Silent Reading

Silent Reading two words that I did not like to hear my teacher say when I was in school. After I read the article about silent reading and the research that Michelle Kelly and Nicki Clausen-Grace I realized that I was not alone in this thinking. The article mentioned that at first look the class may look normal and like they are reading but that is not the case at for all students. Some students are constantly moving around and others are flipping the pages and reading some of the words but they do not really understand the words. This reminds me of exactly what I did when it was time for silent reading came. I would go to my spot but I would just flip through the book and look at the pictures until the time was for the reading time. I also noticed students doing the same types of things that the article talks about in my Block 1 field experience in a 2^nd grade class. When I asked the teacher what he did for independent reading he said that the use an AR reading system. In this system the student has to read a book multiple times with someone like a parent or guardian they also do the same thing independently and at the end they take a test  on the book to see if they pass and can move on to another book. Still even with this kind of a system there were still students that during the times that were set aside for them to read they still did not read the books. This was something I talked about with the teacher and said that the system they use has rewards and incentives for the students to want to follow the system but he also said that he cannot make them read the books.

Another quote from the article that I saw as very interesting was this “research that suggests a powerful link between time spent reading and reading achievement.” (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Guthrie, Wigfield, Metsala, & Cox, 1999) I agree with this idea completely because it is something that I have seen as well as noticed in my own life. It just makes sense if you spend more time reading then it should help your reading achievement. This idea was also supported by the research that was done in the article in the 3^rd grade class. The research showed significant differences between students that were labeled as the better more engaged readers and there test scores compared to the students that do not take as much time reading so there scores were considerably lower. As a teacher you would love for your students to all be like that and learn easily. Your job would be easy if that was the case but that is almost never the case.

The articles also mentions D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read) that was something that I vividly remembered from elementary school and the fact that I did not enjoy it very much may be why it stands out for me. It just never made much sense to me why I had to do something like it. The article offers an alternative to the ideas that things like DEAR and SSR promote and replaces them with the R 5 process. Read, relax, reflect, respond, and rap this is the process that the students follow. The students go through the process three days a week for 10-25 minutes. That to me seems like a good thing to implement in my classroom in the future because it seems like something that would help my students.

The authors of the article made sure to point out that sustained silent reading has many good points but also so negative points as well. One of the good points about sustained silent reading is that it is designed for students to practice reading at their independent level. They also talked about the weaknesses that sustained silent reading has one of the main ones being that students in this system often read the inappropriate reading material that is either too hard or too easy. Many students in this system are unable to engage in their test because they do not have the skills needed to comprehend the text.

As a teacher when you are using sustained silent reading you should be reading along with the students. I do not mean that you should read to them but read silently along with the students. The teacher is supposed to be a role model for the students of what they should be doing at that time. In my view the students have the same role as the teacher do. By this I mean that the students should be role models for each other of what they should be doing at this time. They should also make sure that they pick a book that is the proper level for them and not too easy or too hard.

When I was thinking about our reading assessment project and how it would connect to the article. This is what I came up with the article is about silent reading and how it should be used in the classroom properly. The project is about assessing students on their reading levels of a student. In the project we are supposed to create a list of books that would fit that student’s level of reading. This is how silent reading could connect because the student could use the list of books during the independent reading time.

Acrostic Poems

In class the other day, we spoke about how when teaching poetry, most teachers stick with poems by Shel Silverstein and Dr. Sues. The main reason they use these poets is because they use rhyming poetry and it is easy for children to understand. Instead of showing them that there are different types of poetry and help them to know that rhyming is not just the only type of poetry that they can read and write. If they just use rhyming even though it may be easy to they will eventually making up words to try to rhyme for there poems and taking away from the point of the writing. It is critical to show different types of poems so they will not just write off poetry as something that is just rhyming and nothing more than that.

The article that we had to read was about talked about acrostic poems. When I was in second grade we did poems like this to introduce ourselves to the class. The article says that using it acrostic poems in second grade for studying life cycles, third grade for studying continents, fourth grade for learning about pirates, and fifth grade for learning about the Underground Railroad. I liked that it mentioned using it through out grade levels that is good because it shows that it is not something that is used in just lower grade levels. The way that the article says that you should teach acrostic poems is something that I really liked about this article. It says that the experience should be a hands on kind of thing not just this is the way that you have to do it you get to have experience in doing which I believe helps the students to learn how to do it. If you teach them hands on it allows for the students to be more creative. In the article it shows that the teacher guides the students how to create an acrostic poem and then the students create their own and then they revise that on that they made using more descriptive language and if it applies to the topic the will check the order of the events in the poem.

This is something that I see myself using in my classroom probably to start the class to introduce them selves as well as introduce acrostic poems. I may get them to use them to help them in other subject to help them to remember things better. It seem like a very good resource for using in a classroom to help students.

Poetry

When I heard that we were going to have to read a book with poems in it I thought this is not going to be good. When I started reading I was really related with Jack because I never liked writing poems because I just did not enjoy it at all. The thing that was different about reading this book was the fact that they were short easy to read poems and they talked about things exactly how I would have when I was younger.

