Softschools is a great website for students of all ages to use. Softschools, has phonics, vocabulary, language arts, spanish, and other topics. This site is easy to use for students on their own and helps students with their struggling topics.
http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr038.shtml independent reading is very benefical for students to participate in this 10-30 mins activity daily. Students that participate in independent reading will benfit from:build confidence in their ability to work through trouble reading spots, they can figure out new words on their own using skills that have been taught, students are more likely to ask for books to read at home. During independent reading, teachers should not be grading papers, they should be reading a book themselves or reading with students, when students see the teacher reading, they will follow what the teacher is doing.
"In 1994, 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students who reported reading for fun at least once a week had higher average reading proficiency scores than students who reported never or hardly ever reading for fun."
40% of children are having difficulty learning to read, that is unbelievable, and so sad. As we all know, children that can't read well by third grade will never catch up. This article gives teachers and parents many different ideas to help the struggling reader; why they struggle, assessment process, parent as avocate, finding help, self esteem, and reading difficulties. I plan on putting some of this information up on my website for parents to read, as well as send home in my monthly newsletter.
http://www.readinga-z.com/poetry/index.html This is a short article that talks about the importance of poetry. Students are learning so many new strategies while doing or hearing poetry. This is something that I plan to re-do and send home with my students, I started doing poetry books this year in my first grade room. The students re-write the poem, draw a picture and then we read it together as a class.
At the school I work at, we have many ELL students and the parents will always say why is this so hard for them? Why are they not getting the sounds? It is always hard to explain to parents, that our language is a hard language to learn and there are so many rules. I will defintely check this article out.
Bafile, Cara. (2012). Reader's Theatre: Giving Students a Reason to Read Aloud. Washington, D.C. 1-4
The title of this article caught my attention right away, I have always wanted to do a readers theatre with my first grader but just never took the time to do this or learn how to teach this properly to my students. By doing reader theatre with students they are learning to read aloud, perform in front of others as well as to help improve their reading skills. According to the article, "reader's theater is a wonderful technique for helping readers learn to read aloud with expression". Students learn when to speak louder, use commas and periods the correct way. When doing readers theatre for the first time, the article suggested to find, a script that has an easy read, not too many lines for each reader, enough parts/scripts for each student, as well as making sure the students have fun while practicing and "acting out" their parts. After reading this article, I am very interested in going to the teacher store, to find a readers theatre book to try with my first grade students. I know many of my students will love acting out, and reading in front of their classmates. I am hoping this will encourage my students, especially my boys that it is okay to read, and have fun while reading a story.
Found this quote while looking for an article for my paper, and wanted to share. Reading aloud is a commercial for reading…. Think of it this way. McDonald's doesn't stop advertising just because the vast majority of American's know about its restaurant. Each year it spends more money on ads to remind people how good its products taste. Don't cut your reading advertising budget as children grow older."
Journal # 1
Shedd, K.M., & Duke, N.K. (2008). The power of planning developing effective read-alouds. Beyond the Journal Young Children on the Web. November, 1-6.
The article that I read is about the importance of reading aloud to students and the effectiveness of read-alouds.
The study has found the effectiveness of read-alouds depends on a number of factors:
* open-end questions
* a careful selection of high-quality text
* teacher excitement while reading read-alouds are important part of children's development of literacy skills.
The article gave many suggestions on how to select books appropriate for grade level and for the audience. There were also ideas on how to get students involved before, during and after the read alouds.
After reading this article, it made think about how I do read-alouds in my classroom and if I incorporate all the suggestions from this article during my read-aloud.
I do read alouds throughout the day, which are books that we need to read for our Reading program, science or Paragon (history). At the end of the day I do author of the week, we talk about the author, illustrator, I go to the library every week and grab 5-7 books from the same author and don't really look inside the books to see if it is age appropriate. There has been a few times that the books have been over my students heads or too babyish for them. After reading the article I really need to take a minute and look at the pages and make sure the books are appropriate for my students.
For our 1st article that is due on Monday, does the article need to be on how to apply reading in other subject skills? Or can it be anything on reading? (comprehension, read-alouds etc) thanks
