Word Study

In our Emergent Literacy class we have begun the discussion of Word Study.  Word Study is an integral part of an emergent reading curriculum.  There is no one correct way to implement word work, however there must be a balance of teacher centered and student centered learning in order to meet all aspects of a Balanced Literacy Classroom.

 In my school we are currently using the Words Their Way program.  I have found this program to be extremely beneficial to enhancing my first grade students' reading development.  This article gives a basic overview of the Words Their Way program in case you are not familiar with it.
http://www.coppellisd.com/cms/lib07/TX01000550/Centricity/domain/975/shared/wordstheirway.pdf

Word Study is an aspect of the balanced literacy classroom that I have struggled with effectively implementing over the years.  When I first began teaching first grade in Florida, our spelling words/tests came from the Basal Series that we used.  Some weeks, I found the words to be very difficult and not even developmentally appropriate and other weeks they seemed too easy.  However, following the program laid out for me I used those words in my word study centers.

When teaching third grade I became a Balanced Literacy Observation Classroom teacher and began working very closely with our literacy coach.  Spelling was an area that she pointed out I needed improvement in.  So we began coming up with our own spelling lists.  We pulled the words from various texts that we were using in guided reading.  So different groups of students had different words.  This was definitely a step up from word work my previous years, however it was still not a sequential program that built upon what the students had already been taught.

Fast forward to teaching kindergarten in Mississippi.  This was the first time that I was introduced to a true phonics program.  We used Saxon phonics.   Here is an overview of Saxon phonics.
http://cathyduffyreviews.com/phonics_reading/saxon-phonics-k.htm

I loved Saxon phonics.  As a teacher who had never used a phonics program and who definitely had NEVER worked with kindergarten, I learned a lot from the program.  What I found most fascinating about the program was that the students coded their words.  For example, marking words as consonant, vowel, consonant (cvc) and using the coding symbols that I had only seen educators use before.  It was amazing to watch my kindergarten students really grasp an understanding of the English language.  However, Saxon phonics is very time consuming.  It was difficult to work with my phonics groups in addition to any kind of guided reading groups.  Without having two times in our kindergarten schedule to teach reading, I am not sure how I would have been able to fit in instruction of print concepts and other critical emergent reader skills.

I find the Words Their Way program to be a perfect balance of student centered and teacher centered word study.  I only meet with my Words Their Way groups on Mondays.  I spend 5-10 minutes with them introducing their new word sort and I am still able to meet with two guided reading groups on those days.  The rest of the week, the students are practicing their spelling patterns for homework and in word work center.  I am able to pull spelling patterns from their Words Their Way to use as the word work in my guided reading groups.

Concepts of Print and the Emergent Reader

In Wednesday's Emergent Literacy class we discussed the article Examining the Concept of Learning to Look at Print.  This brought up the discussion of how primary teachers use the concepts of print and if we feel that it is used effectively in our schools.  I feel that concepts of print is a skill that is easily overlooked by teachers of emergent learners.  When I first started teaching kindergarten (having taught first, third, and fifth grades before) and I looked at the pre-assessment, I thought it was crazy that we were asking children to show us the front and back covers of a book.  Surely, I thought, a five-year-old knows that!  Boy, was I wrong.  Yes, the children who have been read to at home do have concepts of print.  However, not all children come to us having been read aloud to at home.  This is a skill that is easily taken for granted.  My second year teaching kindergarten, we got a new principal.  She herself had never taught primary age children.  But she did her research and realized that in order for our inner-city, Mississippi children to keep up with the Common Core and the rest of the country, we needed to revamp our kindergarten program.  One way we did this was by creating two separate whole group reading blocks.  The first one was your traditional kindergarten reading lessons, a  read aloud and introductions of letters and sounds, followed by literacy centers.  At the end of the day we had another reading block.  This was a concepts of print block.  Using a big book I explicitly modeled one concept of print each day.  For example, the first week of school I would say something like:  "This is a book.  How many of you have touched a book before?"  Unfortunately not as many hands went up as you would think.  Using what I was observing about my children's experience with books, I created print concepts lessons focused around what they needed.  These five minute lessons were followed up with independent reading time.  We were building our "stamina" as I told my students.  We started with looking at books for one minute.  A couple of weeks later it was two minutes.  By the end of the year, my students no longer needed explicit instruction of print concepts.   This was just an independent reading time.  My kindergartners who had never touched a book before their first week in kindergarten could now (most of them) sit and look at books for between 10-15 minutes.  This may not sound like a big accomplishment to many upper grade teachers.  However, at the beginning of the year these specific children may have been looking at books upside down, pointing to words from top to bottom, skipping pages, randomly pointing at the page instead of pointing at words, etc.  Yes, these children would have eventually picked this up.  But I feel that reading instruction is enhanced and accelerated if teachers take the time to explicitly teach concepts of print.

