https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PChy7JL-A_dV7e2Km_pHK71V0DaoFZ8OuqMlulzYZZU/edit?usp=sharing

How do we teach comprehension in the early childhood classroom? 

There are many ways to teach comprehension in the early childhood classroom. Teachers should take into account the child’s experiences, reading level, background knowledge, self-efficacy skills, as well as their motivation when it comes to reading comprehension. More supports are needed for children based on these changes from child to child.

The main goal of reading comprehension is for students to understand the meaning of what they are reading. One aspect that relates to this is a student’s ability to learn new vocabulary words. By discussing new words and their meanings, teachers can bring these new words into a student’s short term and then eventually long-term memory through repeated exposure of the words. We want children to be able to recall these words and use them correctly in their speech and writing, which shows growth in their reading comprehension. 

When reading, children should be able to use their phonics skills, decoding skills, and use context clues to create understanding. Teachers can help students use these skills by teaching them which skills to use, how to use these skills, and when. These skills are known as comprehension strategies. Students should be taught comprehension strategies such as predicting, summarizing, and questioning when they are reading. Teachers can help students use these stratagies by modeling them first, and then use gradual release of responsibility to give students the opportunities to use these strategies independently. 

One important way we can teach comprehension is through dialogical reading lessons. These lessons focus on vocabulary, rich conversation between students and the teacher, and having students make connections about what they are reading. The teacher begins the lesson, leading the reading and discussions about what is being read. Students eventually take the lead and lead the dialogue about the book. The child then becomes the storyteller! 

Annotations for:

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension by Nell K. Duke and P. David Pearson 

• Good readers: actively read by evaluating the texts structure, have a goal in mind when reading, make predictions and meaning of the text, tackle unfamiliar words/concepts, integrate prior knowledge, and read many types of texts (pg. 205 & 206)
• How do teachers engage students to become good readers? 
• Techniques: 

• Comprehension instruction should be balanced- teacher should provide explicit instruction of reading comprehension and allow students ample time to actively read, write about, and discuss the texts they are reading. Teachers can help students do this by introducing a wide range of texts (genres, fiction, non-fiction, connects to other subjects, etc.) as well as engage in discussions using rich vocabulary. 
• Teacher should model reading, writing and discussing texts. Teachers can do this by explaining skills students will use in depth along with examples, model the strategy themselves, ask students to model the strategy with them, scaffold students use of the strategy (guided practice), and allow students to work independently using these skills.  
• Elicit motivation in students to WANT to read! 
• Teachers should assess students reading comprehension strategy/progress often. The strengths and weakness of every student should be noted. If students are showing weaknesses in using these skills, they should be given the resources in order to practice these skills more, using both guided and independent practice. 
• Teachers need to create a curriculum that teaches these reading comprehension strategies. These strategies include:
• Prediction– students should be engaged in activities that allow them to make predictions about how a story will unfold. The strategy of prediction also involves students using prior knowledge and making connections. Students can make predictions about themes, characters, plot
• Student think aloud– students should “go public” with their thinking by audibly expressing their thoughts and ideas about a reading. This can involve summarizing texts, discussing what they visualize in their head, and making predictions while reading. Teachers can also model this strategy themselves.
• Text structure– teachers should teach children to use the structure of narrative and expository stories to organize and recall facts. These structures include, but are not limited to plot, setting, theme, and action. Teachers can use story maps along with books for students to practice identifying structures. 
• Visual representations of texts– the use of flowcharts, graphic summaries, semantic maps
• Summarization– students should be able to summarize what they have read, focusing on remembering and recalling key ideas. This is difficult for beginning readers, so modeling, guided and independent practice is needed. Students should develop summaries by deleting unnecessary/redundant material and selecting a topic sentence. Teacher can have students work in small groups in order to practice this skill. 
• Questions/questioning– teachers should ask questions before, during and after reading. This allows teachers to see if students are understanding the text and if they can recall facts and details. These questions should focus on things that are explicitly stated in the text, questions that make the students make connections and those that elicit prior knowledge. Students should also be able to generate their own questions about a reading as well. 
• Teachers should also establish effective comprehension techniques. Teachers can do this by:
• Using reciprocal teaching– practicing predicting, seeking clarification, asking questions and summarizing using gradual release of responsibility. Teachers model, then students use guided practice, then independent practice. Rich conversation and dialogue are a key part of reciprocal teaching. 
• Questioning the author– “what is the author trying to say?” or “did the author give us the answer to that?” are questions teachers can ask students while reading to see the bigger picture of a text. 

