Final Project!!

My goal for my final project was to create a pretty simple way for me, as a future teacher, to understand the process of learning to read. I decided to do this in a creative graphic organizer. I chose to represent the process of learning to read in a clock form for a few reasons. Primarily, I liked the idea that “Reading Takes TIME” as a motto for the project, because of course it does! Reading doesn’t happen overnight (nor in a 12 hour span, but the clock circles around again, so it works). I also loved the idea of having the hands of the clock, where we know that the second hand moves faster than the minute hand which moves faster than the hour hand, just like how some children may progress faster than others along the process. To decide what “made the cut” in getting to make the clock, I tried to choose some of what I thought we the major topics. Ideally, I wanted this assignment to sum up the course for me, so that I could easily look back on it and remember concepts and know the places to look them up if I wanted to. It grew to be a little more involved than I initially anticipated, but I think it will serve its purpose well for me in the future!

Here's the link to my final prezi! Enjoy!
http://prezi.com/c5rwvw0y6iuw/edutl-final-how-does-one-become-a-reader/?kw=view-c5rwvw0y6iuw&rc=ref-15083109  

Literary Autobiography! (Link to Prezi)

I decided to do my literary autobiography in Prezi. Hopefully this link works to get you there! I did a voice over (this is my first time trying this) so you can follow the pictures along with what I'm saying. Hopefully you enjoy it!

http://prezi.com/ntbpi9qehvdi/edutl-literary-autobiography/?kw=view-ntbpi9qehvdi&rc=ref-15083109

"Tonight, on Fluency Idol!"

"

In searching for an article from the journal, The Reading Teacher to read, I happened upon the perfect topic for this class, so naturally, it was an easy decision. I picked this article, “Fluency Idol: Using Pop-Culture to Engage Students and Boost Fluency Skills” by Kristine M. Calo, Taylor Woolard-Ferguson, and Ellen Koitz because I could tell just from the title that it would be a 100% match for what we are studying. It turns out it was exactly like I thought it would be- The Poetry Academy! I remember how brilliant I thought The Poetry Academy article we read was as a way to encourage fluency, and so stumbling upon this, I imagined I would think very much the same (which I did).

So where did this idea come from? The article points out that fluency has long been high up on the list of things that will make students better readers. Even the Common Core Standards recognize fluency as “A foundational skill necessary for children to become successful readers,” so teachers are really starting to see its necessity. There has also been research done showing that the best way to aid students’ fluency is to integrate different approaches- hearing something read, repeated reading, supportive responses, and oral practice. Does all of this sound familiar from The Poetry Academy? Poetry, coincidentally, plays a large role in Fluency Idol, as that’s what the teacher who started it recommends for the students to practice and compete with. Fluency Idol originates in a 2^nd grade classroom, where the idea was to “Build on the students’ love of pop-culture while looking to encourage oral performance in a new and different way.” That seems like a very solid plan to me.

So how does it work? Here are the main steps:

Monday
o   Teacher and students pick out individual poems to work on that week
Tuesday-Thursday
o   Students practice their poem at home, using family as an audience
o   Students practice with partners in class
o   Students practice with the teacher to receive feedback on progress
Friday
o   Three students are chosen to perform
o   They have a toy microphone
o   Teacher records so students and parents can review later
o   Class votes in a secret ballot to determine the winner
o   All three students receive a certificate for achievements

Is it successful? This second grade teacher found her students really enjoyed Fluency Idol, getting excited for the competitions on Fridays and really showing improvement from practicing with each other and at home. Another program decided to try this concept to see if it could work to increase their students’ literacies as well. This was a summer program for 23 K-5^th grade students who were below their reading levels. Different days of this program, students had the opportunity to read with clinicians/teachers, each other, and even therapy dogs (the students really seemed to be calmed by and enjoy the dogs’ presence). Students proceeded just like the 2^nd grade classroom in picking poems and preparing them for the final competition. On the last day of the summer program, they had their big Fluency Idol where there was a stage set up, decorated with a “Fluency Idol” banner, and students entered through a doorway covered in streamers. Parents and other students were there for the performances, cheering on the readers. The parents really noticed an attitude change in their children towards reading, and based on their responses (from “a sucess” to “Today was vary fun,” the students really enjoyed the experience. The numerical data agreed, fluency increased with Fluency Idol.

