Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Chapter 10,11 "When Kids Can't Read"

" Typically, when looking at beginning readers, researchers have measured fluency by oral reading rates. Reading rates usually increase faster during the elementary school years than during the middle and high school years. Furthermore, teh mroe a reader reads, th emore her reading rate will improve."

After we finished our Author Book chat wi th author Dwight MacPherson who wrote "Kid Houdini" our class discussed how graphic novels can benefit children who struggle in reading. One of the first benefits we came up with was FLUENCY! Struggling readers will enjoy graphic novels because of their lively, colorful illustration and the voice that is noticed throughout the story. Students will start to read the story not realizing that the are putting emphasis in the voice and consequently starto to increase their fluency. The text comes in short phrases, and so the students won't fee overwhelmed with little text and will also be able to visualize the story rather than having to read, comprehend and visualize all together. This can be great practice before a student has to test their fluency with basal readings for their teacher.


When I am working with middle school and high school students who have trouble with word recognition, I look for four things...

1. I want to see hwo many high-frequency and sight words they can quickly identify
2. I want to see if they can read single-syllable words but not multisyllabic words
3.I want to see if, when they are reading mulitsyllabic words, they are guessing at the word based on the first few letters or if they are reading through the entire word, just very slowly.
4. I want to see what they know about letters and sounds.


These are the same procedures and steps that I took when I was working with my struggling reader, Sarah! We focused on a new sight word list every week and would constantly go over the pronounciation, spelling and sounding out of the words so she could better master brief reading. Even though Sarah was able to know her letters and sounds well, middle school and high school students may have forgotten the simple dynamics and conventions that are involved with writing and reading. Phonics is now the number one thing teachers have to teach their students when they begin to read and write and needs to be repetitive throughout their highschool even college years.

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