Observations!

My classroom experience has been an interesting one. The 2nd grade classroom I am placed in is rather outspoken and they do no have very good listening skills. The students are constantly all over the place and do not have any respect for the teacher. It is a constant struggle to sit back and watch the chaos take place, but I am gaining a lot of classroom management skills.

My student does not have a lot of self-esteem so I encourage her as much as possible. Her reading level is a 2.1-3.1 which is where she should be at during this time of the year. But her writing and comprehension skills is lacking. I do believe that she has dyslexia or dysgraphia because after analyzing her work that is the conclusion I have made.

http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/mini-books_MFBM.html

           Throughout our lives we have been given tests in every grade and in every subject and though they are time consuming and monotonous, they do serve a very important factor that we are not aware of. Tests are measuring not only our level or intelligence, reading, and visual skills but also detecting any concerns one should have for a students future. From the outside looking in, we are answering 2+2=4, but there is a deeper understanding that lies in the test that will shape the rest of a students educational experiences.

          Below are some vital tests that may be used to detect a child's early learning disability. With that being said, these are not the only tests that will work for every student, some students may require a more thorough examination and thus need a different level of assessment. Every test out there is geared towards each individual student. The goal is to make sure all students are accommodated properly and have an equal chance at succeeding.

SEA Data Table

Test	Purpose	Appropriateness	Strengths	Weaknesses
Slosson Intelligence Test (SIT)	-Provides a quick, reliable index of intellectual ability in children and adults, including those who are visually impaired or blind	-Test can be conducted and completed in a quick manner. -There is a large age group in which this test can be administered.	-Does not penalize individuals who become upset of frustrated easily. It is directed to help all students. -Games for ages 2+	-Very pricey -Must have an education degree to purchase
Slossan Oral Reading Test (SORT)	-Brief estimate of target word recognition for children and adults	-Preschool-adult age test	-North America Teacher Leaders receive 20% off with promo code -3-5 minute test -Nationally standardized across 30 states	-Very expensive
Basic Reading Inventory (BRI)	-Determines a student's instructional and independent reading levels.	-Passages, word lists, and early literacy assessments for all students -Can be used Pre-Primer through high school	-Easy to use -Includes all of the tools teachers need to administer the test, then access and analyze the results	-All test forms given may not exactly line up with all students learning levels
Wepman's Auditory Discrimination Test (WADT)	-Measure a child's ability to detect subtle similarities and differences between speech sounds.	-Ages 4-8 -Best for English language learners -Examiner reads the pairs of words aloud	-Quick: 5 minute test -Identifies children who are slower than average in developing auditory discrimination and who may have trouble learning to read	-Must be level B certified to administer the test -Not appropriate for all ages -Expensive
Bender Gestalt Test (BGT)	-Used to evaluate visual-motor maturity, to screen for developmental disorders, and to assess neurological function or brain damage.	-Examinees are allowed to erase their answers -Testable in children and adults	-Short time to administer and score (5-10 minutes) -Several variations in administration	-Can not be administered to a person with a severe motor or visual impairment, otherwise the scores will be compromised

5 Instructional Materials

Critique of Five Instructional Materials

Corey Galbreath

Instructional materials include a wide range of items that are used to reinforce educational learning. There are many ways to teach a particular subject area, but in order to meet the needs of all students, you might have to think outside the box and explore all of the possible instructional materials out there. Not all children learn the same way, so a prior technique that may have worked for another class, may not work with your present students.

Thinkfinity

Thinkfinity is a website put on by the Verizon foundation that is geared to help students and teachers in the classroom. There are many resources on the website that can help educators gear lessons towards a particular grade level, subject and core standard. Thinkfinity also uses a lot of credible websites within their organization. For example, there are a lot of ideas and strategies present on Thinkfinity from National Geographic and Illuminations; which is the math resource area on Thinkfinity. I personally love this website because it is free and has so much to offer to teachers. I can find anything from a video to a free worksheet on Thinkfinity and use it in my classroom.

SmartBoard

Technology is evolving rapidly in todays society; especially in the classroom. There are many different forms of technology used, but the most common and funded strategy is the use of SmartBoard. Not all schools have a SmartBoard in their school, but the schools that do are very fortunate. I do believe within a couple of years all schools will have the option to have at least one SmartBoard in their school. Even though SmartBoards are very expensive, the possibilities it brings to the classroom is endless. Not only are the children constantly learning something new and staying thoroughly interactive in the lesson, but teachers are always learning different applications that are being offered through SMART technology. On SmartBoard, you can create your own lesson or there are ideas already posted that are applicable to a variety of lessons and grade levels.

