When I first read the title of this chapter I was thinking "my kids need to learn study skills" because mine will be in middle school before I know it. The key questions we have to instill with our children is when to study, where to study, and the amount of time to spend studying. These are such difficult things for children to learn because they always want to be doing something else more fun but in order to be truly successful throughout the more difficult classes they take they need to learn how to study. It's such valuable habits to build before making it to high school and college. Of course we can always find something better to do (I have this problem as well) but we have to learn the importance of these study habits. I had never heard of the SQ3R technique with the five steps for studying: survey, question, read, recite, or recall and review. The key thing you need to do as the teacher is to model your thinking and process of studying. Students need to see and hear what is expected of them. Following directions is hard for students when they are to listen for them. I find myself having to repeat directions several times and I just don't understand sometimes what my students are doing when I'm giving them directions. I see that I need to train them for following directions with some of the steps given in the chapter. "Asking questions is an important part of learning," (p.328) and I could not agree more. I think students that are asking questions are more engaged and truly are wanting to clarify what has been taught. It is also extremely important for us as teachers to be very strategic with our questions for students to help guide our instruction in the direction we have planned. With the way our school systems work now test-taking strategies are extremely important for our students. I am going to take the idea from the book about posting these in the classroom. I think it's important for students to lose the fear of testing and feel confident going in. This chapter was very helpful in guiding me through what types of things I should put more focus on with my fifth grade students.
Chapter 14- Partnering with Parents
This chapter started out with "Parental involvement in the schools is ever present" (p.338) but I would have to disagree with the school that I work at. I have been at my school for two years now and the only times I have seen my students' parents is at parent teacher conferences, maybe 10 in the past two years at curriculum night, and at orientation. These events are good for attendance but then I don't hear from or see my parents the rest of the year. Many of my parents work during the day or more than one job so they don't have the opportunity to be involved. I have seen at my school the value of parents being involved because there is a clear difference between achievement in reading of those who have parents at home when they get home from school and those that don't. "Home support is a major factor in fostering higher achievement; in fact, 'one of the clearest predictors of early reading ability is the amount of time spent reading with parents,'" (p.339) and I see this every single day. I found it interesting the part of the chapter that talked about communities, churches, and local businesses getting involved to encourage parent involvement. Some of the ideas presented for parents to get involved with their children's literacy education are great ideas to incorporate into my classroom since many of my students don't have the opportunity to spend quality instructional time with their parents.
Aricle analysis
This article talks about reading comprehension and how it is affected by our language development, phonics instruction, vocabulary acquisiton, and fluency. I focused in on the part about phonics and vocabulary. The article talks about how both phonics and vocabulary are taugh directly and indirectly. I thought it was interesting that they said phonics instruction should take about two years. Therefore, starting in kindergarten students should have a deep foundation by the end of first grade when it comes to phonics. Vocabulary instruction starts from the day the child is born because we learn vocabulary through listening and later we are taught vocabulary directly from teachers. It is important as educators to incorporate large vocabulary into our conversations with students and teaching so that there is a variety of words being learned. We then can incorporate these same words into direct instruction through phonics instruction and vocabulary instruction. The chapters this week in Opitz didn't talk much about phonics and vocabulary directly but we have read about it in the past. We have read before that direct instruction of phonics isn't always the best way because ideas taught in isolation are hard for students to then trasfer to their reading whereas they can learn the different decoding sounds through exposure in reading the text. I think that there should be a mixed method because some sounds are best taught in isolation especially if they aren't always going to sound the same when presented the same in words. The article was very concise in what is meant to be learned in each area to develop better reading comprehension. The main point with reading is to gain meaning from the text and not just reading the words on the page correctly.
References:
The role of language development, phonics, vocabulary, and fluency in comprehension instruction . (2005, October 5). . Retrieved from www.personal.psu.edu/dgm122/docs/Example2.doc
Opitz, M., Rubin, D., & Erekson, J. (2011). Reading diagnosis and improvement: Assessment and instruction . (sixth ed.). Boston, Massachusetts: Pearson.
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