Back Up Off Me

Wednesday's Emergent Literacy class brought up the modern debate of preschool:  play-based or academic-based?  As an educator with no children of my own, my first reaction is academic-based.  But when it comes to the academic community do my beliefs truly match those of the supporters of an academic-based preschool?

I did some research into play-based and academic-based preschool theories in order to identify my own philosophy.  An article on nbcnews.com does a very good job of briefly identifying the discrepancies in what we believe when we say play-based or academic-based.  The following statement from the article caused me to reflect on what I really mean when I say "academic-based".

"According to Marcon and other researchers, children who are subjected to overly academic environments early on have more behavior problems later and are less likely to be enthusiastic, creative learners and thinkers."  

The key word in this quote is "overly".  Growing up, my mother loved to say, "all things in moderation".  I believe that can be directly applied to this debate.  When I say academic-based preschool I am picturing a colorful, literacy rich environment with children in multiple age ranges working independently, collaboratively, or with a teacher to explore the world with a direct correlation to academics.  I see children engaging in meaningful conversations about relevant life information.  I see children participating in fun and exciting games about letters and numbers that engage all of their senses and learning needs.  I see children on the playground, at snack time, and at rest time.  I see art work hanging on the wall and science experiments growing in a corner of the room.  What I learned from my research is that this is NOT necessarily an academic-based classroom according to some researchers.  

When teaching kindergarten in a state I will not mention in order to protect their anonymity; I was a liaison between our public schools and Head Start programs.  I was supposed to go to quarterly meetings with the intention to share what preschoolers need to know coming into kindergarten to be successful.  But what I really participated in was various circus shows of Head Start students "showing what they know".  My first experience went a little like this:

A group of four and five-year-old children were paraded into the conference room wearing matching black t-shirts. The t-shirts had the student's name on the front and the words "back up off me" on the back.  The "teachers" (and I say this in quotes because they had not attended any type of education preparation program) lined the children up and began what can best be described as an army cadence.  

Teacher:  "Who are you?"
HS Students:  "We are students in Head Start."

Teacher:  "What is your phone number?"
HS Students:  They recite  the phone number for Head Start.

Teacher:  "What is your address?"
HS Students:  They recite the address for Head Start.

Teacher:  "Can you count?"
HS Students:  "Yes, we can count.  1, 2, 3, etc. to 50."

Teacher:  "Can you spell?"
HS Students:  "Yes, we can spell."

Teacher:  "Spell kangaroo."
HS Students:  "k-a-n-g-a-r-o-o"

This continued for quite some time.  I am sure you get the point.  At the end of the "show" the students participated in a chant where they ended with "We're bad and we know it and we're not afraid to show it."  After the show we were invited to participate in a walk through of the Head Start classrooms.  We saw children sitting at tables and writing on worksheets.  There were no books displayed, no manipulatives, no art work, no TALKING!

My point is that the debate on preschool can go on for a very long time unless we begin specifically stating what it is we are expecting from a preschool.  This Head Start program claimed to be "academically-based".  But I think all of us who are true educators know that this is not the case.  I believe in all things in moderation.  Preschool students do need exposure to academic skills, but they also need play time and socialization.  

Reading Recovery in the Modern Classroom

On Wednesday I listened to an interesting researcher presentation on Marie Clay, the creator of the Reading Recovery program.  I found the background information on Marie and her research very relevant to my own first grade classroom.  I teach in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland.  Our county-wide reading leveling system is a combination of both Reading Recovery and Fountas & Pinnell.  Having used Fountas & Pinnell since the beginning of my career, I felt that I was very familiar with the foundations of the system and the research behind it.  However, after listening to my peers present on Wednesday, I realized that I did not truly understand where Fountas & Pinnell began their own research because I had not made the connection to Reading Recovery.  In the same way, I did not see where Montgomery County was coming from when creating their own leveling systems as a combination of Reading Recovery and Fountas & Pinnell.