Graphic Organizers

There are endless amounts of graphic organizers available and every organizer has its main purpose. Graphic organizers can be found free online and are easy to modify for the particular grade and subject you are planning to use it for. I was still using graphic organizers in college because it helped my thought process and everything was laid out in front of me and easy to understand. Graphic organizers are also beneficial in the fact that if you have to get up and leave, when you come back to your work you can pick up right where you left off, hence the name graphic “organizers”. I loved that I was able to drop whatever I was doing and still be able to finish my work in a complete and thorough manner.

The student that I am working with is a second grader who has low comprehension. Sarah (name changed due to confidentiality reasons) is a good reader; her reading level is 2.1-3.1 which is right where she should be testing during this part of the school year. To help her with comprehension I made up my own version of a graphic organizer. I checked out a book from my local library and had her read the book out loud to me. The book was, If You Take A Mouse to the Movies by: Laura Numeroff. During this book there are things the mouse does in a particular order that are vital to the story at hand. Therefore, I went online and printed out a mouse outlined head. I drew lines on the head and made 6 copies of the sheet. Once I was all done cutting out the heads, I created a little book for her to use to organize her comprehension of the book. The front cover was a completely blank mouse head so she could design and color her own mouse. Inside I was looking to see how she wrote down what happened in the story. This gave me a sense of her comprehension level and if she understood that detail 3 happened before detail 5. After she was done, I brought the book home so I could analyze and draw conclusions, then took it back to Sarah and allowed her to take it home. I did all of this for free and she had a great experience drawing and coloring and she didn't even realize she was learning at the same time.

United Streaming

UnitedStreaming.com is correlated with Discovery Education. This website is free to all subscribers and is geared towards administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Once you create a login name and password, all information you access can be saved to your account and you are then able to go back and revisit that information later. There are great educational videos for students to watch and worksheets and assessments for teachers to implement in the classroom. United Streaming is a culmination of teaching strategies and helpful information.

Super Teacher Worksheets

Super Teacher Worksheets is a website that offers many variations of worksheets. Anything from grammar, phonics, and handwriting to science, math and holiday brain teasers. There is a worksheet for every subject out there and it is even possible to create your own worksheet through their template. This website meets the needs of all ages and differentiates for learners. The only setback for this website is that it is not free. It is a yearly subscription for $19.99. A lot of teachers I know have this subscription and they absolutely love it and say that it is worth the $19.99. They have allowed me to navigate under their usernames and explore the website so I can become more familiar with the various teaching ideas that are out there.

How Children Learn To Read

How Children Learn to Read

Between the ages of four and nine, your child will have to master some 100 phonics rules, learn to recognize 3,000 words with just a glance, and develop a comfortable reading speed approaching 100 words a minute. He must learn to combine words on the page with a half-dozen squiggles called punctuation into something – a voice or image in his mind that gives back meaning. (Paul Kropp, 1996)

Why do we read? Why do we need to read? Reading plays an avid part in our daily lives. Whether we read the stop sign so we know to stop our car, read a map to navigate around a city, or to just read for pleasure, reading is important. Reading is the start of someones future and creates the foundation for the rest of their life. Reading takes place as soon as a baby is born. From day one, babies are listening and monitoring their surroundings and even though it doesn't seem like an infant that young can understand anything that is going on, they really do. They are putting together the sounds and babbling they hear and see and through a process, will be able to acquire the five components of effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Each language in the world uses a different assortment of phonemes – the distinctive sounds used to form words. When adults hear another language, they may not notice the differences in phonemes not used in their own language. Babies are born with the ability to distinguish these differences. Their babbles include many more sounds than those used in their home language. At about 6 to 10 months, babies begin to ignore the phonemes not used in their home language. They babble only the sounds made by the people who talk with them most often (Collins & Koralek, 2013 ).

