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Carly S. Readerly Exploration #7

Due: December 4th, 2023

Titles: “Smoke Signals in Reading Education” by: John Wills Lloyd (2021), “Hard Works: Why Aren’t Kids Being Taught How to Read?” by: Emily Hanford (2018), “What’s Hot in Literacy?” by: International Literacy Association (2020)

Big Take-Away:

“Research shows that children who don't learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they're likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we've come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it's been that way since testing began in the 1990s” (Hanford 2018).

“ILA’S CHILDREN’S RIGHTS TO EXCELLENT LITERACY INSTRUCTION position statement asserts that all children have the right to supportive learning environments and high-quality resources. That includes not only access to books at school and at home but also robust literacy-rich experiences that honor social and cultural identities and are culturally responsive, student centered, and free of bias” (ILA 2020).

Nugget:

An interesting piece of information that stood out to me as I read is the school adopting the phrase, “When we know better, we do better”. I think it is amazing that the school district discussed in this article not only is constantly working to make instruction better for the students, but is also looking out for the teachers and is taking care of them along the way.

I am curious about the executive summary section of the report. It is interesting to me how evenly divided the topics are amongst the educators who ranked them, and I would be curious to know the reasons behind why people chose what they did. All of these people clearly hold different ideals when it comes to books, and I want to know how that plays out in the classroom.

I decided to look into one of the citations of the first article, the LETRS curriculum adopted by Bethlehem School District. In the article, it basically just went over how teachers never looked into the science behind reading before, and how teachers were feeling overwhelmed, shocked, and guilty after taking this training. I wanted to know what was going on in the new curriculum that made them feel that way. After finding the early childhood education section of the website, I read a few of the key features listed.  The first was the emphasis the curriculum places on competency, such as word recognition and language comprehension in order to “lead to a smooth transition to early reading and writing”. The website also provides an article as to why it is important for educators to recognize the science of reading. Many other key features listed is how there are a ton of supports for the educators who use this curriculum training. The training is self-paced, has adaptive blended learning or online, print, and professional learning sessions, there is a graduate or transcript credit available, etc. After doing some exploring throughout the website, I found many products, research to back up the curriculum, and resources for teachers. I definitely see why this curriculum training was eye opening for so many teachers in Bethlehem school district.

Multimedia Extension:

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Carly S. Readerly Exploration #6

Due: November 17th, 2023

Titles: “She’s My Best Reader; She Just Can’t Comprehend’: Studying the Relationship Between Fluency and Comprehension” by: Mary DrKonty Applegate, Anthony J. Applegate, and Virginia B. Modla (2009), “Why Reading Fluency Should Be Hot!” by: Timothy V. Rasinski (2012)

Big Take-Away:

“LaBerge and Samuels (1974) proposed the idea that reading requires two central tasks of our inherently limited cognitive resources: word recognition and comprehension. If readers have not developed automaticity in word recognition, then the efforts they must expend in decoding will almost necessarily limit the efforts they can direct to comprehension. Conversely, the more automatic the decoding, the more attentional resources they will have available to direct toward comprehension” (Applegate 2009, pp. 513).

“The science of teaching reading has shown us that reading fluency is a key component to proficient reading and that teacher-guided wide and deep reading are two ways to improve reading. The art of teaching reading challenges all teachers to embed the science of reading instruction into their classrooms in ways that are authentic, engaging, and meaningful for students and that are integrated into the school reading curriculum” (Rasinski 2012, pp 520)

Nugget:

This article is very factual and research based. Using data gathered from a study, the authors proved how reading proficiency should not just be assessed “based solely on speed, accuracy, and prosody, divorced from thoughtful comprehension” (Applegate 2009, pp. 518). This is because comprehension was incorporated into reading. The research in this paper proved how fluency without comprehension is just about useless. The article explains, “Thus it seems that treating word recognition and fluency as skills that exist separate and distinct from comprehension may open the door for a great deal of confusion on the part of students and teachers alike” (Applegate 2009, pp. 519). Both fluency and comprehension are important. They should be taught hand-in-hand.

