Teaching Kids to Read

Embracing Guided Reading in Primary School Classrooms

Gail Saunders-Smith

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781510770164
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Méthodes pédagogiques

"A solid resource to help teachers understand the basic foundation for literacy development through guided reading in the primary grade." —Patti Ulshafer, first-grade teacher Develop successful readers with these strategies for before, during, and after reading. In Teaching Kids to Read, Gail Saunders-Smithdescribes the cognitive processes of emergent readers and provides educators with clear guidelines for promoting reading comprehension with small groups of young learners. A variety of exercises included helps children to locate, record, retrieve, and manipulate information from texts while enablingteachers to measure how students respond in oral, written, graphic, and three-dimensional forms. Topics covered include:

• Aliteracy
• Coaching statements
• Elements of craft
• False positive readers
• Fresh text
• Guided reading
• Instructional practice
• Metacognition
• Phonemic awareness
• Self-monitoring
• Shared reading
• Sight words
• Study skills
• Teacher talk
• Workable words
• and more!

Part I

Foundations

Chapter One

How Learning Happens

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

The good news is that we are wired for learning. Our species has continued this long that we must be designed for survival. So how do we make the most of this penchant for learning? Learning theory after learning theory after learning theory has been offered throughout the ages. This chapter investigates one such theory.

In walking, attaching one step to another gets you somewhere. In learning, attaching one bit of knowledge to another gets you somewhere. When we attach new information to existing information, we construct understanding. Connections between smidgens of knowledge are like scaffolds—you know, those lengths of wood or metal that attach to each other to form a sturdy foundation upon which to work. Generally, the teacher aligns the planks or bars and works to ensure that they are connected in the students’ minds. Over time, the scaffolds eventually become bridges from one bit of knowledge to the next.

What are these bits of understanding? All lessons that result in some form of learning contain five parts:

• concepts
• skills
• vocabulary
• strategies
• behaviors

These five elements form current and next learning. In this chapter, we look closely at the first three items on the list. Strategies and behaviors will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3.

LEARNING AS A SCAFFOLDING PROCESS

The bits of understanding that one has control over—that can be used, in other words—form the foundation of current knowledge. Our job as teachers is to determine the specifics of which concepts, skills, vocabulary, and strategies each child has control over and can use. Like all humans, children know a lot more than they use, so we need to assess how much the children use of what they know. We also need to measure the degree to which they use it and the level of alacrity with which they use it.

We have to do these things so that we can know what the child needs next. The operative word here is next. We cannot provide what children need because they need everything. The best we can hope for is to provide what they need next. Once we know what they have in place, we can determine which concept, skill, vocabulary, or strategy they need next. The new learning is attached to existing learning. Figure 1.1 illustrates this process.

Figure 1.1 Learning as a Scaffolding Process

CONCEPTS

Concepts are what the children are going to learn about from a particular text. The concept is generally the theme in fiction and the specific content in nonfiction. The teacher needs to be clear about what the children are expected to learn from an instructional text, and should tell them what the book is about. This single simple bit of knowledge arms them with a shelf of understanding prior to encountering the book. Knowing what the book is about sets up an array of expectations and corridors of access, and prepares the reader to interact with the book more deeply and more immediately. Consider the following scenario:

A teacher walks around the room showing everyone the book Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White. It is the classic version with the traditional cover. The title is written in spiderweb-like print, and the dominant characters in the story are shown in the cover illustration, with the girl and the pig particularly prominent. The teacher tells the children that this will be their next read-aloud and that she is going to read a chapter every day after lunch. She tells them they will enjoy this story because it is one of her favorites. She reads them the title, the author’s name, and the illustrator’s name. Then she asks the timeless, universal question: “What do you think this story is about?”

Why do we ask children this question? What are we really asking for? When did this ritual become a good idea? When questioned, teachers generally say something about “having children use prior knowledge” or “having children make predictions.” But are the children really drawing on prior knowledge? Really predicting? You be the judge.