During their first year, babies hear speech as a series of distinct, but meaningless words. By age 1, most children begin linking words to meaning. They understand the names used to label familiar objects, body parts, animals, and people. From this point on, children develop language skills rapidly. At about 18 months, children add new words to their vocabulary at a rate of one every 2 hours. By age 2, most children know approximately 2,000 words and combine two words to form simple sentences such as: "Go out." "All gone." Between 24 to 30 months, children speak in longer sentences. And from 30 to 36 months, children begin following the rules for expressing tense and use words such as some, would, and who. During these developmental stages, children are learning not only their reading and writing skills, but also listening and speaking skills (Collins & Koralek, 2013).

Once children have developed basic language skills now the task is to reinforce these skills in a classroom setting. The first component in reading instruction that is important is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the basic understanding that spoken words are composed of different sounds (Ruddell, 2005). The skill sequence for the development of phonemic awareness is first students identify a word unit (cat, kitten), next they identify a syllable unit (kit+ten=kitten), third students identify the rhyme (kit-ten, mit-ten), last the identification of the phoneme is recgonized (blend: kitten= /kit/ /ten/) (Ruddell, 2005). To reinforce this sequence, phonemic awareness can be developed in a number of ways, such as focusing on rhyming words. Reading Dr. Seuss books or Mother Goose rhymes are often relatable to most younger children. These readings incorporate rhyme and using riddles that focus on sound units that will help reinforce the concept of phonemic awareness.

As children go through the primary grades, they gain phonics and other word identification skills that help them decipher print. Phonics is crucial during these stages of development because children need to learn how to spell and read high frequency words such as was, have, and they. In order to do this they need to know how to identify a word based on letter-sound and letter pattern-sound pattern relationships, which is also known as phonics (Vacca, 2012). Knowing these beginning stages of phonics will help children move through the stages of invented spelling then eventually towards conventional spelling.

As children develop the concept of phonics, they move towards fluency and how this can affect their reading. In order for a student to read fluently they must be able to recognize at sight—both quickly and accurately-- most of the words in any given passage. This will allow for more text to be covered, which is a significant factor in developing fluency. Fluent readers are also more drawn to the text and contribute to reading growth and comprehension. To help build fluency, repeated reading, simultaneous reading and paired reading are known to build confidence stimulate the wanting to read in students (Ruddell, 2005). In most elementary classrooms, at least two hours a day are devoted to reading and other language arts areas. During the rest of the day science, math, and social studies are taught. Even though we don't think of it often, learning these content-area subject provide perfect opportunities to help children build fluency skills. In order to read and write in these areas, they must know specialized vocabulary; which is another key component in learning how to read.

Vocabulary knowledge and comprehension develop rapidlytogether. Vocabulary knowledge has long been regarded as critical to children's comprehension development (Cunningham, 2004). Researchers have suggested that in order to address the tasks of teaching vocabulary, children should be enrolled in a program of rich instruction that is geared towards children's independent vocabulary-learning abilities. Direct instruction to help develop vocabulary meaning is a great step to take and help enrich the context meaning. Direct teaching of selected words that not only are essential to comprehending the text but to go beyond the text and understand them in a different context. Present word-learning strategies to children so they become independent and read outside of the classroom setting. Showing them how to use the text to develop meaning will be crucial to identify unknown words. Last, use a wide variety of reading materials in your classroom. Having an extensive variety of reading materials will open students up to many different levels of reading and multiple word selections. Once all of these steps are taken into account, the student will be able to comprehend the material they read. Comprehending includes not only being able to read something but to understand the deep meaning of the context.

Reading is the most important skill any child needs. Beyond their classroom years, adults still read on a constant basis. While most children have been surrounded by language from birth and can be fluent speakers by age three without conscious effort, a lot of children are not this fortunate. A select few have not been surrounded by language and their reading development is going to happen at a slower rate. As an educator we need to understand that all children learn differently and differentiating our instruction to meet the needs of all learners is vital. All students need to comprehend the five components of reading and it is our job as educators to get them to this educational level.

References:

Cunningham, Patricia Marr., James W. Cunningham, Sharon A. Moore, and David W. Moore. Reading and Writing in Elementary Classrooms: Research Based K-4 Instruction. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2004. Print.

Johns, Jerry L., Laurie Elish-Piper, and Beth Johns. Basic Reading Inventory: Pre-primer through Grade Twelve and Early Literacy Assessments. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Pub., 2012. Print.

Koralek, Derry, and Ray Collins (2013). "Reading Rockets." Reading Rockets. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2014. <http://www.readingrockets.org/article/386>.

Lyon, Reid (2012). "Reading Rockets." Reading Rockets. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Feb. 2014. <http://www.readingrockets.org/article/356>.

