/her success and growth. One way for educators to determine what skills of reading a student may need to work on is to use the four cueing systems (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and graphophonic) described within this chapter. After reading the semantic system, and learning again about homonyms, I thought about how often I still see adults make mistakes with using the wrong pronunciation of a word or wrong form of a word, such as to, too, and two. I think introducing students to this knowledge early will especially benefit them.
ReplyDeleteThe section that really stuck out to me was the context clues passage on page 133. I am tutoring fifth grade students, and by this age, the students are practicing using context clues in many instances. To practice this skill, I am eager to use the Cloze passage activity listed in the back of the chapter. From this chapter, this idea was the one that hit closest to home with my tutoring students now, but I am very excited to refer back to this book in future experiences with younger students and try the activities listed in the back. One of my favorites for younger students was the unscrambling game. I think allowing the student to not only be able to listen to and see the word, but also letting the student discover the words in a hands-on manner will help them recognize and remember the word later on during reading.
In response to Trisha W….
ReplyDeleteWhen my son was in 1st and 2nd grade they had site words they brought home from school and every week they added to them. They were hooked together with one of those key rings that unhooked. We would go over them every night. By the end of the first semester, he didn’t need to look over them over more as he knew them all.
I think this should be something all beginning readers should do. What a great way to learn your site words, little by little, with a lot of repetition.
In response to Sara Childs, I thought the personal experience you shared at the beginning of your post was excellent. I think you made a great point, just because a student sounds out a word, according to its spelling, does not mean that he/she will pronounce it right. Because of phonograms and the multiple vowel sounds, students will wrongly pronounce words by mistake at some point.
ReplyDeleteI thought this chapter was full of useful information, especially for our tutoring purposes. I thought the Dolch Bingo activity at the end of the chapter looked like fun as well; I also really liked the Toss the Cube game also. I teach fifth grade students, so I was glad to see these provided activities. I feel sometimes as though my ideas may make them seem too young, and they won’t want to participate, so I am thankful for any and all suggestions!
Finally, I feel the same way about my assessment skills and skills to recognize students’ true weaknesses, this chapter was a great help. I was worried about making a mistake while giving the assessments during tutoring, but thus far, it has proven to have worked out well, so I am gaining confidence as the sessions go on! Good luck!
This chapter focuses on word identification – an important part of the reading process. The authors stressed the importance of sight words. Until reading this chapter and being in my internship classrooms I never realized how much emphasize was placed on sight words. One of my mentor teachers made sight word rings. Students could practice during free time, when they finished early, or to take home and practice with their parents. I thought this was a great idea! From the few weeks we’ve been tutoring I have realized my students can read an entire story word for word, and at a high level but most of my student are not able to tell me about what they just read. This chapter also opened my eyes to how complex the English language is. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for ELL students. I plan on referring back to this chapter when writing my lesson plans and searching for activities.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Janel, e-mails like those you mentioned always puzzled me! It is amazing how our brain works. I agree that it’s going to be important to make our classroom literacy rich so students get lots of exposure to vocabulary and the language. I would also be interested in finding the answer to your question that you posed – very interesting!
ReplyDeleteThis chapter was about word identification and sills necessary for reading comprehension. The reading showed how we, as tutors can help students by using patterns in words and also helping students recognize rime, onset, prefixes, suffixes, and root words. We also need to make sure our tutees are comfortable with their context clues so when they encounter an unknown word they can figure it out.
ReplyDeleteThere were some really good ideas in this chapter that I am going to utilize in my tutoring session with my 1st graders. Each session, we do an activity off of their guided reading but not for reading for meaning. I am going to add that to our activity list.
Something I have noticed in the classrooms that I sub in is that the students who are advanced readers seem to make it harder for the other students to get better. When there is a read-aloud for a subject, and one student struggles on a word, instead of letting the student figure it out, a student will just tell them the word. I get so frustrated because I want that student to have the opportunity to use his skills and figure the word out on his / her own! I finally got to the point where I told the students to be quiet, and if someone needed help, I would help them if they asked for it; otherwise give them time to figure it out themselves. This is what is wrong in today’s classroom. Our struggling students are getting by because other students are doing the work for them!
While reading the differences between The Four Cueing Systems I had one question: Would the graphophonic system be the same as phonemic awareness given they both refer to relationships between letters and their sounds? While reading about Word Analysis Skills I thought of the activity I found on FCRR.org…During my tutoring session on Thursday I introduced the students to a multisyllabic words/Phonic activity for Grades 4-5. It gives students a long vowel and they must determine the spelling in the blanks with the long vowel sound. Example: (/e/, b__tw__n, between). Students struggled a bit at first but they seemed to enjoy the activity as they got used to it. All the activities at the end of the chapter will be great ideas and tools for the tutoring session. One that I recognized was Wordless books. In Children’s Literature we read through wordless picture books several times and it was difficult to write a story to go along with them. I will try this activity with my students during the tutoring session to help with vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Debbie M,
ReplyDeleteI understand your frustration about students who blurt out a word. Some students who need help with reading will look for that passageway to have an advanced student help them. I would make sure that you're giving the struggling reader some independent time to read so you don't have to worry about another student blurting out the word. Make sure you encourage students to read wherever they are! Instead of playing the Nintendo DS in the car, read a magazine or newspaper... even the car manual! Look for that print rich environment and your students will benefit greatly.