Writing mini-lesson: Roll the dice to build a story!

Roll the dice idea from: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/FreeDownload/FREE-Roll-a-Story-Writing-Activity-286634

Grade: 3

Goal: During this mini-lesson, students will choose one story element to focus on, either the character, setting or plot. Students will then roll a dice to determine which specific example (i.e. a “two-headed monster” if they choose the character elements or “got lost in space” if they choose the plot element) they have to develop and write in detail about.

Learning objective: Students will be able plan one element of a narrative story, focusing on an imagined experience using descriptive details about either the character, setting, or plot through a clear sequence of events. 

Standards: 

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.3.3
Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.3.3.A
Establish a situation and introduce a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.3.4
With guidance and support from adults, produce writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task and purpose.

Key Terms: setting, characters, plot, details, beginning, middle, end, conclusion 

Guided Practice: This mini-lesson will consist over the course of two days. On day 1, I will model writing this story using a graphic organizer (shown below) on chart paper. I will begin by reviewing key terms students have previously learned such as setting, plot and details. I will then choose an element and roll a dice to determine which character, setting or plot will be a part of my story. I will ask the students to help me determine some of the details that will be included for my element and we will fill out that specific part of the graphic organizer together. 

Independent Practice: On day 2, students will complete this dice activity independently for their morning work/do now. Graphic organizers will be handed out to students in which they will fill out in relation to either the setting, character or plot they roll. During morning meeting students will then share the one element of narrative stories they developed with the class. 

How I will assess growth: I will assess student growth of writing narrative stories by listening to students read elements of their stories to the class as well as collecting the graphic organizers at the end of morning meeting. I will determine growth if students are able to incoprorate details into the setting, character,or plot they chose.

Read Task

Annotations for Examining the Effects of Preschool Writing Instruction on Emergent Literacy Skills: A Systematic Review of the Literature by Anna H. Hall, Amber Simpson, Ying Guo, and Shanshan Wang.

“Children want to write. They want to write the first day they attend school. This is no accident. Before they went to school they marked up walls, pavements, newspapers with
crayons, chalk, pens or pencils…anything that makes a mark. The child’s marks say, “I am.” (p. 3)

https://via.hypothes.is/https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=eugene_pubs

• Writing skills tend to appear at different rates for different children, along a developmental continuum.
• Through emergent writing, children use their current forms of writing, such as scribbles and letters to make a connection between patterns of familiar words.
• Children notice that print carries meaning and learn to write by being engaged in writing constantly.
• Children are not writing enough in preschool classrooms. Studies show preschool students tend to have only one minute of writing per day. What?!
• Preschool writing learning outcomes:

1. attitudes toward writing
2. engagment in writing
3. oral language skills
4. alphebet knowledge
5. concepts about print
6. phonological awareness
7. early writing skils

• Children need to be engaged in activities where they are free to interact with the writing process as well as having a teacher direct the writing process.
• One study shows that children whose play enviornment was supplemented with writing materials (ex. writing letters) and had no adult intervention showed significant differences in their writing behaviors.
• Another study showed that having adults model and support children in literacy rich enviornments was effective in help students engage in literacy based play.
• Use writing and drawing in music therapy ( drawing what they learned, journaling about songs) also helped student gain advances in their independent writing.
• Group writing or “share the pen” between a teacher and students showed significant differences in uppercase, lowercase and letter identification techniques.
• Another study, where students used multiple methods of writing their name (ex. signing in when coming into class) showed that students became more familar and made connections with well-known names.
• Children enrolled in the Head Start program were given handwriting interventions, called Handwriting Without Tears. These children scored higher on instruments measuring prewriting skills.
• Similarly, another group involved in a program called Fine Motor and Early Writing Pre-K Cirriculum used adapted writing tools (ex. writing letters with popsicle sticks) which showed improvments in handwriting skills.
• Conclusion: all in all the effectivness of writing instruction with and without adult involvment is apparent in these studies. Future research is needed in order to continue strengthening student’s writing skills in the preschool classroom.

Writing Task: Describe your writing curriculum.

