Katie Miller - Jan/Feb Blog

Routman Chapter 4
Teach with a Sense of Urgency

This article made me think about my top five things I do to ensure students become excellent readers.  My list included:

1.       Teach strategies (phonics, sight words, and comprehension)

2.       Allow time for independent reading

3.       Allow time for students to share what they read

4.       Assess and conference with students about their progress

5.       Share my love for reading through discussions and reading with my students

I do a lot of demonstration in the My Sidewalks Curriculum.  The program provides direct instruction with phonics skills, identifying high frequency words, and comprehension strategies.  I personally struggle with fully giving up that control as a teacher.  I support the idea of students being in charge of their learning, but I am having a difficult time with this.  Most of students have shown a lot of success in our direct instruction program. 

After reading about the shared demonstration, I think this is what my classroom mostly looks like on a typical day.  This has allowed me to differentiate my instruction more to meet the needs of all of my students.  Even in my small groups, the needs and learning styles vary greatly.

We do guided practice with our reading stories.  We talk about the pictures, make predictions, introduce difficult vocabulary, and access background knowledge.  I move from this to independent reading.  I have also incorporated partner and group reading.  This way students are allowed to collaborate to deeper their comprehension and practice reading skills that were previously taught.  I have seem my students become a lot more confident in their reading when they read with partners as opposed to reading aloud in class or with me.  With this, I have also seen higher level thinking and better comprehension. 

The section on working towards independence really made me think about a few of my second grade students that I have taught since they were in kindergarten.  One of my favorite parts of my job is being able to see students grow from kindergarten all the way to second grade.  I have always been the person they go to for help and the person who helps them with things that are difficult for them.  I have been really trying this year to make my students more independent.  I experienced success with this last week when working with a student after school.  This particular student has a very difficult time performing any task independently.  He is easily frustrated and gives us quickly.  I challenged him to complete a task independently without asking for my help.  To his surprise, he was able to complete the task successfully.  This has since improved his confidence and willingness to try new things.  Similar situations to this have happened with a few of my students this year and I am excited to see how this helps them with future success.  I know I need to do more to allow my students to be independent learners.

The section on teaching skills in isolation made think about spelling tests.  We made a change this year to not reduce student spelling lists but to rather change how they take their tests.  I have helped several students with spelling homework where they are asked to write a sentence with their spelling words.  More times than not, students have not been able to read the words on their spelling lists or use the words in a sentence.  For most of my students, they are making As and Bs on their spelling tests.  They are able to memorize how to spell their spelling words for that week and then lose most of that information after the test.  I have experienced a lot of frustration for my students.  They are experiencing that success from their grades, but what are they learning?  In turn, I have taken this frustration and changed how I do things in my classroom.  We used to assess phonics skills using individual words.  I now assess skills using passages and stories.  This shows if the students are able to apply what they know instead of recalling and reproducing what they have learned.

I think that interactive reading is very important.  So many different areas of comprehension can be covered during this activity.  My students typically comprehend more when we have conversations about the story while we read instead of after the story.  This also allows you to review vocabulary in context and basic concepts. 

I struggle with writing instruction, and I will be the first person to admit that.  My students struggle with writing.  I enjoyed reading about incorporating writing with reading.  They gave some great strategies and activities that I could try with my students. 

Our school has a high number of poverty-stricken students.  It made me sad to read about how little is expected out of these students.  I think we do a great job at FES reaching these students and providing them with a challenging and obtainable education.  I hope to better myself as a teacher to provide instruction with rich language that will challenge my students to become more independent, confident, and successful.