EDLI635 Theory and Practice of Literacy Instruction

Running Record                                        By: Caroline Gellis I did the running record on a sweet student. I called her aside toward the end of class and told her about the running record. She seemed very nervous. I did not want her to be nervous as I wanted her to do her best. So first I started asking her a few questions about reading. I asked her what stories she likes to read in class and about how the classroom library works. I asked her to tell me about her favorite book. Once I felt that she had warmed up, I began telling her about the running record. I introduced her to the characters and showed her on a map where Japan is. I gave her the running record and she did well. She started off a bit slow and unsure but as she progressed she picked up confidence and speed. I was happy that I gave her time in the beginning as I felt that had she been uncomfortable ...

   What texts and materials do teachers have in their classrooms that support students' development of fluent reading? Teachers should have a variety of books and texts on different levels for students to read. They should model proper reading so students should know how a fluent reader sounds. How do they select vocabulary to teach in all areas of your curriculum? The teacher selects vocabulary from the content that she is teaching that day. the new words can be from texts the students are independently reading or from are listening to in a read aloud. Words can also be from other subjects such as social studies, history etc. How much time do they allocate to word study? The amount of time can vary. Some days a teacher may want to do a whole lesson on words and strategies. Other days, the word can be a pulled from a book or a different lesson and it will not take a lot of time. What word study routines do they teach and encour...

1.       Explain the three levels of words and how you can use word levels to decide which words to teach. The first level is familiar words, words that students can read easily such as run, look, bed. The second level is words that appear often in print, on the news and in conversation such as democracy and freeway. These are the main focus of literacy instruction. The teacher need not present them as a separate lesson but can draw the words from materials that the students are learning. By pulling words from tests students are reading or learning, teachers also help students comprehension.  The third level is highly technical words which are left to the specific subject teacher. 2.       How do you teach your students to "chunk" words as a strategy for decoding unfamiliar words? When do you provide this instruction? A way to decode unfamiliar words is to look at chunks. If you are stuck with a long or hard word, you can...

1.       How can you ensure that your struggling readers have access to texts they can easily read? In my classroom, I have a library and once a week we have library time and students can take up to three books home to read. The books are labeled according to levels and I guide each student in the direction of her level. 2.       How can you foster a learning environment in which students have many opportunities to practice reading? I think that if reading is a teacher’s focus, she can find many opportunities throughout the day to get students to read. I try to write simple instructions that students learn to read and understand on their own. During reading time, I read to the students, we read together and then they read to themselves or in groups and I listen. When we are learning other subjects I will often ask the students, “What does this say?” or “Who can read and understand the sign in the picture?” Etc. 3.  ...

View my lesson plan  HERE

View my lesson plan  HERE!

Moshe is a ten year old ESL student. I began teaching him to read and write a couple of months ago. His accuracy rate is 92% which is instructional, but his self-correction rate is only 1:6. He is not self-monitoring his reading sufficiently. Though he has made great progress, the fact that he is not fluent in English slows down his learning considerably.  Most of his mistakes seem to be visual. Understandably, he did not have many structural or meaning mistakes as it takes him time to understand the meaning of the sentence. I would, therefore, focus on practicing his knowledge of the different and distinct shapes of the letters. Most of his mistakes were confusing letters with similar sounds. For example, he confused “f” and “t,” which is the same letter reversed. He confused “k” with “x” and “a” with “u,” which  do look similar. I divided our mini-lesson into two parts. In the first part, I concentrated on the story he had read. First, he drew and labeled the characte...