This article focused a bunch on how incorporating the arts benefits students with reading comprehension. This article went above and beyond just elementary school, but it also proved the benefits of arts integration for literacy in middle and high school, as well as for adult learners. By acting out a text, singing, or even performing/creating poetry, students will gain a deeper understanding of the text they are dissecting.

I found an article, published in 2009 (the same year as the Applegate article), that goes into depth about the culture shift when the United States decided to take standardized testing more seriously. This article, titled 2000-2009: Decade’s Trends in Education by Tiffany Lankes and Christopher O’Donnel, starts out by saying, “The big theme in education for the past decade: accountability. Heightened state and federal pressure to do well on standardized tests prompted schools to try everything from community outreach to technology to help their most struggling students” (Lankes & O’Donnell, 2009). This article states how the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 changed the world of education, raising the bar for reading proficiency standards. It makes sense why the government would put that act into play, as the article says, “One of the most striking statistics to come out of the decade was that just 35 percent of the nation’s eighth-graders could read at grade level” (Lankes & O’Donnell, 2009). After those statistics were made public and the act was put in motion, communities around the country pushed to help students who were in poverty, school leaders worked to restore houses to assist the families. On top of all of this, schools were grappling to get the newest technology in their classrooms to motivate the students and assist the teachers. That being said, it makes sense that both of these articles that are pushing for reading comprehension came out at the end of the 2000s, they both collected and showed data proving the benefits of reading comprehension that came out of this culture shift.

Multimedia Extension:

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Carly S. Readerly Explorations #5

Due: 11/13/2023

Titles: “Vocabulary Practices in Prekindergarten and Kindergarten Classrooms” by Rebecca Silverman and Jennifer DiBara Crandell

“Word Study Instruction in the K-2 Classroom” by Cheri Williams, Colleen Phillips-Birdsong, Krissy Hufnagel, Diane Hungler, and Ruth P. Lundstorm

Big Take-Away:

1)When developing curriculum for vocabulary instruction, teachers need to keep in mind children who do not have much vocabulary knowledge. Depending on what all they know, not all vocabulary instruction will be beneficial to them.

2)The 9 tips for implementing word study are

Assess students’ word knowledge using multiple assessment tools

Use a homogeneous small group approach to instruction

Carve out time to prepare for word study instruction

Teach word knowledge, not just words

Demonstrate how word study can be used during reading and writing

Teach strategies that support students’ use of word study instruction

Make your word wall work

“Word work” should work, too!

Engage students in extensice “real” reading and writing

Nugget:

The graphs on pages 15 and 17 were interesting to see. Every strategy used the combined word work with vocabulary instruction showed improvement in the students from the pretest to the post test.

The first tip was interesting to me, assessing students word knowledge using multiple assessment tools. This seems like a very simple idea, but it was one I hadn’t thought of before. I always just thought along the lines of assessment, not thinking outside the box on how to get the most reliable data.

The task I chose to do is go through and highlight excerpts that reflect the authors purpose. I printed out the most important pages and attached them as my multimedia extension. The most important purpose statement I found for the first article was found in the conclusion. It says, “In sum, this study suggests that certain vocabulary instruction practices, when implemented by teachers in the absence of a highly specified intervention, are related to improved vocabulary outcomes for children. However, the effects of some practices may differ according to the initial vocabulary knowledge of the child, when the teacher uses the practice during the language arts block, and how the vocabulary is measured” (Silverman and Crandle, pp. 19). After having gone through and reading all about the study, which compared different strategies and levels of students, I recognized that this sentence took all of the conclusions found in the article and tied it up into a neat little bow. For the second article, I took a quote from tip 6, teach strategies tat support students’ use of word study instruction. This quote says, “If we want students to use word study independently and strategically when they are reading and writing, thn we must teach them how to do so” (Williams, pp. 6). This quote directly ties into the first article as well, putting the whole focus of word study on the student and helping them grow as thinkers during ELA practice.

