Chapter 2,3 "When Kids Can't Read"

Chapter 2
"Over the years, continued observation of student's reading behaviors and careful listening to their comments and conversations about thsi complicated act have helped me revise my understanding of how we assist students in becoming lifelong, independent readers....Now I recognize that there are multiple aspects that must be addressed when working with struggling readers-beginning with defining struggling reader."

Beers describes a struggling reader perfectly when I apply all the characterstics to a child that I had the opportunity to work with the past 10 weeks with her reading. We will call her Sarah. Sarah is a spunky and outgoing first grader, but is constantly struggling in her reading. When I bring books for us to read together she gets suddenlty "sleepy, slumpy, eyes roll and she ignores everything else" just as Beers described. By creating encouragement and confidence, a student can begin to enjoy reading by taking a step by step process, just as Beers suggests. Once I created this confidence for Sarah and brought in stories that she could look at and relate the text with the illustration, she found that she was a great reader and could excel. When working with junior high students, many of them are dependant readers and Beers describes them as students that need help to comprehend text. Like we had discussed in Chapter 14 of this book, by bringing in stories that are appealing, a struggling reader will have more motivation and better comprehension of the story, therefore bring them to learn different strategies and steps to progress to chapter stories that may lack white space, illustration and large print.


Chapter 3
"Students can be taught to use a range of comprehension strategies so that these strategies influence how they make meaning from a text."

I think comprehension questions asked before, during and after a reading is vital in order to evaluate is a student is comprehending what they are reading, or guiding them to comprehending the story. In young adult novels, a lot of underlying meaning is hidden within a story that many students do not pick up on. Applying Blooms Taxonomy to asking questions to students to help build schema during a story is helpful for not only the student but the teacher. By asking questions before, during and after reading students can maintain attention and learn what to look for in a story in order to comprehend the characters, plot and important details in the story.