March Blogpost - Laurie Smith - Routman (2003), Ch. 12: You Only Have So Much Time

I found this chapter very applicable to my life as a teacher.  Too often I feel as though there is never enough time to get done all of the things that are expected of us as teachers these days.  There is always something new being added to our “to do” list and it feels like we are losing important teaching time and taking our school work home to work overtime and get everything done that is expected.  Between all the assessments and data collection it is easy to feel bogged down.  This chapter helped me to see that not everything is as urgent as we make it.  Not everything has to be as hard as we sometimes make it.  Our teaching lives should be simple and more efficient by spending more time thinking.  Robin Woods stated:

“I am learning that good teaching doesn’t have to mean lots of hours.  Instead, it requires lots of thinking – thinking about what matters to kids, thinking about what kids need to know, and thinking about how they can be taken to the next level.  My husband will now see me spend less time at school or grading papers and hear me think aloud more about my students and how I’m approaching instruction.  I’d never really thought about how being a good teacher could mean having more time at home with my family.”

I never really considered that all the thinking I do about things I want to do in my classroom is actually a form of planning.  Does this also mean that all the time I spend perusing Pinterest for ideas for my classroom counts as planning?  I guess it does.  This is great news to me since I love Pinterest!   It is also important to keep work meaningful to our students, so that they will “happily engage in work that is connected to their lives and in projects in which they can see value.”  I like the idea of using every portion of our day, including transitions as teaching opportunities, keeping a quick pace when teaching to help hold our students attention to keep them engaged since their attention span is less than 10 minutes before they need a break.  I very much agree with the idea that our struggling students who get pulled for “skill and drill” programs are missing instruction that they need most and should never be pulled from read aloud and shared reading time.  Instead they should be pulled during science and social studies because language development is very important for our struggling students.  It is important that we, as teachers, “cultivate a love of learning.”  We should always evaluate how we are using our time and help our student develop a true love of learning by focusing on strengths.  I’m with Jim Popham in saying:

“If I were obliged to choose between students’ love of learning and their mastery of any collection of cognitive content standards, I’d choose the former every time.  Amen.”

March/April Blogpost  (Lisa L. Smith)  CDC

“Teach with a Sense of Urgency” from Reading Essentials by Reggie Routman

Making every second count in the classroom and in instruction is a key element to ensuring that we are helping students to reach their potential as readers.  What exactly do we need to do to make sure we are developing excellent readers? 

·         Introduce all kinds of genres

·         Have multiple books the students like and that are at their levels

·         Read good literature to them

·         Share our love of literature

·         Give students time to talk or share about their reading

·         Set aside significant time blocks for reading

·         Give children choice

·         Tell students that they are readers

·         Make reading fun

·         Model

·         Link reading to the curriculum

The above are key things we as teachers can do to ensure that students have the best possible opportunity to grow as readers.  We must be the model for students then share demonstrations with students, allow guided practice and finally independent practice.  It is this scaffolding that will help them grow to reach their potential.  The demonstration process can happen while the teacher thinks aloud as she reads books, perhaps wondering and looking for questions to the wonderings.  Later in shared demonstration and guided practice, the students are invited to work with the teacher or a partner or group then do the same thing.  The process is then taken a step further when students are allowed to independently practice what they have learned. 

The article further talks about integrating skills into curriculum instead of teaching skills in isolation.  It is essential to focus on language acquisition and not letters and letter sounds alone.  It is amazing how the skills come up in books and charts about the topic of interest. 

Interactive reading which encompasses allowing the students to talk about a book that is currently being read, not just after the book is read, allows deeper comprehension and engagement.  When reading stories to the students, I use it as a time to focus on author’s craft, story structure, and other literary elements.  I might ask questions like, based on what we already know, what do you think the problem or conflict of the story might be? 

Writing is also a key element in the process.  There should be a deep connection between the reading and the writing.  The author gives multiple examples of good practice of reading-writing activities. 

I found this chapter to be very enlightening.  Not that I didn’t know many of the things that were said, but it was affirming that I was on the right track in many areas.  However, it gave me pause that I do not always connect reading and writing as well as I could.  I enjoyed looking at the examples that were provided and hope to implement some of them into my instructional practice.  I think I do a good job with the read aloud element, modeling, demonstration, and shared demonstration.  I even think that I am doing an adequate, but not amazing job with the guided practice.  Where I am sorely lacking is setting up appropriate structure for independent practice and monitoring the growth during that process.  This will be an area that I will look to improve as I continue to grow as a literacy educator.  

Jennifer Campbell, Blogpost #7: Routman Ch. 10: Examine Guided Reading

In this chapter Routman discusses how to set up guided reading in the classroom.  Students in first grade and above will usually participate in guided reading groups that are based on ability, interests, and other factors.  She mentions that in K5 guided reading may not exist and instead the teacher may teach through whole group instruction, conferencing with students, and occasional small groups.  I really appreciate when she says “..increased pressure on teacher to have children reading in kindergarten has often meant limiting or usurping such crucial activities as playing, building with blocks, painting, acting out stories, and even reading nonfiction and fiction aloud.”. 

 As a K4 teacher I do break my students up into small groups to read simple repeating books, but mostly we are working on reading during whole group instruction.  Routman suggests using a daily morning message, read-alouds, book walks, and a variety of writing opportunities (journals, charts, labels, etc.).  One activity that I learned at a workshop is called “Pictures With Vocabulary.  I have a picture taped onto chart paper and the students spot things in the picture for me to label.  They then help me sound out the words and figure out how to spell them.  It was recommended to use as a way to introduce students to unfamiliar vocabulary and expose them to new things.  Before reading this chapter, it never occurred to me that this is considered a more age appropriate replacement for guided reading for younger children. 

Chapter 9 Emphasize Shared Reading Meredith Cox

Chapter 9 Emphasize Shared Reading

Shared reading is probably one of my most favorite parts of my day.  This time of day is one my students always look forward to.  This is a time where we practice phonemic awareness, model good reading strategies, and retell and act out stories.  Shared reading is such a powerful teaching tool.  I believe that in the earlier grades we do a great job of having shared reading experiences build into our daily schedule.  Sometimes in later grades this key component of reading instruction in lost. 

While I do like some components of our Creative Curriculum, I feel that it is lacking in shared reading aspect.  I feel that a good deal of the books are too wordy and above my students level.  My students do not have the background knowledge to understand or comprehend these books.  I also do not like how the framework is laid out in the curriculum where we do not read a book over a period of time.  In my opinion reading books over and over to children helps to build confidence for children to be able to read the book on their own and grasp important details.  In another district where I taught kindergarten we used Rigby Literacy.  This program came with tons of big books and we read the same book over a period of two weeks during our shared reading time.  After I was finished using the book during my shared reading teaching time, I would place it in my library center.  It was great to see my students use some of the same strategies they had learned over the past two weeks and they were pretending to be in the teaching role.  I absolutely love big books and wish that creative curriculum had more of a selection.