A few strategies I will use in my writing curriculum include: 

• Allow students to engage in multiple modes of writing 
• Focus on handwriting techniques 
• Teach the importance of proper sentence structure
• Have writing supplies in clearly labeled spaces around the classroom
• Assign each student a writing folder to keep all their writing samples in

Activities I will use to support my writing curriculum: 

• Use write alouds frequently in the classroom by modeling my own writing on chart paper or the board. Write alouds help student see how to complete said writing activity (ex. focus on topics such transition words, details, introductions, conclusions) 
• Writing group stories where each student gets to write one sentence.
• Writing journals! A lot of teachers have silent reading time, but why not silent writing time? Use this time for students to free write or write about a specific prompt. 
• Write letters (ex. write letters to famous people in history that aligns with history lessons)
• Use story starters and let children finish the story themselves. 

I will support vocabulary instruction in the classroom by first focusing on which words should be taught. It’s important to remember that sight words are not vocabulary words. I will not only focus on teaching everyday words children use, but also academic and content specific words as well. I will also teach vocabulary thematically. Teaching new vocabulary around a theme allows students to see these words in multiple contexts such as activities and reading materials. Repeatedly exposing students to new vocabulary words, 3-5 at a time, allows them to become more comfortable reading, writing, and using these words in their vocabulary. I will also focus on helping students engage in production base play where they use these new words frequently. Students should be using their sense to learn new words. Children should feel, sing and move with words they are being newly introduced to.

Annotations for:

Beyond the Pages of a Book: Interactive Book Reading and Language Development in Preschool Classrooms by Barbara A. Wasik and Mary Alice Bond

“Unfortunately, children raised in poverty often enter school with limited exposure to books and underdeveloped literacy and language skills (Adams, 1990; Snow et al., 1998).”

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d460/c915766a2ae833ba410e5d953dcebe5bd7df.pdf

• Shared book reading promotes language development, early literacy skills and the learning of decontextualized language and vocabulary for young readers.
• Children learn new words that they may not hear regularly in the classroom.
• Children and teachers can have rich conversations about the reading and new words they are learning by discussing information that goes beyond the explicit meaning of the story.
• Children who are raised in poverty/low-income homes have lower vocabularies when entering school and thus lacked skills in areas such as sentence structure. 
• Children who are regularly reading withan adult, at home for example, learn much more than children who just listen to books being read to them without engaging in a conversation about it. 
• Dialogic reading- adult asked students open-ended question, allows student to participate in the storytelling process and engages in rich conversations about what has been read. Example: “tell me more about what we just read on this page”
• Classroom based dialogic reading, according to the study, has less of an effect than one-to-one reading.
• What happens to the students who do not read with an adult one-on-one at home? These students need to be engaged in this type of reading in school in order to learn language and literacy skills.
• Repeated exposure to vocabulary words (and words similar) is needed to understand and use these words correctly, not just read them once in a book. 
• Open ended question and discussion during reading times is key and allows for vocabulary skills to increase. 
• The study: 127 four years olds from low income families who attend a Title Ischool in Baltimore participated in the study. The study lasted for 15 weeks. Teachers were trained in interactive book reading techniques (discussing vocabulary words, asking open-ended questions) and extension activities. 
• Vocabulary words should be introduced BEFORE reading the story to gain an understanding about student’s prior knowledge. 
• Teachers were given theme based materials to help them with their instruction, like books and prompts as well as activities (such as art and crafts or cooking activities) as an extension. 
• Three measures were given to test students on the vocabulary to see if students in the experimental group gained growth in their vocabulary compared to the children in the control classrooms. 
• Results showed that children who were exposed to multiple means of interacting with vocabulary learned more words. The materials, props, labeling, and activity extensions provided a meaningful context for new words to be learned. 
• Students in the control group, whose teachers did not expose them to these things had lower performance on the vocabulary measurement tests. 

Take away- it is hard to complete one-on-one reading into the classroom dynamic but implementing these ideas can strengthen student’s vocabulary and expand their language greatly!

Video 1: The student in this video often uses meaning cues to make sense of words she is not quite sure about. For example, when trying to sound out the word “phone”, she repeats the sentence and likely determines the word is “phone” by the previous words “called her on the.”

The student also repeats words or sentences when she knows she made a mistake. For example, the student uses a structural cue to determine that the word printed was “our” instead of “your” because the whole book is written in first person point of view. 

Video 2: The student in this video seemed to have some troubles decoding multisyllabic words. However, she used strategies to sound out the word when getting stuck. For example, when reading the word “rattlesnake” she read it as “rattle” “snake.” She broke the word into smaller pieces in order to understand what she was reading. The student also said the word “tear” (like crying) instead of “tear.” (tear a piece of paper) The student used visual cues because the words look identical but in context should be pronounced differently. 