Ruddell, Robert B. Teaching Children to Read and Write: Becoming an Effective Literacy Teacher. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2005. Print.

Vacca, Jo Anne L., Richard T. Vacca, Mary K. Gove, Linda C. Burkey, Lisa A. Lenhart, and Christine A. McKeon. Reading and Learning to Read. Boston: Pearson, 2012. Print.

Logan's Summary

Logan's Summary

Corey Galbreath

Logan was a struggling second grader who received early intervention help and made a great improvement in reading. In third grade his teacher administered the Basic Reading Inventory and the results showed his decoding skills and word identification had improved since he received early intervention. Even though his word identification was very strong, his reading was very low for his grade level. Logan does not comprehend all of the information he reads and reads at a very slow rate. Due to this, Logan does not enjoy to read because he is a lot slower than other classmates. He gets embarrassed if he has to read something out loud and overall it is lowering his self-esteem. Logan needs to be encouraged by his teachers and further actions need to take place so Logan can back on his grade level in reading and comprehension. Some actions that can take place are to give Logan a book that is below his instructional level and thus he will be able to read it faster and this will help build his confidence knowing that he read a book fast. Encouraging Logan 24/7 is a big factor and will help boost his self-esteem. Structured repeated reading will increase Logan's motivation and use a Reading Progress Chart as a visible means of demonstrating progress.

My Article Summary

Article Summary

Corey Galbreath

Print Books vs. E-books

Article Title: QuickReport: Print Books vs. E-Books

Publication Date: May 15, 2012

Author: Cynthia Chiong, Jinny Ree, Lori Takeuchi and Ingrid Erickson

Source: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Summary:

Print Books vs. E-Books was an article that researched some very interesting information that dealt with the cost and benefits of print books and e-books. E-books are the new fad and all textbooks are slowly transitioning to e-books and not being sold as a print book. The technology development in todays society is very predominant and increasing every day. There are many positive and negative effects that come along with e-books and the research executed in this article explains those.

During this article, there were three different trials conducted and overall, the findings were very similar. The experiment included 32 pairs of parents and their 3-6-year-old children that were asked to read a print book and e-book together (two different e-books were used: enhanced and basic). The first test focused on parent-child conversation after reading a print book vs. an e-book. The findings were that e-books prompted more non-content related interactions, whereas print books improved vocabulary and overall language development. The second test focused on story comprehension after reading the two different text types. The findings were that while reading an e-book, the students' and parents focus was not on comprehension, but on non-content related issues. The last test was engagement in the different text types. The conclusions made were that print books were more advantageous for literacy building co-reading, whereas the enhanced e-books were more advantageous for engaging children and prompting physical interaction.

The consensus in this article after all of the experiments were conducted was that e-books were not as beneficial for students and parents as were print books. It is recommended for designers to modify their designs in e-books. Some designs are too distracting and thus get the reader off task and the comprehension level is at a low. According to this article, e-books don't offer the student and parent an effective co-reading experience.

Reflection:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article. It was an interesting topic and I never thought about all the pros and cons of print books and e-books. After reading the article and mimicking the tests, my mom and I found that the findings researchers discovered were spot on. We went through all of the three tests and compared our results to the results of the article.

We focused on the findings to see how our data correlated with the articles data. We made sure to cover parent-child conversation, story comprehension and engagement. My mom and I fell into the majority of those findings. After we were done reading on the e-book, we had no recollection of what the story was about. We stared at each other in confusion and were completely baffled because we couldn't talk about the excerpt we had just read, nor could we remember any supporting details. The background pictures and font changes were very bright and vivid and caught our eye easily. I would be in the middle of a sentence and wander off because of all the distractions. And I am 24, let alone giving a 3-6-year-old this material and asking them to constantly focus on the material at hand.

Technology today is becoming integrated more into our classrooms and is supposed to help our students learn better. But are our students benefitting from all of the technology or just some technology? Technology such as SmartBoards, Ipads, Elmo's, and laptops, do enhance the learning for students because it is a new and effective way to make learning fun. I do agree that technology in the classroom is a great addition to our educational system, but when analyzing all of the technology equipment used, are the overall grades showing a positive or negative slope?

References:

• Chiong, C. (2012). Print Books vs. E-Books. Reading Rockets. http://www.readingrockets.org/research/topic/comprehension