Let's Go Fishing

Recently, according to Lucero & Montanero (2012) in their article Rhetorical structure and graphic organizers: effects on learning from a history text research on reading comprehension has evolved from not only strategy teaching to the analysis of activities to promote constructive learning (Lucero & Montanero, 2012). In order to comprehend an academic text, readers are required to consistently evaluate, elaborate and review text information. These types of inferential activities will promote an active role in the student 's task and in turn improve the quality of the process. This aligns perfectly with the basic definition of inquiry learning. Again, this supports how teaching nonfiction reading strategies early on to elementary students will help them be successful within an inquiry based learning system. Lucero & Montanero (2012) suggest that some of these engagement activities teachers could use are summarizing, asking and answering text-based questions , thinking aloud during reading and designing graphic organizers to aid student comprehension (Lucero & Montanero, 2012).

In a previous lesson, the teacher demonstrated a “Think-Aloud” strategy with Gary Soto’s short story “Seventh Grade,” to teach students the elements of a plot. The teacher read the beginning of the story and then stopped to ask the students to identify information about the characters, the setting, and the background information that establishes the exposition of the plot. She repeated this process with the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the resolution. The students recorded notes and observations in a graphic organizer.

“A Read Aloud Curriculum integrates intentional direct comprehension and explicit vocabulary instruction into read alouds while maintaining the integrity of an authentic read aloud experience that would be highly engaging for students (Fien, et al., 2011).” The Read Aloud program is structures as to “(a) set a purpose for reading, (b) building vocabulary knowledge, (c) making text-to-text and text-to-life connections, and (d) having students retell stories or information on a regular basis (Fien, et al., 2011).” The problem is that Read Alouds by themselves do not help close the gap between children who enter school with strong vocabularies and children who enter school with weak vocabularies, accordingly the gap between students with strong and weak vocabularies only grows as the children progress through school. Another setback for students with weak vocabularies is that there is a direct link between word knowledge and comprehension, consequently the children with weak vocabularies will struggle with comprehension. Small-group instruction shows promise in improving student’s vocabularies thus improving their comprehension. By spending more time with the text and receiving instruction in a group of 2-5 students, those with weak vocabularies have shown improvement in their word knowledge and

How can teachers use exploratory talk to support the development of reading comprehension? Use examples from the fiction books to illustrate key points.

The book itself contained many questions for students to respond to. In addition to these questions found in the book, I asked students questions to activate and assess their prior knowledge. Some of the questions that are found in the book include “are you ready?” “what do you think will happen?” and “can you remember that?” These questions make it easy for the teacher because the text already includes questions that engage the students. Unlike my prior experience with this book being read aloud, I believe that student engagement and interaction is vital during any read aloud with younger students. The students will interact with the text by taking turns and doing what the text prompts them to do. All the students were very eager to respond to the questions and interact with the text.

* Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning about key events, ideas and information in texts that they listen to, view and read by drawing on growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features (ACELY1660), (ACARA, 2012). Learning to read is essentially learning to decode and understand the words/language written in the story and to construct meanings from those words (literacy) (Nicole & Roberts, 1993). The more language the children (and adults) hear and read the more developed their vocabulary will become (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998, Nicole & Roberts, 1993, Anderson et al, 1985). Reading fluency is enhanced with an enlarged

For the next read aloud I would definitely do things different. For an examples I would read the book aloud before I do it in front of the class, to see how long it takes. Then I would come up with questions and have the questions simple enough for them to understand whats being asked. But keep the question good enough for them to know if they comprehension the story. And ask questions throughout the story to keep their interest with me. I could tell some of the student was not interesting with the book I reading to them.

When Grace was asked comprehension questions during our first tutoring sessions, she was able to correctly answer comprehension questions by looking back at the pictures, but not based on what she had read. To improve her comprehension, tutoring sessions were used to help Grace become a purposeful and active reader. Before reading any books, she was asked to look at the cover of the book and to make connections with the book to things in her own life. She was then asked questions about the book and asked to make predictions on what she thought would happen in the book. After reading the book, Grace was asked to confirm or refute her predictions. Through working together to understand the books, making connections to the books, and looking for predictions, Grace is now able read a book with few pictures and correctly answer comprehension questions correctly more than 80% of the

Sometimes I have the girls read a page altogether, at times all the boys read at once, sometimes I read a page aloud and other times the east or west half of the class. I can see that this takes the attention of the student who isn’t such a good reader and it this strategy does well in my classroom. There is good comprehension questions listed in my teaching manual that I use. After the execution of the new joint center standards, I have learned that I should have the students review the story. This is an issue I plan to add to the lesson.

I believe the more I read and the more I write, the easier it is for me to comprehend what is being told in the story line. For example, in Dr. Seuss’s ABC book, I was able to comprehend which words began with each letter in the alphabet as the book contained pictures and examples of each letter. The book Ten Apples Up On Top! by Theo LeSieg helped me gain a knowledge and understanding of counting numbers as well as learning my colors. Each page in this book displayed an apple in bright red color with one or more apples on each page. By doing so, this taught me to count each apple on the page and the repetitive use of the red colored apple taught me the color red. I believe it is imperative that all readers gain a knowledge and understanding of words being used in their

In 2011, the professional journal, Theory Into Practice, included an article titled, “Comprehension as Social and Intellectual Practice: Rebuilding Curriculum in Low Socioeconomic and Cultural Minority Schools.” The authors, Allan Luke, Annette Woods, and Karen Dooley, focus on the issue of reshaping the reading curriculum, particularly comprehension, in diverse schools, such as low socioeconomic status and cultural minority. This article highlights a different view of comprehension and a new way to teach comprehension to diverse students to help them truly learn and grasp comprehension when reading. As I hope to become a leader, it is beneficial to learn about different curriculum developments and research the effects of the changes in different curriculums. I chose this article, because since I am a first grade teacher and I teach comprehension, I thought this may be helpful to me as an educator, as I could compare my curriculum of teaching comprehension to this article’s ideas of rebuilding their curriculum. In addition, I have students in my classroom that are diverse that could benefit from my new learning from the information in this article.

Students' comprehension of the text will be the dependent variable in this study. Comprehension will be measured using the student responses to the story questions. The questions and answers are coming from Benchmark Literacy. In this study, the students will not be given the opportunity to look back in the text to respond to any questions.

Viewing the “Comprehension” clip, reminded me of my own experience within the classroom. Mr. deLeon introduced vocabulary words such as evidence, decoy, and suspense to help students better comprehend what they’ll read. The teacher also activated the students’ prior knowledge of the words. When a word was hardier to understand, Mr. deLeon gave an anecdote for the word decoy. Teachers use many techniques to introduced vocabulary words in order for them to get a grasp on a text while reading. I read to the children daily, but before I review unfamiliar vocabulary before reading. I ask the class if they’ve ever heard the word before, and if so, if they can help me give definition to the meaning. This doesn’t guarantee students to fully understand

I found this article to be very informative about the process the teacher took the students through to assess their reading comprehension. It is well written and outlines very clearly the hurdles that the students had to overcome in the process. The findings were varied and realistic. The author provided quotes from the students that showed what challenges another teacher might be up against if implemented into her classroom. I especially found the section of the article on “Higher Level Thinking Skills” important, because it points about the types of higher level thinking that were taking place as the students worked on their art: metaphoric

Reading comprehension at a knowledge level is a complex task. Reading comprehension instruction that attempts to move students beyond the knowledge level to a place of true understanding is daunting at best and not something that can be left to guess work. A review of current literature in