Need a more direct association to our class material? I’ll give you a few of the techniques to build fluency we talked about from Graves Chapter 8, and then explain how Fluency Idol modeled this!
Partner Reading: Students got the opportunity to read with and to each other in class, ideally helping to give input into how the other student was doing, all with the goal to help each other succeed in the Idol competition.
Tape-Assisted Reading: Students in the Fluency Idol program didn’t use tapes, but they did get video recordings of themselves reading to help them work and learn from what they had already done.
Readers Theater: Graves describes readers theater as, “The well-rehearsed reading of scripts, with feeling and expression, in front of an audience, but without the memorizing of the lines, costumes, prompts, scenery, make-up…and other features of a full-blown play performances” (232). Fluency Idol is readers theater on steroids. Students practice pieces, and learn how to give them to “Recreate the voice of the author so that an audience listing to the performance of the text read aloud will truly appreciate the meaning.” Then, with the rehearsals culminating in a final completion, the Fluency Idol participants are getting the full experience of readers theater, and surely some of the enthusiasm and motivation for reading that comes along with this method. In addition, if you look back to page 233 of the Graves text, you’ll see what I saw- the Monday, Tuesday-Thursday, Friday schedule that is used for Fluency Idol exactly mirrors what Graves recommends for a “Schedule for a Week of Readers Theater.”

How would I use this in my classroom? If you haven’t noticed by this point in my post, I’m a pretty big supporter of readers theater, particularly this idea of using a friendly (emphasis on the friendly in my classroom) competition in a way the students would love. I had a few thoughts that ran through my mind as I was reading. 1.) Do kids still watch American Idol? If not, could we find other ways to make literacy and fluency game shows in the classroom? For instance, maybe their more into The Voice, so we could try something where they formed teams that way. 2.) I would want to try this using other texts other than poetry. I’ll be in a 4-9^th grade classroom, so we will be reading novels at this age, so I think it could be a really great way to do book reviews. If students are all reading different independent reading books, an innovative way to get them to share could be to have them do a Fluency Idol competition competing with a passage they really liked! 3.) When I originally saw the article, I imagined the students would be competing using lyrics, but reading them like poetry, so that would definitely be something I would want to try (with appropriate lyrics of course)!

I would post the link to the article, but you have to sign in through the OSU library databases to get it for free, so if you are interested, just let me know and I can help you find it!

Let the Records Run!

Having never ever heard of “running records” before, I found Clay’s Chapter 5 absolutely fascinating. Math and Language Arts are my two areas of concentration as a Middle Childhood Education major, and it never really occurred to me how similar they could be to teach because of how grading and progress are handled. Math is much more simple- you can tell who is practicing and who is not, where their mistakes are on homework based on which step they made an error, whether they understand previous concepts, how they are thinking on their own, all because so much work is shown for each problem. Reading always seemed so different and impossible to understand in such a mathematical way, but running records takes a reading passage and makes it mathematically understandable, which of course, I love.

I tried to think back to my early reading days to think if I can ever recall anything like this in my experience, but of course my memory isn’t so great. I wonder what mine would have looked like, and I can’t help but think that mine may have been somewhat like the example from “Claire” (appropriately) from Clay. My speculation is that I was very much a self-corrector. I was never a particularly fast or flawless reader as “Emma” was in her example, but I know I tried very hard to be perfect, which I think would have shown through on a running record if I had one from when I was beginning to read.

The fact that you can tell so much about how a child is learning and processing reading from the marks made word by word in a running record is absolutely brilliant. I loved that bits that the “teacher” wrote after each sample running record. I am sure it takes a lot of practice, but it seems so incredibly practical that it only makes sense to use this technique. I know Clay mentioned that it’s best to start with average readers, but I think if you mastered the process enough, this could be very helpful to every variety of learner. My only question is that I couldn’t help but wonder how English language learners fit into the mix. Is there any sort of special mark for different pronunciations? What happens if the student says the word in their primary language?

English Language Learners? Or Just Learners?

My grade school, middle school, and high school didn’t have a single English Language Learning. The reason for this is probably the neighborhood I lived in combined with the fact that it was 12 years of Catholic education. Since it hasn’t been something I’ve had a lot of experience with, I love learning about teaching ELL students.

I found it particularly intriguing that Graves Chapter 14 emphasizes so strongly that “Learning a second language is more like learning a first language than different from it” (414). This fascinates me. I do have a good understanding that learning a second language is easier if the first is similar, but it never occurred to me that the actual process of learning a language could be so similar. As I kept reading, it made more sense.