Montgomery County uses the Reading Recovery leveling system through first grade.  The Fountas & Pinnell leveling system consists of a much broader range of reading skills in each lower level.  For example a level D (Fountas & Pinnell) are levels 5 and 6 in Reading Recovery.  This continues through the first grade leveling system with each Fountas & Pinnell level being the equivalent to two Reading Recovery levels.  See Reading Level Conversion Chart.

In addition to the leveling system, Montgomery County provides their teachers with an explicit guided reading planning sheet that includes daily high frequency word writing, word work, pre-reading strategies (meaning, structural, and visual), interactive writing, and running records.  When looking more into the Reading Recovery program and after speaking with a veteran teacher at my school this week, I have discovered that our guided reading system is largely based on the one-on-one Reading Recovery system.

So what does all this say about Marie Clay and the Reading Recovery program?  I see this at that Marie Clay's research has laid the foundation for a very strong and effective reading program in Montgomery County as well as many other school systems across the United States.  What Montgomery County has done is taken the best of that program and found a way to use it so that it is not just giving one student at a time the benefit of the system.  The Reading Recovery program provides teachers with skills and strategies that can benefit all students and does not necessarily have to be done in the one-one-one setting to be effective.  The program is still being actively used in my school by one reading intervention teacher, as well as by other teachers in the county.  Although Reading Recovery has its critics you can not argue that for some students it can be life changing.  Check out the provided article to read about one such student who had it not been for Marie Clay and Reading Recovery, he may not be where he is today.

Reading Recovery Student Intervention

The Impact of Language on Reading

The video clips from our last class really activated my thoughts on the impact of language in reading development.  I have always known that there is a strong, if strong is the word, connection between language development and reading success.  My undergraduate program at Florida State University required me to take ESOL courses to earn an ESOL endorsement.  Through these courses I was required to integrate differentiation into my lesson plans to include the English Language Learner.  I also shadowed an ELL student for one semester as they went from their regular education class to their ESOL pull out class.  Through my studies I was taught that language impacts the reading development.  I continued to see the affect of language in reading success as a classroom teacher in Florida, since Florida has a very large Hispanic/ELL population.

However, what I quickly learned when I moved to Mississippi is that there is an entirely different type of ELL student.  These are the ones that are not classified as ELL.  They receive no differentiation, no IEP goals, no special services.  These children were born in America and have parents who were born in America.  The only language spoken at home is English.  These are the children who come to us from low socioeconomic backgrounds.  Often times children who come from poverty have not been exposed to language as much as those children who come from a middle class family.  In my experiences teaching kindergarten in an inner-city school in Mississippi I used my ELL strategies as much, if not more, than I did in Florida.  These children had a very limited vocabulary, they had difficulty pronouncing their sounds correctly, and their background knowledge was so poor that teaching this vocabulary included videos, trips outside, and bringing in materials to expose the children to.

One particular child, who I will call Z, came to me using only telegraphic speech.  Upon meeting the family I found that they were wonderful, caring parents who truly wanted the best for their daughter.  However, dad had only been to school through the eighth grade and mom had finished school but was very quiet and soft spoken.  Neither one of them spoke to the children in normal conversation.  They spoke only to convey orders and simple messages and never read aloud.  The father asked me at parent/teacher conferences what a lunchbox was.  Z is as much an ELL student as the student who comes to us from a Spanish speaking home.  Her exposure to language at a young age was very minimal and therefore did not set the premise for reading instruction that she needed.  Her interventions included being read aloud to daily by my assistant and or myself.  These read alouds were not the interactive read alouds done with a whole group reading class.  This was Z and myself sitting quietly in corner, her on my lap, pointing to the text as I read and making statements such as, "This is a lion.  A lion says roar."  I am proud to say that Z is now a third grader in the same school.  She is reading on grade level and makes the honor roll consistently.  However, I strongly feel that without the language interventions I provided she would never have made the reading progress that she did.