Text Sets: Teachers collect text sets of books and other reading materials on topics to use in teaching thematic units. Materials for text sets are carefully chosen to include different genres, a range of reading level to meet the needs of students, and multimedia resources that present a variety of perspectives. 

Trade books: trade books are books published by a commercial publisher and intended for general readership. These books are both entertaining and informative, and the authors’ engaging writing styles and formats keep readers interested. 

Mentor Texts: Teachers use stories, nonfiction books, and poems that students are familiar with to model the writer’s craft. Picture books are especially useful mentor texts because they’re short enough to be reread quickly. Teachers begin by rereading a mentor text and pointing out a specific feature such as adding punch with strong verbs, writing from a different perspective, or changing the tone by placing adjectives after nouns. 

Learning Logs: Students use learning logs to record and react to what they’ve learning in social studies, science, or other content areas. Learning logs are “a place to think on paper.” Students write in these journals to discover gaps in their knowledge and to explore relationships between what they’re learning and their past experiences. 

Double-Entry Journals: these are just what the name suggests: Students divide their journal pages into two parts and write different types of information in each one. In a double entry journal, in the left column the student could write information he was learning and in the right column he could ask questions and make personal connections to the information. 

Quickwriting: When students do quick writing, they write on a topic for 5 to 10 minutes, letting thoughts flow form their minds to their pens without focusing on mechanics or revisions. 

Essays: 

Collaborative books: students work together to write collaborative books. Sometimes students each write one page for the report, or they can work together in small groups to write chapters. Students create collaborative reports on almost any science or social studies topic. 

KWL charts: KWL chart is a graphic organizer designed to help in learning. The letters KWL are an acronym, for what students, in the course of a lesson, already know, want to know, and ultimately learn. 

Anticipation guides: In anticipation guides, teachers introduce a set of statements on the topic of the chapter, students agree or disagree with each statement, and then they read the assignment to see if they were right. 

Prereading plan: Teachers introduce the big ideas in a chapter when they create a prereading plan in which they present an idea discussed in the chapter and then have students brainstorm words and ideas related to it. 

Question-Answer Relationships: Sometimes students turn the main headings into questions and prepare to read to find the answers to the questions or check the questions at the end of the chapter to determine the question-answer-relationships. 

Stages of reading process:  

Semantic feature analysis: To focus on the big ideas, students make data charts to record information according to the big ideas or create a semantic feature analysis chart to classify important information. 

Word sorts: students do word sorts to emphasize the relationships among the big ideas.  Word sorts focuses students’ attention on critical features of words, namely sound, pattern, and meaning. 

SQ4R study strategy: 

Classroom application: This chapter has showed and taught me that in order to be an effective teacher, we must integrate reading and writing instruction with content area study. Thematic units and minilessons should be taught to ensure that students learn how to comprehend nonfictions books and content area textbooks. In my future classroom, a goal of mine is to integrate reading and writing instruction in all content areas. For example, I would like to have my future students read a nonfiction science book and then create a poster board of what they learned in their text and then share their poster board to the class!

Differentiated instruction: is based on this understanding that students differ in important ways. Differentiated instruction means “shaking up” what goes on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn. Differentiating instruction is especially important for struggling readers an writers who haven’t been successful and who can’t read grade-level textbooks. 

Differentiating the content: The content is the “what” of teaching, the literacy knowledge, strategies, and skills that students are expected to learn at each grade level. The content reflects common core grade level standards. Teachers concentrate on teaching the essential content, and to meet students’ needs, they provide more instruction and practice for some students and less for others. 

Differentiating the process: The process is the “how” of teaching, the instruction that teachers provide, the materials they use, and the activities students are involved in to ensure that they’re successful. Teachers group students for instruction and choose reading materials at appropriate levels of difficulty. They also make decisions about involving students in activities that allow them to apply what they’re learning through oral, written, or visual means. 

Differentiating the product: The product is the result of learning; it demonstrates what students understand and how well they can apply what they’ve learned. Students usually create projects, such as posters, multimodal reports, board games, puppet shows, and new versions of stories. Teachers often vary the complexity of the projects they ask students to create by changing the level of thinking that’s required to complete the project. 

