How do we impress upon all students that reading at any age takes practice and work?
I'm not entirely sure how to effectively impress upon students that reading at any age takes practice or work. However, in the past I did want to impress on students that reading is just not for school. To do this I created a reading bulletin board that kept track of titles of books teachers were reading throughout the year. The goal of this was to show students that it is possible to find time to read, that even as adults it is difficult to do at times but that the benefits of doing so are so fulfilling that it should take priority over getting sucked down a YouTube or TikTok hole for hours.
What stood out to you in these chapters? so
Two things really stood out to me during these chapters, the first one being the Idea of "decoding x oral language comprehension = reading comprehension" (p. 17) I thought the way Beers described this was simple and effective. There is no way to lack in either decoding or oral language and still be proficient in reading comprehension. When I think of oral language I think of all the books that are read aloud to my children. On average we read 90-100 books a month, so by the end of the year my children have listened to 1200 books. Granted we do get some favorites in there that are repeated, many times but I think of the children that have adults in their lives that don't prioritize reading. Think of all the words they are not learning and the vocabulary they are not obtaining!
Secondly, early on in the book I took in the stat that "approximately 23 percent of children's fiction features characters of color, 50 percent features white characters, and 27 percent features talking animals". (p. xi) This in itself brings up the notion that if readers are not seeing themselves in books, it might make it harder for them to do one of the following, enjoy reading or understand the reading. When I look at released NYS questions, one thing I am always taking into consideration is the topics they are having students read. So many of my students have not been on an airplane, smelled the ocean, been to a big city or experienced a different climate. When passages are focused around these experiences, my students are already at a disadvantage because they have no knowledge to pull from. However, one way that I can combat this is by giving students different opportunities to read and virtually explore various settings. This at least opens up a conversation about how, where we live is different from other parts of the state, country or world.
How does the Science of Reading impact your instruction?
Most recently when I am thinking about the Science of Reading, I am thinking about the foundation of skills that my oldest child will need in order to be a successful reader. As the book states on page 19-20, the Science of Reading shoes that young children should recieve instruction on six areas including: Phonological awareness, Phonics & word reconition, Fluency, Vocabulary, Oral language comprehension and Text Comprehension. Upon further analysis of these areas it, unfortunately, has come to my attention that many students that I have in seventh grade are struggling with at least two of these areas. WIth this being the case I have spent some time working on vocabulary within my classroom. What this looks like is I introduce the word, then use it in a variety of sentences. Once this is done, I have students write their own definition using clues that were provided in the sentences I previously used. After we share with partners and with the class, students must write a sentence using the word correctly. Another thing that is on my mind when I am considering the deficiencies of reading of my students, is the type of text passages I pick for them. I take into consideration the text complexity, words used and length of reading. With so many struggling readers longer passages will be quite tiring due to the effort it takes them to decode words and meanings. Overall, I am looking forward to reading more in depth about this topic in Chapter 15.