Multimedia Extension:

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Carly S. Readerly Exploration #4

Due: September 18th, 2023

Titles: “Enriching and Assessing Young Children’s Multimodal Storytelling” By: Wessel-Powell, Kargin & Wohlwend (2016), “Why Children Need Play” By: Leong & Bodrova (2018), “Building Language and Literacy Through Play” from Scholastic (2018)

Big Take-Away:

The authors of this article took part in a research study in a classroom to prove that even if a child is not good at creating or working with written text, they can still explore literature in many different ways.

Children learn to connect with peers when they play together, and modern technology is taking away from their social development.

When children use their imagination while playing, they are building their language and understanding of the world.

Nugget:

I love how the end result of this study proves that children should not just be graded on what they can do with words on a paper. These students, even if they were not the best at comprehending written text, were able to put together elaborate stories and productions with just their brain. They were not even graded on if they had written everything down or not. Their teacher was more focused on the students understanding the content they were learning as opposed to being able to assess every little detail of their project.

I knew technology was damaging to children’s development, but I found this specific area an interesting target. When children go home and simply play on an iPad or watch TV, they are not playing with dolls to replicate a family or making cars drive to replicate real driving. Technology has its benefits, but when it comes to social development and acclimation to the real world, it has been causing significant damage.

I greatly appreciated how at the end of this article, the author provided cheap and realistic ways to add more room for imagination in your house. Something as little as an old plane ticket can not only introduce them to the concept of how to get on a plane, but they can reenact how they would do it and become acclimated to that idea.

These articles reminded me of the children’s literature class I took last semester, during Spring 2023. In this class, we examined the importance of play in the development of a child, and how literature can both inspire it and be inspired by it. I remember when I was little, I would read books about children playing an activity outside and then I would want to play that activity outside. If the kids in the book were baking a cake, I would want to bake a cake. Whatever the author chooses to display in the book, it will teach the children that thing. This idea goes along with an idea presented in the first article, saying that whether a student fully grasps an idea presented by a text is irrelevant when compared to if they are able to manipulate the idea in the real world using their own ideas. This is also why we focused so much on representation in literature during the children’s literature class, so all children can see themselves in a book and connect with it at a deeper level. The world of literature has been inspired by the children of today by including more positive lessons being within a story to make the book feel less educational, and also including way more representation than we used to have. Books of well behaved children of many religions, races, and abilities getting along and going on adventures together, learning lessons, and interacting with many different types of families teach so many good skills to children still in the process of gaining social development skills through play and literacy.

Multimedia Extension:

The article I included is an article about making your own library of children’s books more inclusive. I like it because it says that many different kinds of characters should be included in the main plot, not just as background characters of the story. I believe this would help children learn that they should be social will all the kids they are surrounded by, which will in the long run help them have greater knowledge on how to interact with all different types of people and knowledge of the world in general.

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Carly S. Readerly Exploration #3

Due Date: September 4th, 2023

Title: "Reading With a Crayon: Pre-conventional marginalia as reader response in early childhood" By: Dr. Sarah Fischer (2017)

Big Take-Away: Young readers writing in the margins of books should be allowed to in order to benefit their connection to the text.

Nugget: A point that was made in the article that I had never thought about before was how modern day scholars will research and search for books that scientists from long ago wrote their notes in. Even if the person may not have notes in the book, just the fact that they owned it made the book special. People will take the books and tear the text apart, searching for meaning and a glimpse into the brain of the original reader. If this is the case, then why wouldn’t we encourage young readers to interact with books in the same way as these people who are known internationally as geniuses?  

I talked about this article with my friend Alexandria Hay, a sophomore psychology major. To start the conversation, I gave her a summary of the article, focusing on the nugget I wrote about holding famous people’s notes to such a high level or respect, but disregarding notes made by kids. She listened very intently, and even commented on how interesting this article is. Neither of us have ever thought about this subject before this article introduced the idea to us. She asked what specifically I was looking for her to comment on, and I asked what she thinks the logic is behind the parents’ perspective and also from the child’s perspective. She brought up the point of how children will draw on the walls in order to impress their parents, not recognizing the cost of the paint or labor to repair the “damage”. She also brought up how children will color in coloring books and look at picture books, so why can’t they color in the book that already has pictures in it? Parents will be upset because the child “ruined” the nice book they spent money on, but the child was interacting with the text at a deeper level by putting their own ideas in the pages. Alexandria agreed that children should be allowed to write and color in their own books, as she knows interacting with text at young ages helps them learn the language and also deepens their understanding of the text.