Suppose one child raises his hand and asks, “Is it about a girl named Charlotte?” Is he drawing on prior knowledge? Is he predicting? He uses the two slivers of information he has: the title of the book, which often provides a hint and in this case contains a girl’s name, and the illustration, which contains a dominant figure who happens to be a girl. He puts those two bits of information together and, using his prior knowledge that Charlotte is a girl’s name, decides that the book must be about a girl. But is Charlotte’s Web about a girl? No, as the teacher explains to this little guy, a girl is in the story, but the story is not about that girl. So, was the child predicting? Nope. He was just guessing. He had only those two slivers of information, which were not enough to make an accurate prediction. He was using prior knowledge, but not in the way the teacher had hoped.

Suppose another child raises his hand and says, “Is it about a pig named Charlotte?” This child uses three bits of information: the title, the illustration, and his classmate’s error. This fellow discounted the name as strictly a girl’s name and went with the possibility of it being the name of the second dominant figure, the pig. Clever, yes, but still not right. (Not that being right is important.) These children are not even in the ballpark. The teacher knows it is time to move on when the third child raises her hand and asks, “Is it about Charlotte’s Web site?”

So, what is the difference between making predictions and guessing? Guessing happens when we have minimal bits of information. Predictions require personal input. Predictions are schema events. Ah, schema—a scary graduate school word! Merriam-Webster’s defines it as “a mental codification of experience that includes a particular organized way of perceiving cognitively and responding to a complex situation or set of stimuli.” I prefer my own definition: the sheet of fabric that billows behind us as we walk through life. Everything we encounter either sticks to or slides off the sheet; the stickier our sheet, the more that adheres—events, impressions, everything. The more that sticks, the stickier our sheet becomes. What lingers on our schema sheet serves as a sieve, shaping all thoughts and ideas as they pass through.

So predictions, as opposed to guesses, are based on more than fragments of data. But back to the Charlotte. . . . What is Charlotte’s Web about? No, it is not about a spider either! The girl, the pig, and the spider are all characters, and like most stories, the book is not about characters. Stories are generally about something bigger than the characters—an idea, a theme. This concept is what the characters live in, work toward, demonstrate, personify. Charlotte’s Web is about friendship. There, that’s the concept: friendship, and all that is friendship.

Think about how the children might have responded if the teacher had told them, “This is a story about friendship.” Their brains would have done a file search for “friendship” and come back with all sorts of friendship-related ideas and experiences. They would have been so much better prepared to make predictions. Their thinking would have been so much more centered and driven.

Now, back to our scenario. Let’s suppose the teacher has finally let on that the book is about friendship. The conventional question at this point would be something like, “Have you ever had a friend?” Now why in the world would anyone ask such a thing? Of course the children have had a friend. Instead of asking a “have you ever” question, we need to go directly to the point and tell the children, “You know about friendship.”This focuses their thinking and immediately engages them, rather than causing them to ponder a yes-or-no question. At this point, when the children are wrapped up in the idea, the teacher needs to say, “Tell me what you know about friendship.” Here the children begin to share relevant experiences, define friendship, describe friends, and pretty much build a profile of what it all means. Now they are ready to make predictions—predictions that are on target and meaningful. This is powerful thinking. This builds on the existing scaffolding—it sets the stage for learning.

SKILLS

Skills are behaviors we learn that we can use for a greater good. They are useful only within a context: learning skills in isolation makes them useful only in isolation. Skills are nuts and bolts that enable us to hold together words, sentences, paragraphs, stories, ideas, and understandings. Having control of skills enables us to process more information, and to process it more accurately and quickly. We will discuss three types of skills here: literacy skills, study skills, and comprehending skills.

Literacy Skills

Literacy skills fall into several subsets—reading skills, writing skills, listening skills, and s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part I: Foundations
• Part II: Techniques
• Part III: Putting It All Together
• Glossary
• Resource List
• Bibliography