How to address struggling readers and writers problems:

Interventions for older students: Despite teachers’ best efforts, approximately one quarter of students in the upper grades are struggling readers, and they need effective classroom interventions in addition to high-quality reading instruction. Teachers should design intervention programs that includes these components: 

Grouping for instruction: teachers use three grouping patters: Sometimes students work together as a whole class, and at other times, they work in small groups or individually. Decisions about which type of grouping to use depend on the teacher’s purpose, the complexity of the activity, and students’ specific learning needs. 

Guided reading: guided reading was developed to use with beginning readers, but teachers also use it with other students, especially English learners and struggling readers who need more teacher support to decode and comprehend books they’re reading, learn reading strategies, and become independent readers. 

Tiered Activities: to match students’ needs, teachers create several tiered or related activities that focus on the same essential knowledge but vary in complexity. These activities are alternate ways of reaching the same goal because “one-size-fits-all” activities can’t benefit on-grade-level students; support struggling readers, and challenge advanced students. Created tiered lessons increases the likelihood that all students will be successful. 

Literacy Centers: literacy centers contain meaningful, purposeful literacy activities that students can work at in small groups. Students practice phonic skills at the phonics center, sort word cards at the vocabulary center, or listen to books related to a book they’re reading at the listening center. 

Interventions: Schools use intervention programs to address low-achieving students’ reading and writing difficulties and accelerate their literacy learning. They’re used to build on effective classroom instruction, not as a replacement for it. 

Reading recovery: Reading recovery is the most widely known intervention program for the lowest-achieving first graders. It involves 30-min daily one-on-one tutoring by specifically trained and supervised teachers for 12-30 weeks. Reading recovery lessons involve these components:

RTI: RTI means response to intervention. It is a schoolwide initiative to identify struggling students quickly, promote high-quality classroom instruction, provide effective interventions, and increase the likelihood that students will be successful. 

Classroom application: Classroom application: Effective teachers demonstrate their responsibility and commitment to teaching all students effectively by personalizing instruction using the guidelines presented in this chapter. I’ve learned that teachers should differentiate instruction by modifying the content, the process, and the product to meet the needs of all students, including the students who struggle. Teachers should also use a balanced approach to teach struggling students that incorporates effective instruction, materials at students’ reading levels, and extra time for reading and writing. 

Basal: The basal reading approach is a technique used to teach children reading skills. Basal stems from the word “base” or “basic.” Commonly called “reading books” or “readers,” basal readers are short stories, including individual books for learners, a teacher’s edition, workbooks, assessments and activities for a specific reading level. 

Components of a basal: A number of commercial programs are available today, and most include these components:

-Selections in grade-level textbooks

-Instruction about decoding and comprehension strategies and skills

-Workbook assignments

-Independent reading opportunities

Steps in developing a literature focus unit:

Step 1: select the literate

Step 2: set goals

Step 3: Develop a unit plan

Step 4: coordinate grouping patterns with activities

Step 5: create a time schedule

Step 6: assess students 

Literature circles: one of the best ways to nurture students’ love of reading and ensure that they become lifelong readers is through literature circles-small, student led book discussion groups that meet regularly in the classroom. Sometimes literature circles are called book clubs. 

Key feature of literature circles are choice, literature, and response. As teachers organize for literature circles, they make decisions about these features: They structure the program s that the students can make choices about what to read, and they develop a plan for a response so that students can think deeply about books they’ re reading and respond to them. 

Reading and writing workshop: Students are involved in authentic reading and writing projects during reading and writing workshop. This approach involves three key characteristics: time, choice, and response. Reading workshop and writing workshop are different types of workshops. Reading workshop fosters real reading of self-selected books. Similarly, writing workshop fosters real writing for genuine purposes and for authentic audiences.

Think alouds: Teachers demonstrate the thought processes readers and writers use as they read and write by using think-alouds. Teachers think aloud or explain what they’re thinking so that students become more aware of how capable readers and writers think; in the process, students also learn to think aloud about their use of strategies. 

Grand conversations: The grand conversation is an authentic student led conversation about a story where students ask questions, discuss their thoughts and feelings, and make meaning as they talk about the story. Conversations are characterized by spontaneity rather than predictable questions. 

Shared reading: is an interactive reading experience that occurs when students join in or share the reading of a book or other text while guided and supported by their teacher. 

SSR (sustained silent reading)- is an independent reading time set aside during the school day for students in one class or the entire school to silently reading self-selected books. 

Management of the workshops: It takes time to establish a workshop approach because students need to develop new ways of working and learning, and they have to form a community of readers and writers in the classroom. Beginning on the first day of the school year, teachers establish the workshop environment in their classroom. They provide time for students’ to read and write and teach them how to respond to books and to their classmates writing. Teachers develop a schedule for reading and writing workshop with time allocated for each component. Teachers can also use a classroom chart to monitor students’ work. 

Classroom application: There were many important concepts and vocabulary words in chapter 10 that will be useful to my future as an educator. I learned that effective teachers organize for instruction using a combination of instructional approaches to ensure that students can read grade-level texts and meet reading and writing standards. It is vital that teachers use leveled books to teach reading in guided reading groups/lessons. For example, I am placed in a 3^rdgrade classroom this semester and when we do guided reading groups/lessons, each group has leveled books. It is also important that teacher supplement basal reading programs with authentic reading and writing activities. As teachers, we must provide opportunities within our classroom for students to read self-selected books during reading workshop and write on self-selected topics during writing workshop. It is also imperative that we allow students to silently read daily! 

Genres: The three broad categories of literature are stories, informational books, or nonfiction, and poetry, and there are subgenres within each category. For example, science fiction, folktales, and historical fiction are subgenres of stories. 

Text Structures: Authors use text structures to organize texts and emphasize the most important ideas. Sequences, comparison, and cause and effect, for example are three internal patterns used to organize nonfiction texts. 

Text Features: Authors use text features to achieve a particular effect in their writing. Literary devices and conventions include symbolism and tone in stories, headings and indexes in nonfiction books, and page layout for poems. 

Elements of Story Structure:

Plot: plot is the sequence of events involving characters in conflict situations; it’s based on the goals of one or more characters and the processes they go through to attain them. Plot is developed through conflict that’s introduced at the beginning, expanded in the middle, and finally resolved at the end. 

Characters: characters are the people or personified animals in the story. They’re the most important structural element when stories are centered on a character or group of characters. Main characters have many character traits, both good and bad; that is to say, they have all the characteristics of real people. 

Setting: The setting is generally thought as of the location where the story takes place, but that’s only one aspect. Setting has four dimensions: location, weather, time period, and time. 

Point of View: Stories are written from a particular viewpoint, and this perspective determines to a great extent reader’s understanding of the characters and events of the story. Here are some points of view: First person viewpoint, omniscient viewpoint, limited omniscient viewpoint, and objective viewpoint. 

Theme: Theme is the underlying meaning of a story; it embodies general truths about nature. Themes usually deal with the characters’ emotions and values, and can either be explicit or implicit

Text Factors of Nonfiction books: Stories have been the principal genre for reading and writing instruction in the primary grades because its been assumed that constructing stories in the mind is a fundamental way of learning; however, many students prefer to read nonfiction books, and they’re able to understand them as well as they do stories. 

Expository Text Structures: Nonfiction books are organized in particular ways called expository text structures. 

Text Factors of Poetry/Formats: It’s easy to recognize a poem because the text looks different than a page from a story or a nonfiction book. Layout, or the arrangement of words on a page, is an important text factor. Poems are written in a variety of forms, ranging from free verse to haiku, and poets use poetic devices to make their writing more effective. 

Poetic Forms……

Concrete poems:  The words and lines in concrete poems are arranged on the page to help convey the meaning. When the words and lines form a picture or outline the objects they describe, they’re called shape poems. 

Haiku: Haiku is a Japanese poetic form that contains just 17 syllables, arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. It’s a concise form, much like a telegram, and the poems normally deal with nature, presenting a single clear image. 

Odes: Odes celebrate every objects, especially those things that aren’t usually appreciated. The unrhymed poem, written directly to that object, tells what’s good about the thing and why its valued. 

Narrative Poem: is a form of poetry that tells a story, often making the voices of narrator and characters as well. 

Rhymed Verse: is the most common type of poems. This poem tells a story. 

Free Verse: this is a contemporary kind of poem. Writers aren’t required to use traditional poetic techniques, including structure, rhyme and rhythm. Writers choose words to express ideas precisely and create powerful images, and they divide the lines so they flow like speech. 

Comprehension strategies: The goal is for students to actually use what they’ve learned about text factors when they’re reading and writing. The comprehension strategy they use when they’re applying what they’ve learned is called noticing text factors;it involves considering genre, recognizing text structure, and attending to literacy devices. Students need to think about “what to expect from a text, how to approach it, and what to take away from it.” Teachers teach students about text factors through mini lessons and other activities, but the last step is to help students internalize the information and apply it when they’re reading and writing. Teachers use think-alouds to demonstrate this strategy as they do modeled and shared writing. 

Classroom Application: Chapter 9 will greatly benefit my future classroom and I. I learned a great deal about the elements of within a story, different kinds of poems, and how to assess knowledge of text factors. I’ve learned that effective teachers teach students to use their knowledge of genres, structural elements, and literacy devices to increase their comprehension of complex texts using the information within this chapter. As a teacher, it is imperative that I teach my students that stories have unique text factors such as: genres, story elements, and narrative devices. As a teacher, it is also important that I spend time teaching my students about poems and their unique factors. 

Comprehension: is a creative, multifaceted thinking process in which students engaged with the text. The comprehension process begins during prereading as students activate their background knowledge and preview the text, and it continues to develop as students reading, respond, explore and apply their reading. 

Text Complexity: text complexity is a new way of examining comprehension to determine the cognitive demands of book, or more specifically, how well readers can complete an assigned task with a particular text. 

For students to comprehend a text, they must have adequate background knowledge, understand most words in a text, and be able to read fluently. 

Background Knowledge: Having both world knowledge and literary knowledge is a prerequisite because they provide a bridge to a new text. Teachers use prereading activities to build students’ background knowledge-both their understanding of the topic and their familiarity with the genre. Involving students in authentic experiences such as taking field trips, participating in dramatizations, and examining artifacts is the best way to build background knowledge. 

Vocabulary: Students knowledge of words play a tremendous role in comprehension because it’s difficult to comprehend a text that’s loaded with unknown words. Teachers preteach key words when they’re building background knowledge using KWL charts, anticipation guides, and other prereading activities.

Fluency: fluent readers read quickly and efficiently. Because they recognize most words automatically, their cognitive resources aren’t depleted by decoding unfamiliar words, and they can devote their attention comprehension. 

Inferences: Readers seem to “read between the lines” to draw inferences, but what they actually do is synthesize their background knowledge with the author’s clues to ask questions that point toward inferences. When readers draw inferences, they have “an opportunity to sense a meaning not explicit in the text, but which derives or flows from it.”  

Teachers begin by explaining what inferences are, why they’re important, and how inferential thinking differs from literal thinking. Then they teach these four steps in drawing inferences:

1. Activate background knowledge about topics related to the text. 
2. Look for the author’s clues as you read. 
3. Ask questions, tying together background knowledge and the author’s clues. 
4. Draw inferences by answering the questions. 

 Comprehension Skills: 

How to create an expectation of comprehension:

Reciprocal teaching: is an instructional activity that takes form of a dialogue between students and teachers regarding segments of text for the purpose of constructing the meaning of text. This is a reading technique, which is thought to promote students’ reading comprehension. 

Assessing Comprehension: Teachers use the integrated instruction-assessment cycle to ensure that students are growing in their ability to understand complex texts and to use increasingly more sophisticated strategies to deepen their understanding of grade level texts. They also use diagnostic tests with struggling readers. 

Step 1: Planning

Step 2: Monitoring

Step 3:Evaluating

Step 4: Reflecting 

Cloze Procedure: Teachers examine students’ understanding of a text using the cloze procedure, in which students supply the deleted words in a passage taken from a text they’ve read. Although filling in the blanks may seem like a simple activity, it isn’t because students need to consider the content of the passage, vocabulary words, and sentence structure to choose the exact word that was deleted. 

Story Retellings: Teachers often have young children retell stories they’ve read or listened to read aloud to assess their literal comprehension. Students’ story retellings should be coherent and well organized and should include the big ideas and important details. Teachers often use checklists and rubrics to score students’ story retellings. 

Classroom Application: Chapter 8 will be very useful for when I have my own classroom in the future. It is important for teachers to be knowledgable about what readers think about when reading. Comprehension is the goal of reading and it is our job as educators to make sure we read with our students and assess their reading. Effective teachers demonstrate their responsibility and commitment to facilitating their students’ comprehension when they address reader factors according to the information within this chapter. It is vital that we teach students to use comprehension strategies to direct their reading, monitor their understanding, and troubleshoot problems when they occur. It is also imperative that we teach students how to apply comprehension strategies to support their learning of texts. Lastly, within this chapter I learned how important it is to motivate to our students and to show them how much we care about their learning experience.

Academic vocabulary- are the words that are frequently used in language arts, social studies, science, and math. These words are found in books and textbooks that students read.

Three Tiers of Words:

Levels of word knowledge: students develop knowledge about a word gradually, through repeated oral and written exposure to it. They move from now knowing a word at all to recognizing that they’ve seen the world before, and then to a level of partial knowledge where they have a general sense of the word or know one meaning. Finally, students know the word fully: They know multiple meaning of the word and can use it in a variety of ways. Here are the levels:

Unknown word-> Students don’t recognize the word

Initial Recognition-> Students have seen or heard the word or can pronounce it, but they don’t know the meaning. 

Partial Word Knowledge-> Students know one meaning of the word and can use it in a sentence. 

Full Word Knowledge-> Students know more than one meaning of the word and can use it in several ways. 

Word Consciousness: Student’s interest in learning and using words. Word consciousness increases students’ word knowledge and their interest in learning academic vocabulary. Students who have word consciousness exemplify these characteristics: 

Multiple Meanings of Words: Many words have more than one meaning. For some words, multiple meanings develop for the noun and verb forms, but sometimes additional meanings develop through word play and figurative language.

Synonyms: Words that have nearly the same meaning as other words are synonyms. 

Antonyms: words that express the opposite meanings are antonyms. For the word loud, some antonyms are soft, quiet, sedate, anddull. 

Homonyms: are words that sound alike but are spelled differently, such as right, write, to-too-two andthere-their-they’re. 

Root Words & Affixes: 

Etymologies: are the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history. The three main sources of words are English, Latin, and Greek. 

Vocabulary instruction: plays an important role in balance literacy classrooms because of the crucial role it plays in both reading and writing achievement. These are some components of vocabulary instruction:

-Immerse students in words through listening, talking, reading and writing.

-Teach specific words through active involvement and multiple encounters with words.  

-Teach word-learning strategies so students can figure out the meanings of unfamiliar words. 

-Develop students’ word consciousness, their awareness of and interest in words.

Explicit Instruction: Teachers explicitly teach students about academic vocabulary, usually Tier 2 words. Instruction should be rich, deep, and extended. Teachers should provide multiple encounters with words; present a variety of information, including definitions, contexts, examples, and related words; and involve students in word-study activities so that they have multiple opportunities to interact with words.  

Word-Study Activities:  

Word-Learning Strategies: When students come across an unfamiliar word while reading, they can do a variety of things: for example, reread the sentence, analyze root words and affixes in the word, check a dictionary, sound out the word, look for context clues in the sentence, skip the word and keep reading, or ask the teacher or a classmate for help. Here are three effective word-learning strategies:

-Using context clues

-Analyzing word parts

-Checking a dictionary

How to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word:

1. Students reread the sentence containing the word.

2. Students use context clues to figure out the meaning of the word, and if that doesn’t work, they continue to the next step. 

3. Students examine the word parts, looking for familiar root words and affixes to aid in figuring out the meaning. If they’re still not successful, they continue to the next step. 

4. Students pronounce the word to see if they recognize it when they say it. If they still can’t figure it out, they continue to the next step.

5. Students check the word in a dictionary or ask the teacher for help. 

Assessing Students’ Vocabulary Knowledge:  Teachers follow the four-step instruction-assessment cycle as they teach vocabulary, particularly during literature focus units and thematic units. They identify academic vocab words, plan minilessons and instructional activities, monitor students’ progress, and evaluate their achievement. 

Classroom Application: This chapter applies to my future of being an educator, because it has taught me many ways to expand my future students’ vocabulary and to develop their word consciousness. Students come to school with varying levels of word knowledge, both in the number of words they know and in the depth of their understanding, so as teachers it is important that we know ways to expand our students’ vocabulary. Effective teachers demonstrate their responsibility and commitment to ensuring that their students are successful when they teach academic vocabulary using the guidelines presented in this chapter. As a future educator, it is important that I teach these vocabulary concepts: multiple meanings, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, root words, affixes, etymologies & figurative language. In my future classroom, I will also teach word-learning strategies through a variety of activities.

Reading Fluency: is the ability to read quickly, accurately, and with expression, and to read fluently, students must recognize most words automatically and be able to identify unfamiliar words easily. 

High Frequency Words: The most common words that readers use again and again are high-frequency words. There have been numerous attempts to identify these words and to calculate their frequency in reading materials. 24 common words that kindergarteners learn to read are: a, at, he, it, no, the, am, can, I, like, see, to, an, do, in, me, she, up, and, go, is, my, so, and we. 

Word Walls: Teachers create word walls with high-frequency words. They prepare walls at the beginning of the school year and then add to them as they introduce new words. 

Word-Identification Strategies: Students use four word-identification strategies to decode unfamiliar words: phonic analysis, decoding by analogy, syllabic analysis, and morphemic analysis. Beginning readers depend on phonics to sound out unfamiliar words, but students gradually learn to decode words by analogy and to use syllabic and morphemic analysis effectively. 

Interactive Writing: Students and the teacher create a text and write a message. The text is composed by the group, and the teacher assists as students write the text on chart paper. Interactive writing is a useful procedure for examining young children’s handwriting skills and demonstrating how to form letters legibly. 

Guided Reading: is an instructional approach that involves a teacher working with a small group of readers. During the lesson, the teacher provides a text that students can read with support, coaching the learners as they use problem-solving strategies to read the text. 

Language Experience Approach: The Language Experience Approach (LEA) is based on children’s language and experiences. In this approach, teachers do shared writing: Children dictate words and sentences about their experiences, and the teacher writes down what the children say; the text they develop becomes the reading material. Using this approach, children create individual booklets. 

Choral Reading: is a literacy technique that helps students build their fluency, self-confidence, and motivation in reading. During choral reading a student, or a group of students reads a passage together, with or without a teacher.

Assessing Reading Fluency: Teachers informally monitor students’ reading fluency by listening to them read aloud during guided reading lessons, reading workshop, or other reading activities. 

• Automaticity- teachers check students’ knowledge of high-frequency words and their ability to use word-identification strategies to decode other words in grade level texts. 
• Speed- teachers time students as they read an instructional-level passage aloud and determine how many words they read correctly per minute. 
• Prosody- Teachers choose excerpts for students to read from familiar and unfamiliar instructional-level texts. As they listen, teachers judge whether students read with appropriate expression. 

Rubrics: are used to evaluate students and their progress. Rubrics usually contain evaluative criteria. Rubrics are used to assess students’ performances, written products, and multimedia projects. 

Activities to increase reading practice and independent reading:

Running Records: are authentic assessment tools because students demonstrate how they read using their regular reading materials as teachers make a detailed account of their ability to read a book. Teachers take running records of students’ oral reading to assess their word identification and reading fluency. 

Writer’s Voice: Writers Voice: Writers develop distinctive voices that reflect their individuality. Voice is similar to prosody, is the tone or emotional feeling of a piece of writing. 

Dysfluent readers and writers:

Obstacles to Fluency: Students who struggle with fluency may have a single problem, such as slow reading speed or delayed spelling development, or they may face numerous obstacles in both reading and writing. Teachers need to intervene and help older students become more fluent, so they can comprehend what they’re reading, and more fluent writers, so they can focus on creating meaning as they write. Providing targeted instruction is often necessary to help students overcome these obstacles. 

Classroom Application: All of these terms in Chapter 6 will be useful in my future as an educator. It is important that we as educators help students read and write. Effective teachers ensure that their students are fluent readers and writers by fourth grade and they work with older dysfluent students to overcome obstacles to fluency using the guidelines presented within this chapter! In this chapter I learned that teachers develop these three components of reading fluency: automaticity, speed, and prosody. Teachers also develop these three components of writing fluency: automaticity, speed, and voice. Reading and writing fluency is very important in schools today, and as a future educator, it is my job to address older struggling students’ obstacles to fluency using specific strategies!

Phonemes: students learn about phonemes as they notice rhyming words, segment words into individual sounds, and invent silly words by playing with sounds, much like Dr. Seuss did. They learn about letters as they sing the ABC song, name the letters of the alphabet, and spell their own names. Phonemes are classified as either consonants or vowels. 

Phonemes are the smallest units of speech, and they’re written as graphemes, or letters of the alphabet. 

