April Hollis- "Laying the Foundations" Blog #2

The article “Laying the Foundations” confirmed what I knew to be true. Teaching a balanced approach to ELA is essential in creating lifelong readers and writers.

At the beginning of my teaching career I thought children should be taught to sound out unfamiliar words, but the article pointed out that this is a misconception. It made perfect sense that when children try to sound out words they may end up mispronouncing the word altogether. Which is exactly what my students would often do. I agree that children need to have a grammatical understanding, structural language, knowledge, experience, letters, sounds, and graphophonics in order to be a successful reader.

In addition, students become better readers when they are exposed to a balanced literacy classroom in which a read aloud, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading are all taking place. As a classroom teacher I learned quickly that students need to see how reading works. Teachers have to model how to read and guide students in the right direction. It became evident that students, no matter the age, enjoy when their teacher reads them a book. Some of my students would say, “Mrs. Hollis made that story come alive.” Comments like that are exactly what a good educator loves to hear. Not only did I make the reading come alive but through questioning and discussion I made my students think about what I was reading. I was extremely impressed with the way Johnson broke down the educators role as well as the students role with a read aloud, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading. This explanation made it clear as to what should be happening in a balanced literacy classroom.