In response to Trisha W - Sight words are important. I student teach 4th grade and if it wasn't for those sight words some of my students who are below level would be even lower. There lower grade level teachers taught them those sight words.
ReplyDeleteChapter 6 placed emphasis on word identification and the skills needed for students to understand what they are reading. Word recognition includes the recognition of prefixes, suffixes, root words etc. We have to teach children word recognition so they may have a better understanding of what they are reading and understanding what words mean helps their comprehension. I teach children in my internship course to take a close look at the words so they can get a feel of what they’re reading. If I am reading directions and I mistake a word with a different prefix, I can easily miss the important steps or miscomprehend the material. So I stress word recognition for reading comprehension to students! This chapter really gave me some good ideas that I am going to try during my Reading and Language Arts time. One thing I try not to do is carry my students through their reading time by telling them the words but I allow them to read their AR books and then I ask questions. I also ask vocabulary questions because I want to know they were paying attention to those words in the book. No questions regarding this chapter.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Janna C.,
ReplyDeleteJanna C.,
Emerson’s quote is exactly how I feel an effective teacher should be like. We can give the students all the tools in the world, but if we don’t teach them how to use those tools, they will have a difficult time putting it all together.
Chapter 6 was about the importance of students being able to recognize words. As I gave my fourth graders the Rebecca Sitton word list, I was amazed at the number of words they knew. We were to give 100 words, well; I ended up giving them the 4th, 5th and 6th grade word lists. They didn’t have any trouble with any of the lists. Those words were easy for the boys, but the words in the chapter book we are reading are a little difficult. In one of my upcoming lessons, I’m putting together a Cloze passage for the students to complete. This will help them with those words that are unknown to them and are unable to decipher because they either don’t have a prefix or suffix to support the word.
ReplyDeleteI found a lot of helpful activities in this chapter to help with tutoring especially on page 139 for guided reading. It has step by step instructions on how the lesson should flow.
In response to Shelby H.:
ReplyDeleteI have actually never heard of word walls for each subject, but that is really a good idea!
Chapter 6 was about word identification. I am finding that with my tutoring group, the one thing that both of my students have told me is that they struggle with the words when reading. So my objective during my tutoring is to help them learn the words that they really struggle with as well as becoming the fluent readers that they can be. The chapter provided some great examples and activities that I can use to help them with word identification. I really found the assessment suggestions to be very helpful. I came away from the chapter with a greater sense of what I needed to do to help my students succeed.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Trisha w....
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that sight words are very important. I think that students need a large bank of sight words in there vocabulary so that when they are reading they recognize them instantly. Flashcards are a great way to help students learn these words. When my daughter was in kindergarten she brought home different words each week that she was to work on. The ones that she struggled with I made cards for so that we could work extra on them.
In response to Janet H.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter is in kindergarten and is learning sight words through context. I was so impressed when she brought home her shared story to read and she was able to read her "red' words,as she called them, without even hesitating! I have to agree that this is a very effective way for students to learn sight words.
This chapter was interesting to me because as I relate it to my tutoring sessions, I am seeing that the problem I am seeing more frequently is not sight words, it is phonemic awareness and phonics. One of the strategies I see one student use is the blending of polysyllabic words discussed in the chapter. All of my students did pretty well on their sight word assessment also. I think the assessing blends section of this chapter will be something I will need to consider doing with one of my students in the coming weeks. I was also excited to see the section on guided reading in this chapter because that is something I am unsure of how to address, especially when you have 4 students all at different reading levels. And again I am loving the activities in this book!
ReplyDeleteAs the title states “Word Identification” this chapter explains it all. This chapter explained about the word knowledge of students and see what they know and context analysis. The tools that were mention in the reading for assessing was very helpful. From what I remember when it discussed about suffixes and prefixes it was difficult to remember and when I substituted I taught this lesson with students and it seems now there are better tools to teach students. At the end of the chapter it gave great ideas for lesson plans. I didn’t have any questions and it related to my Reading internship with working with a student on sight words and assessing the information. I think that reading material was very helpful on how to assessing students.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the score sheet was very helpful on 6.4 for showing how the student would improve. I think I would use this tool in my future classroom.
Response to Margaret W. ...
ReplyDeleteMy students also feel that they struggle with words when reading. But when it came to the words to read from Rebecca Sitton they did very well. I'm researching on different strategies to help these students so they can overcome this.
In response to Alisha G.,
ReplyDeleteMy students did really well with the Rebecca Sitton Word lists too. One my students is in the school spelling bee and he brought me the list that they are studying from. There are some tough words on there. This weekend at Borders I purchased a word wall and I'm using the spelling bee words as part of their word wall.
