Chapter 3 Blog

As educators, we slip into many roles in the classroom to help benefit our students. I agree that it is important that we teach the students to like to read and to want to read. We must find what they are interested in individually and use those to grab their interest. In order for them to get interested, they must comprehend what they are reading. I have noticed from experience that when the student does not understand what they are reading, they get greatly frustrated. They give up on reading so it is important that we help them and encourage them throughout the learning process.

When the chapter was discussing the issue of readability and addressing a difficulty level to books, I was debating on how I would use this in my own classroom. In one hand, I believe that some of the students will be motivated to read some of the more challenging books and if they are successful, then it is beneficial to their learning. However, if they chose a higher level book and were to be unsuccessful in their comprehension, then the student tends to get frustrated. And also, I think that it could be hard on the student if they don’t have success reading a certain higher level material that their fellow peers have had success in. This could be very discomforting to them and could make them feel a sort of failure. If I decided to incorporate this into my classroom, I would have to be cautious on how to use it. I would want to stay away from classroom competition between the paces of learning of my students.

I believe the concept of guided reading can be very beneficial to the students in that the teachers are giving the students a preview of what they are going to be reading. This can make the students interest into what the book is going to be about. Also by looking at the visuals, and some of the readings from the book, the students can get a better understanding of what they are reading well when they actually begin reading the book.

Dramatization of the readings, I believe can be one of the best ways to review what the students have read and perhaps can be use as a prediction of what is going to happen in the story. When I was in school, my teacher often split us up into groups in the middle of the book and had us create and reenact a story of how we thought that the story would end. It helped me review of what we had read and got me a better understanding of what we were learning.

Story maps have been used to help students with their reading material in classrooms, including some that I have been in. I have done story mapping in groups when I was in grade school and it helped us students organize the events, people, plots, and conflicts in the story. Personally, I have never done the comic strips of the sketch-to-sketch approaches in the classrooms, but I can see how the creativity of these projects can be beneficial to students by finding multiple ways to express their interests in the reading material.

When I was learning to read, I think that the most difficult part of the process was the vocabulary that I didn’t know. Most of the time, I would just read around it and figured out what the word meant. This was not always successful though. There are lots of words in our language that have many different meanings and those meanings can be confusing to students like me who were just in the beginning stages of the learning processes of reading.

Discussing the readings before, during, and after the readings I believe is crucial to the learning experience. Pre-reading of the material can be very beneficial to the students especially if the students are unfamiliar to the content of the material. Having discussion during the reading, enhances the understanding of what is going to happen in the story and what might happen towards the end of the story. After the end of the reading is where I feel that the discussion is most important. This shows the teacher whether or not the students comprehended what they read and whether they see the importance of the reading. Discussion as a whole and individually is highly important for full potential of the students.