Another thing that was different about this book was the fact that when I started reading it was the first book in a long time that I had trouble putting the book down. I read the majority of the book before I ever even started writing any of this blog response.

I think that if I had of read a book like this when I was in elementary school I may have been able to enjoy poetry more. When I was reading this I caused me to want to right some poetry in my writers journal instead of only right this is what happened I wrote a poem about something that I did it was not very long but it got to the point of what I was trying to do.

I realized when I was reading this that I do not hate poetry like I thought that I did before if it is written in ways like Jack wrote his. In a way that you do not even realize that you are writing and or reading a poem like I realized in this book. I did not realized like I normally do when I am reading something that I do not enjoy I was just so engaged in the poems and the topics of the poems that I really enjoyed myself and would not mind reading or using a book like this in my classroom to help the students that are like me to not feel like that they can’t write poetry or do not like it because it has converted me. I know that I am not the only one that thinks this way and feels this way about poetry because I have seen it in my experience in classrooms because the students do not seem as engaged in the topics because they do not like poems. I am glad that I had to read this book and I really enjoyed it and will defiantly use it in the future.

Kneading Notebooks

I was thinking about which one of these strategies I could use to go along with one of my journal entries. This was difficult at first until I got to my entry about my cousin’s football game. I thought I could use writing from another point of view. This was the obvious answer because it would be easy to think about the game from the view of the other team but now that I think about it I could have just wrote from the point of view of one of our players or our coach or even the referee that would have made things interesting that is an idea for another entry in my journal. It was easy to write from the view of the other team because it was the opposite of what I thought about the game. In my original entry I talked about how the game was just terrible because we got killed obviously someone on the other team would have seen it a different way. In my entry from the other teams view I said things like we played very well I even went to the point of being one of the kids relatives so I said things like “Mike was unstoppable this week he dominated the defense they did not know what to do with him”. I just talked about things like that I talked about how great the game was and how good our time played completely different from how I wrote the original entry.

Hot Blogging

After I read this article I made me change my thinking about blogs. Before I was not to sure about using a blog as a part of my class but now I am considering because I see how you could do so many different things with it. I am not say it is something that I would make as a mandatory thing for my class but I may use it as a class activity so they could get experience using technology. I would not give the students homework unless I knew for a fact that all of the students had access to a computer and internet so that they could do the assignments. I would also make sure that I went over how to use the blog before I ask the students to do things on there own or at least have them show that they could work independently. I think that this idea of using a blog in a classroom to help students is a very good idea but I just not sure that I would use that as the only way to get students to use technology although it is a good way. I wish I had of read this article before I started my blogs because it would have been easier then me just using trail and error to figure out how to do things. This article did teach me somethings that I did not know about the blog which was very helpful and will be very helpful in the future working with blogs.

After I checked out some of the ways that blogging is being used in classrooms I learned somethings that would be helpful in a classroom. For example posting things about project that are going on in the class would be helpful in many ways. It would help the parents to know what is going on in there child’s class and stay connected with those kind of things.  This is helpful for students as well because if they are sick one day they are able to see what they missed and they will not feel so left out in class the next day because they were able to see exactly what the class did that day. Another thing that I noticed was that with a blog for the class you could get the students to create one for themselves and talk to each other and comment on things that other people in the class post on there. This helps them to learn things about each other and find out things that they have in common with each other that they may not have known about that person with out finding out on there blogs. After looking at how other teachers are using blogs it has made me think that it is a great resource to use in a classroom for the students, parents and teachers.

Response to Readings ( Sign up for Reading and Zorgamazoo )

I really like the article  Sign up for Reading: Students Read Aloud to the Class because it I know if I had of done something like this when I was in school I would not have minded reading in class because I would have had time to prepare if there was a list to sign. This is a way for students to get confidence in reading and speaking in front of people. I know for me I learn and remember more when I hear things aloud this is how a lot of children learn that same way.

The book Zorgamazoo is a good book. I liked it but I do think that it is a book that should be a read in moderation. The rhyming gets kind of annoying after a while but it is a good book. If I was going to use a book like this in my class I would read just a section of it a day so that the rhyming does not over whelm the children because I know if it did me then it will elementary children as well. I would take breaks when I was reading the book to keep me from losing focus on the book and what was going on in it.

Notebook Know-How pages 1-15

When I first heard about this assignment that it was not something that I was going to look forward to because reading is not really something that I enjoy doing. My thoughts changed when I started actually reading the assignment because it made me think back about my time in elementary school when we had a writing journal for class. It was something I was good at but I just did not want to do it. So I really related to Chance even though my teachers told me that I was good at writing but I just did not want to. So I would just do the minimum I always asked “how long does it have to be”.

Now think as a teacher this idea of a writers notebook it is a way to allow students to express things in there own way and be creative in what they do in there notebooks. It also gives them some where to talk about things that they may not be able to talk about with other people. As  teacher I would see me using this type of thing in my class so the students will be able to practice writing.