Multimedia Extension:

Alexandria and I had this conversation over coffee. We have most of our deep conversations over coffee, so it was very interesting to include what I was learning about in class and apply it to her major.  I hope we can make more connections between our majors, as psychology plays a huge role in being able to connect with each individual student.

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Carly S. Readerly Exploration #1

Reading Due Date: August 25th, 2023

Article Titles: “This is Balanced Literacy” By: Douglas Fischer, Nancy Frey, and Nancy Akhavan (Chapter 9)

Big Take-Away: Using the data that comes from assessments is key for when making instructional decisions, so you can make the most strategic choices to help your learners.

Nugget: The piece of information I found to be most helpful was in the beginning when the authors broke down the components of how to use formative evaluations. Formative evaluations is made up of making instructional decisions, gauging student progress, setting goals with students, and providing interventions.

The activity I chose to do for this reading is make a sketch of my mother at her job. My mom has her master’s degree in Speech and Language Pathology, and she evaluates people of all ages to see if they qualify for disability benefits from the government, specifically for special needs. This reading made me think of the tests she does, evaluating language and the development of the child. The evaluations range from knowledge of letters, to if they know what words rhyme, to if they can tell what words don’t belong in a group. She does both evaluations with the patients but also gets information from parents about the history of the patient and of the family. My mother will then put all the information into a rubric and give them a score to see if they require intervention or a disability check. The multimedia extension is of the picture I drew and shared with her over FaceTime. In the picture, You can see her sitting on the floor with one of her younger clients. She has all of the toys laid out on the floor to see how the child is playing with them, and her coworker is sitting off to the side writing down everything that is going on. You can also see the parent sitting with the child, helping the evaluation run smoothly.

Multimedia Extension:

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Carly S. Readerly Exploration #2

Reading Due Date: August 28th, 2023

Article Titles: 1. “Toward an Educationally Relevant Theory of Literacy Learning: Twenty years of inquiry” By: Brian Cambourne, 2. “Building a Literacy Community: The Role of Literacy and Social Practice in Early Childhood Programs” By: Susan J. Britsch and Daniel R. Meier

Big Take-Away:

Cambourne has identified and explained the conditions for learning specifically when talking about literacy, which include immersion in content, demonstration, engagement, having clear expectations, taking on adequate responsibilities, employ what was learned, and response.

Britsch and Meier used a study of literacy practices of students in urban and rural early childhood settings and introduced methods of how to interpret these different abilities in the classroom, as well as seeing the benefits of the early head start program.

Nuggets:

An interesting bit of information that stuck out to me in this reading was actually In the very last two paragraphs of the article, saying that the theories Cambourne introduced have been adopted in many countries, but also taken by teachers and applied in the context of math, music, and professional development. This proved the validity of the theories and characteristics of teachers that he introduced.

In this article, I found it very helpful that the authors included tons of examples of quotes from the study to provide context and did not just explain what they wanted us to know. I especially found this helpful in the section talking about teachers directing children to be self-directed while still being there to support them when they are solving problems.

During the second reading, I was reading through a socioeconomic lens. It was very easy to do so, as the studied groups of people are the majority under the poverty line, even though they come from very different places. This trait of the studied people is so important because they are the target audience of the Head Start program, where the study was taking place. What I expected the least was how both studies, even though the people are from all different types of living, came to a common conclusion for how teachers should respond to these children. I learned the most from the section titled “Implications”, because it offered many suggestions of strategies to adopt into your own teaching style, the one being having writing and drawing materials available and heavily used in classrooms. This is because the children will respond to your teaching through creating stories or pictures subconsciously and we can use what we learned from them to adjust and better assist certain students in many ways. I found it so helpful to think of this article through the socioeconomic lens, because when I revisited the article by Cambourne, which also offered many strategies of how to evaluate your lessons, I saw how they can go hand in hand, but also close attention needs to be paid to certain students based on many factors.

Multimedia Extension: