Gretchen Vogle is our guest blogger for this week. Gretchen is a second grade teacher at Lawnton Elementary in the Central Dauphin School District.
Gretchen writes... Giving up control is often difficult for teachers. It is natural that we want to step in and help a struggling student. However, this chapter really made me think about how I respond to students during guided reading. Guided reading truly is the “dress rehearsal” for independent reading and students are not always going to have someone telling them which strategy to use. Therefore, using general prompts, such as “What will you do?,” requires students to think independently while the teacher is right there for support. In order to help me become used to this method, I think I am going to put questions from this chapter on a card to keep at my guided reading table. This will serve as a visual reminder until it becomes a habit. How will you incorporate these strategies into your guided reading lessons? Another point that kept reappearing in this chapter is text selection. Often a lack of resources limits our options. At my school, we have a book room and a subscription to Reading A-Z. I also try to purchase sets of high interest books through Scholastic book orders. How do you ensure the texts you use for guided reading are engaging?
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Emily Reed, Reading Specialist at Dillsburg Elementary School, is our guest blogger again this week. The third chapter of Who's Doing the Work? focuses on shared reading.
Emily writes... When a teacher says Shared Reading an image comes to mind. Students on the carpet surrounding a teacher, all reading and experiencing the same text. But there is so much more to a Shared Reading than just that image. I am really enjoying the dancing metaphor for Shared Reading. It really reminded me of my first ever Zumba class. Zumba, when you first begin, is not really that easy. (Okay maybe for some of you it is!) There is so much to learn and do. The Zumba teacher always begins demonstrating the moves, but then comes the SHARED part. We practice the moves together. The teacher doing the moves slowly and us echoing and mimicking them. If we aren't quite getting it, they even say, "remember earlier when I...(echoing back to when they demonstrated) This is Shared Reading. But just like there is a lot to being a good Zumba teacher...there is a lot of important things to remember when doing Shared Reading. My name is Emily Reed.
I am a Reading Specialist at Dillsburg Elementary School in Northern York County School District. Read-Aloud has always been my favorite time of day as a child (and probably still is today). I couldn't wait to explore different worlds and characters. I would listen to someone else's voice as I pictured the characters and worlds in my head, developing meaning as the words echoed in my mind.. My Read-Aloud experience began at home. My dad read to me every night for as long as I can remember, even long after I began middle school. I remember hearing Go Dog Go, Where the Wild Things Are, More Spaghetti I Say. As I grew older, we explored the worlds in Chronicles of Narnia and A Wrinkle in Time. I think we read every Scott O'Dell and Lois Lowry book there was, together. He read the stories and we talked about what we thought, what we loved and what we were wondering. This experience I know is why I am such a voracious reader. I literally started from day 1, to enjoy words and stories and to learn to question and discover the world within books. Not all students have the benefit of such a wonderful dad like mine. So, that is were we as teachers come in. We need to make Read-Aloud an important part of our daily routine. The text used the words "Read-Aloud is a Commercial for Reading" often. I love this statement. This is a great time to show children how awesome reading is. if we make thoughtful selections of text to share, making sure to offer a variety of genres, a variety of characters, a variety of experiences, we can open the world of reading up to a whole new group of students. We also need to know it is okay to not plan-plan-plan the read-aloud to death based on a particular standard. We can read for the enjoyment of text. We don't have to be "in control" all the time, but should let the quality of text lead the children to explore their thoughts, feelings, about the text. The student role during a read-aloud should be active, not passive. They should be talking, gasping, laughing, crying, responding to the text. That is where their love of books will shine through. |