Sorry for my Absence

Hey everyone! 
         So sorry to have been gone for so long!  But as I am sure you all know and believe, family comes first!  I have had two of my grandchildren with me for several weeks and that was pretty much all consuming for all of my time!  Their father also had to leave during this time to go to New York to help storm victims, so it was all on Grandma!!  It has been quite an exciting and busy time.  I hope that everyone is doing well and I bet you are all finished with all of your assignments and ready for the holiday season!  I am trying to read everyone's blogs and post on them all!  Everyone has such new and exciting ideas; so great to see so many people excited about reading and literacy.  I wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving and hope to see you spring semester in the 2nd class for reading endorsement!  :)

Let's get parents more involved at school!

         As I was reading through the many, many choices Dr. Webb provided for us this week, many topics were of interest to me, but the article about gaining parent involvement in our schools really sparked my curiosity.  This is a also a major area of concern at my school; our leadership team of which I am a member is working on ways to increase parent involvement.

          In the article, "Invitation to Families in an Early Literacy Support Program" which appeared in The Reading Teacher", May, 2006, edition, a program at a southeastern urban school was developed to increase parent involvement.  This school realized that nothing newly implemented in a school can be done quickly, so it was a program that was phased into the school over a period of three years.  Now, we want more parent involvement, but I do not know if my administrators have the patience to see progress for three years!  The Bridges Project, Bridges to Literacy, a project developed to bridge the gap between school and home, was phased in using three phases – one phase each school year.

            Home visits were used in kindergarten and first grade; I am a little weary of this.  I think it all depends on the environment in which you students live.  I lot of my students live in housing projects that I am not sure I am very comfortable visiting.  If I had a partner to go with me, then I would be willing to make home visits.  I would like for someone to comment on how they feel about home visits.  The advantages of visiting the home are numerous; you get to see what type of home environment your students live in and this can be an asset in how you view the child and what type of support the child requires to make progress academically.  Also, like the parent in the article, some parents would be more willing and at ease for the teacher to come to their home to teach them strategies to use at home to help their child with their studies. 

            Many of my parents could also use adult literacy classes which I think should be made more available and possibly even have transportation available.  Transportation is a big issue with many of my parents not being more involved at school.  They have no means of getting to and from school except by taxi and that just gets too expensive.  Maybe we could have literacy activities at school on one Saturday a month and provide bus transportation for the students and parents.  We could also have activities planned for the children while the parents attend literacy classes, as child care is also an issue when trying to attend classes.

            I am a big believer in parent involvement being crucial for all students to obtain the best education they can:  a good education and learning experience is dependent on three things:  the student, the teacher and the parent.

DIBLES Next

DIBLES has been completely revamped and is now a much more useful tool for reading teachers!  My school is lucky to have been included on the Read Across Georgia grant and I was selected to be on my school's Read Across Georgia team.  I attend a two day workshop learning about the new and improved DIBLES testing program now called DIBLES Next.  You can go to www.dibels.org and see the changes they have made and even better, you can download everything you need to use the new program FREE!!  If you download one of the grade level booklets for the DORF - DIBLES Oral Reading Fluency - when you print it use legal size paper.  The print will be too small on 8 1/2 X 11 paper.  A comprehension component has been added and the whole purpose is for accuracy and comprehension, not speed!  The program goes through 8th grade, I believe.  It is worth looking at and seeing what you think.  Also, if you teach high school, I get you have students who cannot read very well and are on middle school or even elementary reading levels.  This could be a good resource for you, too!  Progress monitoring is included on the site, too, but I am not sure if those materials are also FREE!  Our school gets the entire package for K-3 through the grant! I am so excited to try it and use it as a resource to improve reading in third grade at my school!!

Module 1

Charlotte K. Sills

            I have found a new resource – The Reading Teacher.  I love this magazine; besides being easy to read, it is full of information that I can use on a daily basis as I teach reading to all of my little third graders!  I opened the May, 2012, addition and there it is, right there in black and white – an article on fluency that retells exactly what I have been trying to get across at my school for the past 3 years:  fluency is not how many words you can read!!  And I quote, “…fluency is reading with and for meaning, and any instruction that focuses primarily on speed with minimal regard for meaning is wrong.” Amen!!  At my school the reading score for each nine weeks is an average of three grades:  Reading Fluency (which is just speed), Vocabulary and Comprehension.  So, if a very high functioning student does not read 120 words per minute, their reading average for the nine weeks it going to be lowered because reading speed is one/third of their grade.  I cannot wait to share this with others!!

            Who knows what a “vocabulary flood” is?  I do, thanks to another article in the same issue of The Reading Teacher!  “…a vocabulary flood is an environment of immersing students in word-rich environments, maximizing both intentional and incidental word learning and breadth as well as depth of vocabulary instruction.”  Not only does this article give you meaning and example of vocabulary flooding, it also gives you resources to use, so you can start turn your classroom into a vocabulary rich environment.  We have to move from the 10 words a week to hundreds of words per year!  I am already setting this up in my classroom.

            Formative assessment is the topic of yet another article in the same issue of The Reading Teacher, May, 2012, issue.  So many teachers do not truly understand the reason for formative assessments and thus do not use them correctly when teaching their students.  It should be a snapshot that tells the teacher how large a gap if from where students are in their reading and where they need to go.  Used correctly the teacher will go to have the students self-assess in such a way to prove productive in helping to close their reading gap.  This article offers many useful ideas and strategies for reading differentiation to help close your students’ reading gaps.

            I think a reason that I so like this magazine, besides the obvious, is that is written by teachers for teachers.  The best reading teachers out there are offering their own experiences and what they did that has proven very useful to obtain success in the classroom when teaching reading.  I have subscribed to this magazine and look forward to the next issue (and to reading more of the past issues!)

Literacy and Teaching Reading in Public School

I am taking classes to add a reading endorsement to my teaching certificate.  Please share with me your thoughts, practices, ideas, antidotes, anything that will help me be a better teacher of reading to my students. I teach third grade reading, but I have readers that range from pre-primer to fifth grade!