This chapter was about word identification. The part about formal and informal assessments was very interesting as well. All students need to build a good amount of sight words. They can make their school experiences much easier. Building a student’s background knowledge is such an important factor in the classroom. They need to understand what they already know and how to integrate that into their learning. Using the MSV like we did in Reading and Language arts class has really helped my tutoring students. I think it helps me as a teacher type person to understand whether it looks and sounds right and whether it makes sense or not. I think sometimes in anything we are learning about, we need to ask ourselves this. In my science internship she always is telling the students to look back over the sentences they read and write and make sure they sound right. She told them that it may look right to their eyes but does it sound right and make sense? The cueing systems wer also real interesting to read about. I never knew about these and how they work in the classroom setting. This chapter was full of so much information that I can never say it enough that I am not letting this book go anywhere when I get done with it except in my teacher resource pile that I will take with me when I get a teaching job. I think it is such a great asset to me.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Trisha W–
ReplyDeleteI think a personal word wall would be a very good asset to all students. They can have their own word wall maybe in a journal or something and that way they can go back and refer to them whenever they need them. I love the Jan Brett books. We collect them. My children love them along with many other types of books. We just spent like almost $200.00 at the local book fair on books because we enjoy them so much and also because I wanted to build my library for my tutoring students.
Chapter 6 focuses on word identification. In order for a student to comprehend what they are reading, they must be able to recognize and analyze a word. It is vital that students develop a large amount of sight words to help with word identification. My reading mentor teacher had flashcards of the sight words for the students and she also had them posted around the room. This made it so much easier for the students to gather the needed sight words. It was interesting to read about the semantic system, as I had never heard of this before. I really liked the idea of each student having their own personal word wall. I think that is a great tool for students that really invite them into learning new words. It is important to remember that English as a Second Language learners may not have the same background experiences of the other students when learning sight words. Teachers absolutely need to be aware of the students’ background knowledge when presenting them with new reading material and words. An interesting fact that I pulled from this chapter was that 10 words make up 25% of what we read and write! That is amazing! I really didn’t have any questions about this chapter. Did anyone have any other games or activities that can help with word identification?
ReplyDeleteIn response to April- I really liked that you pointed out how wonderful an MSV chart can be for word identification. I had never heard of an MSV chart until Reading and Language Arts Methods and I think they are great tools for students in learning if something looks right, sounds right, and makes sense. I completely agree that this book has a vast amount of useful information that will be an invaluable source for me when I enter my own classroom.
ReplyDeleteCh6. Goes through the importance of using sight words and developing the sight words. The student I am tutoring is great with the sight words however sometimes he gets reading to fast or just focusing on the word and not putting the meanings of all the words together. After sight words have been learned it is important to work on comprehension and make sure the student is understanding what they read. The chapter gave examples of how to use picture books in lessons. I would like to find a picture book and have my student write a story to go along with the pictures, and then read in to his parents. It would really help him think about what is going on in the story.
ReplyDeleteTo Kelsey
ReplyDeleteI agree the more sight words a child can build the better. I think that it is helpful for a student to have a sight words book and as the teacher goes over a new word they can add it for the younger grades the teacher can have the word printed on a note card for the child to paste into a book and for the older students who have developed readable hand writing the can write the word into their book. For ELL students you could add a picture with the word such as boy
Chapter six is about word identification. This chapter covers site words, reviews cueing systems (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and graphophonic), site words, etc. It also explains different types of assessments a teacher can use. I really liked the explanations in all of the different sections. As I read I realize how much students are learning at such a young age and all through their school years! The descriptions of each type of formal and informal assessment were very helpful and I’m sure I will use them my future classroom. I also liked the different activities at the end of the chapter. They will all be very helpful and I think they would be a lot of fun for students to play.
ReplyDeleteWorking in a first grade classroom last semester opened my eyes to how much students learn! I had the opportunity to help assess site words as well as work with students on phonograms and individual letter sounds in centers. Through this experience I found that the checklist on page 134 would be very helpful when working with students.
In response to Lauren…That is a great idea to have the students create a story using a picture book! I definitely agree too that it is really important to make sure the students understand and know what the passage/words they just read mean instead of just naming words! I’ve worked with students that can read quickly and pretty well but cannot remember what they read! This skill is very important to learn at the beginning because if they don’t it will be really hard later on in life to make the student stop and check comprehension of what they read!
ReplyDeleteTrisha W:
ReplyDeleteI also thought the picture book activity was really neat! It's so nice to get all these ideas from this book!
I thought chapter 6 was a great chapter and it was full of ideas for word identification activities to use in your classroom.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how it mapped everything out for you and gave you great examples of how to use these new activities.
I also really liked how it reviewed the parts of the cueing system. Those are explanations that I wrote down and will make sure I'm covering those ideas in the classroom. It's very important that our children learn these concepts at a young age because if they don't it's only going to make reading harder for them, and they won't learn to enjoy reading at all. It's very important we remember these concepts and activities and use them in our classroom.