Every method or strategy mentioned in this section as a way to help students learning English as a second language have also been noted as ways to help English-speaking students learning to read and write for the first time. What a novel idea! We can teach students that are learning to read and write English as a second language with the same methods that we teach students who only speak English to read and write. So what are these tactics?

·         Emphasize grammatical skills as well as critical thinking

·         Help students reference their own culture (or own lives for non-ELL students)

·         Help them gain positive self-esteem towards reading

·         Use and teach “A wealth of diverse strategies” (420)

Don’t those sound like concepts we have already learned in different areas for how to help any student with reading and writing?

That being said, I also appreciated some of the differences we could make as teachers to help our ELL students (since something like 42% of us will have at least one non-native speaker in our class each year). I think these ways of scaffolding, like making sure these students really have enough time to fully read through things and respond to them, and differentiating, like allowing students to choose their language to respond on tests, with later having them translate, have the potential to really help students acquire knowledge and a positive attitude towards learning English.

The last thing I find particularly interesting is that there is no regulation for how ELL and ESL students are taught across states or across the country. Yes, every classroom is going to be different, but I think there should be some sort of consistency across schools so that all students can have these methods and special attention when they need it.

"Chopsticks" and Comprehension

This was a really intriguing book to me, partially because I have never read anything like it. I think it was also a little challenging because, as it is in cohesion with the comprehension chapters from Graves, I think it was meant to test our comprehension strategies a little.

In my Young Adult Literature class last semester, the teacher’s intent was to show us lots of different genres of literature. This is actually something Graves mentions that can aid comprehension because students can learn how to follow the general form of different genres, as well as something that can help interest different students. In my YA Lit class, we did read a graphic novel, thought it was much less engaging in my opinion than Chopsticks, so I ended up deciding that graphic novels were not for me. This however, was a much more gratifying experience. I actually think this book would be much better used in the classroom, though definitely high school, than the book that we read (Skim, a cartooned graphic novel by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki). I also enjoyed the music references and pictures as well as the Spanish and Pablo Neruda poetry, because I’m a musician AND I love Pablo Neruda!

So, what do I, personally think about Chopsticks? I think it is not only filled with interesting pictures, but also an interesting storyline. I didn’t know what I was getting into—I actually choose not to read the little back cover synopses of books before I read them, so my first impression was the initial pictures. I saw evidence bags and immediately thought someone might be murdered (I watch a lot of crime shows), but the next bit was a photo album of happy people in love. At this point, I was hoping no one will be dead because I didn’t want to see either of these happy people hurt. As the story kept going, I thought it was easy enough to follow. There are the typical teens that are in love but the parents don’t approve, in this case Glory’s dad, V. This particular part of the plot is always interesting to me, because I’m my dad’s daughter. I hate when I can read love from the dad but see how the teen daughter sees it as utter despise. With this book, I could visibly see it on the dad’s face, especially in the page where Glory and Frank are sitting at the piano laughing and her dad is looking over at her. It makes me think of my dad when I was in high school, though I didn’t hate playing the piano, but I quit the golf team, which was something I knew my dad loved.

In the end, I like to think that she left the arts psychological ward of sorts to be with Frank in Argentina, but I don’t know that is even a happy ending for me. Because I believe in the healing power of music, I was hoping that Glory would be able to regain her senses and love for all music, but I could see that she just couldn’t get Frank and Chopin out of her head. I like the ambiguous ending. I think it’s a very reflection and discussion sparking book and I think it gives readers a chance to define the ending in the way we see as the most logical and the one we like the best as well.

My question, more than the end of the book, is what is the connection (V makes) between Glory and her mother, Maria? Alcoholism?

Authentic Vocabulary

I found the vocabulary readings, both from the Graves text and the “Robust Vocabulary Instruction” article particularly interesting, because I think that I was taught vocabulary words in possibly not the best way.

Things I Noticed That Differed from My Experience:
1.) Choosing sets of words that are related
2.) Using authentic learning in a workshop format
3.) Students as “scholars”

First, Graves mentions in Chapter 9 on vocabulary that it is an important step in vocabulary learning that the word sets are all connected in some way. In the opposing side, in my school experience, there is the vocab book. Sometimes words were somewhat related, like positive words vs. negative words or things like that, but hardly ever in my memory did words actually relate to each other in the real world outside of that textbook. That meant that our primary experience with those words was from the text and direct definitions, not from any individual thinking. This got me thinking, “As a math teacher, what can I do to stimulate interesting, connected vocabularies in my students?” There is the obvious, teach them the math vocab words, but based on Graves mention of using all words that can be used to describe space, couldn’t I design problems that we could work through as a class that all have interesting and new space words? Instead of a space shuttle traveling from Earth to the Moon, what if it was a space capsule, dispatching from The Kennedy Space Center or something like that?

Secondly, the article strongly emphasizes the benefits of workshop-styled learning for vocabulary, something my experience definitely lacked. I absolutely love the concept of the word box, where students can put words in they want to learn. It’s such a brilliant way to get kids EXCITED to learn new words. If what we’re out to get is our students personally invested in their education, this is an excellent way to do it. I think even high school students in some cases could like this way of learning vocab words better than the traditional vocab book or list.

Finally, in Chapter 7, something really caught my attention. In one of the little anecdotes in the text, Gordon Scholander talks about his students’ learning and casually refers to them as “my young scholars” (199). This blew me away a little. His “young scholars” are first graders, where my teacher may have considered us pests more than scholars. While this particular section was actually about how to use a word bank (another authentic way to help kids take interest in their words), his word choice was the part that really affected me. I think that all children, even 6 year old first graders should know that they are “young scholars” and be treated accordingly. I think it has such a positive connotation, not that “student” has a particularly negative connotation, but the optimism behind his word just made me feel as though his students really are scholars-in-the-making.

 

Feezell, G. (2012). Robust Vocabulary Instruction in a Readers' Workshop. The Reading Teacher, 233-237.

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Fluency and Confidence, in Reading and Music

Occasionally I think all of our readings about reading can be difficult to relate to in our own experiences. We talk about using these concepts and ideas in the classroom, but I personally need a more personal connection to material to be able to really keep it in memory for future use sometimes. This section on fluency and the intervention of the Poetry Academy really got me thinking about my experience in music.

As I was reading, a lot of the techniques used to help students with their reading fluency had parallels with my life in music. I started playing the clarinet a year later than my peers, so in a way, I was a low-level reader when I was thrown in with them in my band class in 7^th grade. Partner reading, where one partner (the stronger reader) reads and the second repeats translates into practicing in pairs, where you essentially do the same thing, but playing a difficult part, not reading. Tape-assisted reading is just like how band directors gave us CD’s of our songs, both played professionally and by us to listen to and play with. Readers’ theater and radio reading, which are more progress-to-perform oriented, work just like chamber music concerts, where band students work on solos and small ensemble pieces to play for each other in a low-pressure performance. The more I read, the more I could relate. Maybe I don’t remember learning to read, but I do remember learning to play clarinet.

One of the big things I struggled with as a beginning clarinetist was confidence. Because I felt so far behind my peers, I never wanted to play at any audible decibel or in front of them because I didn’t think I was good enough. I think that a large part of these fluency practices, and especially the Poetry Academy, are working towards is reading confidence. When we feel inadequate at something it is almost always because we are comparing ourselves to our peers. I think this is where the Poetry Academy really made an impact because students were learning one-on-one with a helper—there were no “others” to be compared to in this situation. Also, by encouraging students that this was something cool and special (like Hogwarts) these students could feel like they were special too, which probably helped with confidence as well. Lastly, having students work on short poems that they can enjoy and learn with a little effort was sure to inspire self-confidence—learning that you can do something is what makes the difference in terms of a positive learning experience, it doesn’t matter how long it is. A small poem learned is the same as a whole novel learned for someone who needs the confidence boost just like a few bars of music is the same as a whole concerto for a beginner.

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Wilfong, L. G. (2008). Building Fluency, Word Recognition Ability, and Confidence in Struggling Readers: The Poetry Academy. The Reading Teacher, 4-13.

Reading Differentiation Across All Blackboards

Once again, I am caught supporting what I read about reading on every front, and the realization that I will most likely find myself teaching Math in the classroom. I should add that I am totally ok with that. But reading about assessment and differentiation in terms of teaching reading, in particular, early reading, it can be a little complicated to relate it to myself and my future classroom. That being said, the three sections I read (Chapters 4 and 5 in the Graves and Chapter 4 of Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents) actually helped me come up with some connections I haven’t thought of previously. My realization is that in assessing my Math tests and homework, I am also assessing reading, so it is up to me to differentiate and scaffold not only Math concepts, but reading as well in order to help my students learn at the levels they are at and progress from their individual levels.

Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents pointed out that often times, the differentiation that middle and high schools try to create for students who are struggling with reading is ineffective. They say that many schools try to work on phonemic awareness with these older students, but it just doesn’t help them progress. So, what are teachers of older students supposed to do? I believe that differentiated teaching (and assessment) can occur in all the different subject matter in terms of reading level. If we do it that way, students who are behind in reading level can still fully participate in their other classes, while improving their reading and writing skills. The only “negative” of this is it would mean teachers would have to start paying very close attention—classroom differentiation is about more than sending a student to see the reading aid or ESL program. In my Math classroom, I was thinking about how homework, test questions, and even the textbook are worded. I hope that when my time comes to teach, I will take the time to adjust these texts for my students who may need help with more than their math. The Graves text worded eloquently, “Differentiation is about matching students with texts and tasks that meet their ability, their interests, and their learning styles” (125). I think that can relate to the projects I plan and questions I create. I will do everything I can to make learning math accessible to my students, even if that means altering my plans to account for reading differences.   

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Ivey, G. &. (2006). Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents. Alexandria: ASCD.

Kids on Reading

A friend of mine (who is actually a music educator) posted this on facebook, and I loved it, so I decided that I needed to post it here! Burning Through Pages seems like they're doing good things!

TED Talk Review: Let's Hear It for Boys

http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html

One of the concepts we have emphasized so far, is the influence of culture on students and how they learn. From Teaching Reading in the 21^st Century: Motivating All Learners, we know that “The social and cultural backgrounds of students have a huge and undeniable effect on their learning. Unless we as teachers take students’ social backgrounds and modes of learning and thinking into account, little learning is likely to occur” (Graves et al. 2011, p. 11). Interestingly enough, we have mostly focused on how culture based on socioeconomic status or ethnicity has affected reading and learning in our discussions, perhaps forgetting one of the elements of culture that we will come in contact with wherever we teach—gender.

In her TED talk, Ali Carr-Chellman delves into some of the inherent differences between boys and girls, and explains how schools presently are not friendly to the culture of boys. I have heard in multiple statistics and classes that there is a significantly decreasing amount of men at college, though it hardly seemed like a catastrophic problem to me before. At the time, the low-key feminist in me was rejoicing, “Hooray! Girls get degrees!” but it wasn’t until Carr-Chellman brought up the greater problem, that education is not serving the male 50% of our country well.  Her talk is titled, “Gaming to Re-Engage Boys in Learning,” but it discusses so much more than that, from how drastic the differences between boys and girls are in suspension, expulsion, and ADHD diagnoses to how teachers and our school systems are pushing boys away.

I initially chose this TED talk because it reminded me of a child I know that I used to babysit. “Gaming to Re-Engage Boys in Learning” as a title spoke directly to him. School was not his area of expertise by any means. Getting through homework was always a struggle, and he was never remotely interested in or inspired by any of his projects. But give him a Playstation, Xbox, Wii, or even Super Nintendo controller, and he was incredible. He was always better than me at anything we played, even when it was a game I owned. I used to hide Crash Bandicoot from him because once he hit the power button, we definitely weren’t doing anything for the rest of the day. One summer, we spend the whole week after he got The Beatles Rock Band trying to beat it, only for him to eventually kindly ask me to stop playing because I was slowing him down with my sub-par scores. Something about games was so much more intriguing to him than anything else, especially school work. So naturally, when browsing TED talks and finding this one, I was pulled in by interest right away.

Ali Carr-Chellman’s talk proved to be far more diverse than I anticipated. She drew light on plenty of ideas beyond just gaming. She explained exactly how our school culture conflicts with boy culture. Her three main theories are that 1.) Schools’ zero tolerance for violence pushes them away 2.) They hate writing and 3.) There are VERY few male teachers. So where do the problems lie? Carr-Chellman notices that we essentially expect boys to behave as girls in classrooms, “Sit down. Be quiet. Do what you’re told. Manage your time, BE A GIRL.” The classroom regulations combined with the complete prohibition of the toys and subjects that interest them and no male teachers to look up to give boys the impression that school is for girls. Let me say that again, we are convincing our boys that education is a girl-thing. I probably would never have come to that conclusion on my own, but pieced together the way she puts her evidence in this TED talk, it is undeniable. We need to revamp education to be boy-friendly.

I have been trying to think about what we would do if it were another culture that was being told school wasn’t for them. For instance, if we were not including Mexican culture in schools with Mexican populations, what would we do? We would add readings about Mexican culture and food, add stories by Mexican authors, and go out of our ways to encourage them in learning English while not losing any of their Spanish. Maybe we, as mostly female teachers, are speaking only in a foreign language to the boys. Graves’ social cultural theory implores us as teachers to connect our material to the culture of our students, so what do we do for our boys?

As future teachers, this is something we ARE going to encounter, probably daily. One of the things Ali Carr-Chellman says needs to change is teachers’ attitudes about boys and boy culture. If you were teaching at a Columbus school with a large percentage of Somali students, would you try to include Somali culture in your lessons? Would you make adjustments to accommodate how they learn like you would for any other student? Yes, boys like guns and no, toy guns are not acceptable at school, but couldn’t we allow them to write stories about mysteries or cops or monsters instead of saying those are unacceptable topics? Can’t we as teachers respect videogames just as much as we would respect playing house or playing school as after school activities? Can’t we let them read stories about warriors or knights or even sports heroes? Think back to that boy I used to babysit, how could his school experience be different if he had a teacher that valued his talent in video games? Or even one that tried to include video games in her lessons from time to time? Would he be more intrinsically motivated to learn or more involved in his education?

“Gaming to Re-Engage Boys in Learning” is much more than a plight to allow video games in schools, it’s a plight to allow boy culture, real, genuine, playing-in-dirt, sword-fighting boy culture in schools, because if we don’t, we are going to lose them more and more every year. It’s just like Sir Ken Robinson said in his TED talk we watched—kids are in a highly stimulating environment all the time because of technology. We need to make school equally as stimulating. In a country that prides itself in education for all, Ali Carr-Chellman points out that we may not be fairly educating all, just because of a culture clash, and I couldn’t agree more. Culture is has “a huge and undeniable effect” on how our students learn, so why not give teaching to their culture a try? Take the time to watch Ali Carr-Chellman’s TED talk, “Gaming to Re-Engage Boys in Learning.” It had a huge effect on me, and I think it will for you too. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Graves, M. F., et al. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

1st Grade Phonics Meets 6th Grade Math

So you’re teaching Math in a 6^th grade classroom, how does 1^st grade Reading affect you at all? This week’s reading from the Graves textbook focuses on how primary students start to become readers, from pronouncing sounds to learning the alphabet. This might not seem obviously connected to middle school classes, other than Reading of course, but the two might be more connect than we think right away.

Of course there is the obvious connection: If students don’t learn to read properly in the primary grades, doing their reading for their classes by the time they reach middle school is going to be a struggle, both frustrating for the student and you as a teacher. But how can the methods Graves describes to teach phonics and letter recognition be related to upper grades? My theory is this, most students in my future classroom will already have a pretty strong foundation in reading, but there is no such thing as too strong of a foundation. Maybe I won’t be helping students with phonological awareness activities or letter-sounding, but writing and reading can easily fit into my classroom. Maybe instead of reading a story book aloud, I could read a more complicated story problem aloud and treat it as if it were a book. Graves mentions about stopping mid-book to, “Briefly define the new vocabulary and model one or more strategies. You might ask a question, clarify something that is difficult to understand, make a prediction, or solicit questions and comments from the children” (175), which is completely applicable to solving story problems! If I treat story problems as a story, stopping to ask questions or explain confusing statements, reading story problems is certainly a way of reading aloud. It might not seem the same, because we would be focusing on elements of our math problem, not how to say and spell words, but my 11 year old students would be getting some of the same reading benefits that 6 year olds get from being read to by their teacher.

This is precisely what Chapter 2 of Creating Literacy-Rich Environments for Adolescents was emphasizing—connecting subjects in a visible way to students to follow and learn from. It gave the story of how one high school created connections in how classes were taught by keeping things consistent from class to class in terms of note taking, vocabulary, writing, and other elements of school. Imagine, if I started every Math class with a story problem, and English started class with a poem or short story, and Social Studies started class with a first-person account of what they would be studying that day, every class would start the same way, with reading aloud!
Reading out loud as a class isn’t the only possible connection. Beginning readers are encouraged to practice their writing, even when they don’t know how to spell words “properly.” Isn’t that just like the math concept of showing your work so teachers can see your thought process? What about having an exit slip in a math class or a “crystal ball” prediction during science lab to get students writing? (Ivey & Fisher 47) It may not be the most apparent connection in the world, but I think the way we teach and reinforce basic reading skills is completely related to how we teach different subjects to older students.

