Sharing our thinking about literacy learning
I have a student who persistently takes his eyes off text. Right from the beginning this behavior of eyes off text and inventing can be seen on the Observation Survey. His strengths are using meaning and language structure along with the text pattern to read the text. He has a weak pointing finger and is …
Continue reading The Dreaded “Eyes Off Text”
I am occasionally asked by others, outside of the field of education, if I enjoy being a literacy specialist. My response is immediate, "I love it!" When I try to share why I love being a literacy specialist I find it difficult to convey how special it feels to support a child in taking on …
It is that time of year again! That mysterious two week period known as Roaming Around the Known (RATK). To stay true to Marie Clay's intentions for RATK I like to prepare by reading pages 29-34 in Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals, 2nd edition. At the beginning of the RATK section, Clay identifies what she …
"You are more than a script or a product or a program: you are an educated, observant, thoughtful individual who is qualified to decide what is best for your students."
Guided reading is an important component of a balanced literacy framework. The other components consist of shared reading, interactive read aloud, book clubs, reading mini-lessons, and independent reading with reading conferences. Powerful reading instruction should be offered in a variety of settings and provide students with multiple opportunities to engage in high-quality texts. There should …
"If students' comprehension can be influenced by daily fluency teaching in just minutes a day, what are we waiting for?"
It was back to school time for me last week. Back to school for a literacy interventionist often means administering beginning of the year assessments. My job currently consists of spending half of my day with my Reading Recovery students and the other half providing tier 2 and tier 3 literacy academic intervention services for …
Continue reading Back to School: Assessing my Tier 3 Students
"Reading aloud to children is, by far, the easiest and most inexpensive way to boost a child's literacy learning and love of reading. It requires only a library card and a willing adult..it is difficult to keep sight of how important those few minutes of a read aloud can be each day- but we must!."
"Come to terms with the fact that you will not be able to change someone else's personality. Whoever they are, they are a product of their unique set of lifetime experiences. Trying to change the personalities of the people around you will be stressful-don't do it! Instead, seek to understand what makes those around you tick and change how you respond to those personalities."
When teaching our young students to read we strive to give them the tools they need to be a "problem-solver". If our students do not develop independence with problem-solving they can become dependent on us, unmotivated to read, and they are more likely to abandon books in frustration when they encounter difficulties. In this post, …
Continue reading Teaching that Blocks the Path to Strategic Activity
