Blog Post #4 Routman Chapter 4 Teach With a Sense of Urgency

        We must make every moment count and utilize every second in a way that is productive to our student’s learning.  We have to maintain high expectations for all of our students and provide activities where student’s are engaged in higher level thinking and problem solving.  It is our job to help support our students to become more independent.  The author in this chapter outlines the optimal learning model.  There are four phases of learning; demonstration, shared demonstration, guided practice, and independent practice.  When this model is used the students are equipped with the knowledge of how to learn on their own and are responsible for their learning.  This is hard as a 4k teacher to make this shift from teacher to student.  We tend to be hesitant to give our students the freedom to work towards independence.  We must teach our students skills and strategies to help to guide them to work independently.  We need to provide our students with experiences that make learning enjoyable and meaningful.  It is important to focus more on the process rather than the product.  I agree that we need to not teach skills in isolation.  This may limit our students

learning possibilities.  In the past we have focused on a letter of the week.  We have moved away from this practice and are trying to integrate phonemic awareness throughout our day.  We are trying to make these experiences more meaningful to the children by for example focusing on initial letters of classmate’s names and working on having literacy rich classroom environments. 

           The author stresses how we need to do more interactive reading where we are allowing children to talk about the text during the reading.  I believe that we are doing a good job with this by allowing our students to do “turn and talks” during read alouds.  This increases student engagement when they are given the time to share and talk with their peers about the text.  This practice will help to aid in student’s comprehension about the text.