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Ivey, G. &. (2006). Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents. Alexandria: ASCD.

What Motivates You to Read?

From what I have read in my classes and learned in real life, motivation is one of the most complicated and difficult areas for future teachers and current teachers alike. There is something ever so complex about how to inspire so many different minds in your classroom or future classroom. With all the various theories and speculation about motivation, it is hard not to get overwhelmed. As a future middle school teacher, I found both of the readings valuable and was able to take information from both of them to apply to my future classroom. Kelly Gallagher’s “Nine Reasons for Reading” chapter was geared towards an older audience and the Graves Chapter 3 felt as though it was geared towards a younger audience.

With “Reading Reasons,” I tried to really consider how these reasons to read that high school students came up with will apply to my classroom of slightly younger students. Some of them would be more difficult to relate to them than others. For instance, explaining to a group of middle school students that reading is necessary for college is much less applicable than explaining that it is going to be particularly important in high school, and emphasizing that reading is hard, but we need hard things in our lives might not be something they are interested to hear. I was thinking about teaching Math, since I don’t know at this point if I will end up in Math or Reading, and the reason that reading is important financially really hit me. I would love to do a class project with allowance tracking or even pretend class bills. We could create a classroom community where students had to research funding and spending, but in a simpler way than with high school students.

With the Graves chapter, I was really thinking about the students that will be in my classroom. They with be ages 9-13, so opinions on reading may have already formed. They might also have in mind if they are a “good reader” or a “bad reader.” I hope that I can create a fresh start environment for my students where they can all be good readers and all can love to read. In that, there was one little line that really hit me on page 54, “Perhaps the best books offer an experience that is similar to looking through a window at twilight. At first you see through the window into another place, but, as the light gradually fades, you end up seeing yourself.” My students will be at a time in their lives where everything they knew about themselves and their world is starting to change. With that quote, I realized that I can help them learn about themselves and their world through the books I have them read. Maybe the best way to motivate my students is to have them divided into book groups, where each group is filled with students who are different from each other, but by the end they will all be reflecting on the book and themselves together, once it’s dark and the window reflects themselves. I think motivation can seem daunting, but the trick is finding what motivates us now, and when we were children, and I think Graves has it, it’s finding literature that allows us into another world, different from our own, but leaves us thinking about our own lives, no matter the age.

(2003). Nine Reasons for Reading. In K. Gallagher, Reading Reasons: Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School (pp. 15-38). Portland: Stenhouse Publishers.

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Cultural Identity and Reading

There are some things in life that shape who we are and how we view the world, though we may never notice their presence or effect on us, like socioeconomic status, gender, race, and culture. To some, the definition of culture may be as simple as our ethnicity or society we live in, but to me, culture is all of those things and more, ranging from age to education. When I think about my personal culture, I notice that it takes me a while to form my identity because culture is so multifaceted. I am female, white, from a middle-class family, where both parents work for a car company, my parents are still together, I am a college student, I am an Ohioan, more specifically a Toledoan, I am Catholic, I have an extremely close extended family, I am an oldest child, and I am a musician. Based on that description of my culture, I think you can find many of my identifying qualities, and you may also notice that there is no one with a cultural identity quite like mine. This identity affects everything I do, how I do it, and how others see me. One effect is has is how I read.

To be completely honest, most of my reading is academic, which comes from the “college student” part of my cultural identity. This means that generally speaking, most reading I do is for information at this place in my life. Looking back, however, there were times when reading was more than a means to pass exams and write papers. Even a few years ago in high school, I genuinely enjoyed reading, even for classes. I went to an all-girls high school (another part of my cultural identity), but we still read all of the classics—white, male literature. Occasionally, my teachers would make their best effort to throw in anything of literary merit written by a woman, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We, as a class, noticed that we were more excited and more engaged when reading books by female authors. We appreciated the characterizations more and the descriptions of emotions. Unfortunately, this was not the norm, meaning that most of the time, I am reading something that I am not particularly culturally connected to as a girl, which makes it less exciting to read and less relatable. Why is it that all of “the classics” are written by white men? Are there other works we should add to the classics to make reading more culturally relatable to everyone?

