Family Literacy Night

My school hosts a Family Literacy Night every year during the first week of March.  We invite students and their families to spend the evening celebrating reading and literacy.  The first grade classes usually open the evening with a couple of songs about books and reading.  Then we have break-out sessions.  Each session lasts 20 minutes and there are three different choices during each time slot.  Our evening involves presentations by the students, as much as possible.  They give book talks, present reader's theater, showcase book projects, or share research reports that they've done.  Our kindergarten teachers do a puppet show that is a big hit every year.  We have "Are You Smarter than a . . .(third grader, fourth grader, or fifth grader) where parents compete against their kids in answering test questions similar to those found on end-of-year tests.  The local public library is invited to share resources such as free e-books. One of the big hits of the evening are the free books that are given to each of our students and their pre-school age siblings.  These books are purchased with Title 1 funds.  There is a room assigned to each grade level where student can choose a book of their liking.  This evening also is the culmination of our One School, One Book project.  About a month ago, each family was given a copy of a novel, this year it was "The World According to Humphrey", along with a reading schedule.  Students have been winning prizes all month for correctly answering questions about the book.  At Family Literacy Night, the whole family gets to work together to answer questions about the book.  Prizes are given to the families with most correct answers.  The evening is capped off with ice cream.  As students and their families leave the building, they are all given ice cream sandwiches.  This evening has become an important tradition at our school, and is looked forward to by students and their parents, alike!

Reading Comprehension: Fix-up Strategies

Good readers automatically monitor their own comprehension.  They know when they don't understand the text, and they use various fix-up strategies to make sense of what they are reading.  Poor readers, however, often do not recognize that they don't understand.  They muddle through, reading in the same way and at the same rate, even though the text is meaningless to them.  Sometimes poor readers don't expect the words they read to make sense.  They are so used to failing at reading comprehension, that they don't know any different.  For these kids, explicit teaching of fix-up strategies is essential.  Listed below are strategies that can help poor readers improve comprehension.  They can be used separately, or in combination:

1.  Stop and re-read.  This is the most important fix-up strategy.  Don't just keep going if you don't  understand.  When you reread, you might find a word that you skipped or misread.  Sometimes a single word can make a huge difference. 

2.  Slow down.  Read slowly and carefully when things don't make sense.  Vary your reading rate, depending on your understanding.

3.  Question yourself as you read.  Think about whether or not the sentence or paragraph makes sense to you.  Could you retell it to someone in your own words?

4.  Read ahead a few sentences.  Maybe getting a little more information will make things clear and help with the confusion.

5.  Visualize.  Make your own movie in your head and "see" what is happening or what is being described.

4.  Figure out words you don't know.  Look for prefixes, suffixes, and base words.  Use a dictionary if you need to.

5.  Make predictions.  What do you think will happen next?  Check to see if your predictions were right.  Make new predictions as you read further and get more information.  Predicting can keep you focused on what is happening in the text.

6.  Look at pictures, diagrams, charts, and maps.  Read captions and sidebars.  Especially in expository text, a lot of understanding comes from sources other than the paragraphs. 

Struggling readers can benefit greatly from the explicit teaching of these strategies.

 

Reading Fluency

For decades, the battle of ideas has raged over reading instruction.  There are many ideas, opinions, and methods for achieving the same goal.  Many teachers and districts today use reading workshop.  That method is not well-accepted in my district.  Reading instruction in my district is very skills based and data-driven.  It is an approach that is working very well. 

One element of comprehensive reading instruction is building fluency.  A quick one-minute timing of a child's oral reading can yield a wealth of information.  Easy and inexpensive to administer, these timings provide a snapshot that is invaluable in collecting data and tracking student performance and learning trends over the course of the year.  Reading fluency has been shown to be a reliable predictor of performance on high-stakes tests.

Automaticity--how quickly and effortlessly a child can process words--is a key factor in identifying children who struggle and why they struggle.  During a fluency timing itt is easy to identify children who guess at words rather than decode them, children who don't read the endings of words, children who skip words, and so on.  Reading rate is important in measuring the extent of automaticity.

An effective way to build fluency is through repeated readings.  This method is research-tested and proven.  The child reads a passage cold, and the number of correct words per minute is recorded.  They then read through the passage with adult, and practice the same passage repeatedly until they are fluent.  They do a final timed-reading, which is recorded.  Students are able to compare their reading rates and accuracy rates from the first reading to the final one.  Seeing their own growth gives a big boost in confidence. Students who are struggling, start out with reading passages below their grade level.  As their automaticity improves, they progress to passages that are more difficult.