Video 3: The teachers in this video were discussing an ELL student’s running records. While they mentioned that student was not using self-correcting strategies, they did notice him using all three strategy cues. For example, the student used a meaning cue when he said “goat” instead of “billy” because it made sense in the sentence. He also used meaning, syntax, and visual cues when reading the word “mom” instead of “middle”.

Video 4: Teacher begins by introducing the story so the student has some background info on what she is about to read. The student often self-corrects herself when realizing that a word she read did not make sense in the story. When the student was done reading, the teacher asked questions. The student used specific words from the story such as “wheelbarrow” and “safari” when answering the questions, showing she comprehended what she read.  

Video 5: The father introduces the story before the child begins reading. I noticed that the child may not have been noticing the pattern of rhyming words throughout the book. I also think that she was relying on the illustrations to help her. For example, she said the word “ball” instead of “top” likely because the top in the picture was round like a ball. She also said “myself” instead of “me” on the page of the boy looking at his reflection in the pond. In this case, the child may have used a visual cue of the letter “M” when making this mistake. 

Video 6: Student said “glazing” instead of “gazing”- visual cue,               had trouble with the word “unconvincing”- used help from the teacher

Annotations for: Scholastic Guide to Running Record 

Teachers can use running records to:

• Guide teaching- what are students able to do and what can they learn next
• Match students to read the appropriate “just right” texts (pg. 1)
• Document growth of readers 
• Group and regroup children for instruction 

How to take a running record:

• Select appropriate, uninterrupted time for student to read a portion of text 
• Record everything the student says/does using appropriate notations 
• Notations used for a correct response, a substitution, omission or insertion of a work, attempts, repetition, appeal, told/supplied word and self-corrections. (pg. 2)
• Determine the number of running words and then the errors made while reading these running words
• Errors include a substitution, omission, incorrect attempt, unsuccessful appeal, a told word and insertions (pg. 2)
• Errors do not include self-corrections, repetitions, correct attempts, successful appeals and words pronounced differently due to child’s dialect/accent (pg. 2)
• To calculate the percent of accuracy: subtract # of errors from the # of running words. Take this answer, divide it by the # of running words and multiply by 100. This is your percent of accuracy.
• To calculate self-correction rate: add the # of errors to the # of self-corrections. Take this answer, divide it by the # of total self-corrections. This is your self-correction rate, written as a ratio. 

What do these percentages mean?

• 96%-100%- these are easy texts for students and can be used during independent reading times
• 93%-95%- these texts are appropriate for students to read during guided reading with a teacher
• 90%-92%- these texts are very challenging for students to comprehend 
• 90% and below- too difficult for student

What to do after completing the running record? 

• Analyze strategies students use to decode the text- goal to use all types of strategies/cues
• Students will use meaning cues- understanding the books message, by asking themselves “does this make sense?”
• Meaning cues are marked in a running record by a circled letter M
• Students will use structural cues- use their knowledge of grammar and syntax to make sense of the reading
• Structural cues are marked by a circled S
• Students will use visual cues- visual features of how letters and words look, marked by a circled V

Diagnostic Reading Conferences- helps teachers figure out the cues students are using, choose appropriate texts based on interests and inferencing abilities 

Steps:

• Select appropriate level text- if students use cues consistently the text may be too easy while if they do not use cues it may be too difficult 
• Briefly introduce text to reader and allow student to look through the book 
• Take running record
• Ask student for a summary of what they read- can they recall what the read, report events in the story accurately, use words from the text, discuss characters?
• Check comprehension/higher level thinking- ask critical thinking questions 
• Conduct interest survey- students will likely be more motivated to read if they enjoy the text
• Check fluency
• Analyze running record 
• Analyze the interview- based on student’s connections and retelling of reading 
• Make instruction decisions- can students move on to next reading level or do they need a bit more time in current one 

Each group member for our Vowel Digraphs project contributed to the workload equally. We determined in class which group member would complete each portion of the project we had to cover and everyone did their part. We were able to give each other constructive feedback of our work and offer up ideas on changes that could be made before we submitted the project. We communicated well and set a day in which we would have everything completed. Overall, I am very pleased with how our project turned out and I believe we did a great job in explaining what vowel digraphs are and how they can be used in the classroom.