Another aspect of my cultural identity is that I am a future Math teacher. That being said, the Introduction to Ivey and Fisher’s Creating Literacy Rich Schools for Adolescents connected to me personally because of the many references to Math teachers regarding the phrase “Every teacher is a teacher of reading.” I did not like how they played the Math teachers as the enemies of reading in every class because to me, that is unfair stereotyping. In my opinion, Math can incorporate reading, writing, and speaking, it is just more difficult to involve it than it would be for a Social Studies class. It is my hope that I can bring reading into my future classroom by having students write explanations or story problems and share them with each other, as well as by bringing in creative projects that could even involve interviewing people about how they use math in their jobs or brief history presentations about where the math we’re learning came from. It is also my hope that English teachers can promote Math, and Science teachers can promote Music. All the subjects have their connections, and it would be beneficial for the students to have that intertextuality in the back of their brains to take their learning outside the classroom.

Ivey, Gay and Douglas Fisher. (2006). Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents. Alexandria: ASCD.

Literacy Backgrounds

Reading and literacy at this point in my life are expected of me. I am very much expected to be able to read textbooks for class, street signs and directions, cookbook instructions, and facebook updates, and tweets. That being said, for as much as I need and use my reading ability, I haven’t spent any particular amount of time considering how or when I learned to read. I do remember that for me, reading has always been a family affair. My parents and extended family read to my sister and me often, probably too often in our opinion at the time, and we were asked to practice our reading out loud at home. Because I am from a family that values reading, Amy Suzanne Johnson’s research on the literary history of the Jones family draws my attention to the reading process, both as I experienced it and as the women of the Jones family did in her article, “The Jones Family’s Culture of Literacy.” Johnson spent time interviewing the Jones family of Pinesville to uncover how reading and the process of learning to read occur in their household. In her research, she discovered that the Jones view literacy very highly, with one kindergarten teacher in the family and extended family who all take considerable time to read to the younger generations. While Pinesville may be a small southern rural town where African Americans have historically been discouraged from literacy, reading is emphasized as a necessary right and gift for this family. From writing letters to each other to reading the newspaper and from reading the Bible at church to reading story books at home, these women, Harriet, Sally, and Lola demonstrate to young KiKi that reading is a large part of their life, which influences KiKi’s attitude towards reading.

While the Jones family was creating an encouraging learning environment for KiKi to learn to read, not all families place importance on reading or display positive reading habits in their own lives for their children to observe and follow. I have never really considered the dramatic impact that a home environment can have on a child’s ability to read at such a young age. More eloquently, “The Social and cultural backgrounds of students have a huge and undeniable effect on their learning” (Graves et al. 2011, p.11). What kind of differences could arise from a difference in background? A positive reading background may mean parents or babysitters who read to the children from a young age, parents from higher socioeconomic statuses or with higher level jobs where children hear a more diverse vocabulary, or children who are encouraged to have and use their own library cards. A negative reading background could look more like a home where parents come home from long hours exhausted and turn on the television rather than read books, parents with limited vocabularies or who don’t speak English at home, or children who do not visit their public libraries. These differences could even be more subtle and certainly more varied, but either background is likely to have an effect on how the child learns and views reading.

The complication comes with how to teach students from all upbringings. Teaching two students with completely different childhoods regarding reading cannot yield the same results. These preexisting differences that children may not even know are present require teachers to take the time to learn about the literacy history of the families, even on a basic level, to better teach the children in their classes. My fear is that they aren’t. While it has been a while since I was undergoing the process of learning to read, I do not remember much differentiation based on preexisting differences. How can children living in New Mexico read and comprehend a story on a standardized test about building a snowman the same way a child from North Dakota? How can a child whose family only speaks Spanish at home be expected to know as many vocabulary or spelling words as a child from an English speaking family? How can a love a reading be instilled in a child who goes home to a family that never reads compared to KiKi from the Jones family, who reads every night? They’re tricky questions, but questions that need to be addressed regardless. Everyone deserves to learn to read, but not everyone is going to learn the same way or in the same timeframe, and that is the important thing to remember. Hopefully, as this semester continues, we will learn about how we can accommodate for these differences in our future students.

Graves, M. F., et al. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Johnson, A. S. (2010). The Jones Family's Culture of Literacy. The Reading Teacher, 33-44.