Phonemic Awareness: Phonemic awareness is children’s basic understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual sounds, and it provides the foundation for phonics and spelling. Cunningham and Allington describe phonemic awareness as children’s ability to take words apart and put them back together again. Those who are phonemically aware understand that spoken words are made up of sounds, and they can segment and blend sounds in spoken words. 

Graphophonemic- students learn about graphophonemic relationships as they match letters and letter combinations to sounds, blend sounds to form words, and decode and spell vowel patterns. 

Graphemes: letters of the alphabet. It is the smallest meaningful contrastive unit in a writing system.

Teaching Phonemic Awareness: Teachers nurture children’s phonemic awareness through the language-rich environments they create in the classroom. As they sing songs, chant rhymes, read aloud wordplay boos, and play games, children have many opportunities to orally match, isolate, blend, and substitute sounds and segment words into sounds. Phonemic awareness instruction should meet three criteria. First, the activities should be appropriate for 5 and 6 year olds. Activities involving songs, rhymes, riddles, and wordplays books are good choices because they encourage children’s playful experimentation with oral language. Second, the instruction should be planned and purposeful, not just incidental. Teachers need to choose instructional materials and plan activities that focus children’s attention on the sound structure of oral language. Third, phonemic awareness activities should be integrated with other components of a balance literacy program.  

-it is important children perceive the connection between oral and written language. 

We can teach phonemic awareness through, sound matching activities, sound isolation activities, sound blending activities, sound addition and substitution activities, and sound segmentation activities 

Elkonin boxes: Teachers use Elkonin boxes to teach students to segment words. The teacher shows an object or picture of an object and draws a row of boxes, with one box for each phoneme in the name of the object or picture. Then the teacher or child moves a marker into each box as the sound is pronounced. Elkonin boxes can also be used for spelling activities. When a child is trying to spell a word, such as duck, the teacher can draw these three boxes, do the segmentation activity, and then have the child write the letters representing each phoneme in the boxes. 

Phonics: is the set of relationships between phonology, the sounds in speech, and orthography, and the spelling patterns of written language. The emphasis is on spelling patterns, not individual letters, because there isn’t one to one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in English.

Consonant blends: occur when two or three consonants appear next to each other in words and their individual phonemes are “blended” together, as in grass, bely, and spring. 

Consonant digraphs: are letter combinations representing single sounds that aren’t represented by either letter; the four mot common are ch as in chair and each, sh as in shell and wish, th as in father and both, and wh as in whale. Another consonant digraph is ph, as in photo and graph. 

Vowels: the remaining five letters-a, e, i, o, and u – present vowels, and w and y are vowels when used in the middle and at the end of syllables and words. Vowels often present several sounds. Vowel sounds are more complicated than consonant sounds, and there are many vowel combinations representing long vowels and other vowel sounds. 

Diphthong: Most vowel combinations are vowel digraphs or diphthongs: When two vowels present a single sound, the combination is a vowel digraph, and when the two vowels represent a glide from one sound to another, the combination is a diphthong. Two vowel combinations that are consistently diphthongs are oi and oy but other combinations, such as ou as in house and ow as in now are diphthongs when they represent a glided sound. 

R-controlled vowel: When one or more vowels in a word are followed by an r, it’s called an r-controlled vowel, because the r influences the pronunciation of the vowel sound. 

Phonograms: one-syllable words and syllables in longer words can be divided into two parts, the onset and the rime:

Onset: the onset is the consonant sound, if any, that precedes the vowel.

Rime:  the rime is the vowel and any consonant sounds that follow it. 

Example: in show, shthe onset and owis the rime. 

Teaching Phonics: The best way to teach phonics is through a combination of explicit instruction and authentic application activities. Most teachers begin with consonants and then introduce the short vowels so that children can read and spell consonant-vowel-consonant or CVC-pattern words, such as dig, and cup. Then children learn about consonant blends and diagraphs and long vowels so that they can read and spell consonant-vowel-consonant-e or CVCe-pattern words, such as broke, white, and consonant-vowel-vowel-consonant or CVVC-pattern words, such as clean, wheel, and snail. 

Minilesson: Decoding CVC words with final consonant blends

Stages of Spelling Development:

Teaching Spelling: Perhaps the best know way to teach spelling is through weekly spelling tests, but tests should never be considered a complete spelling program. To become good spellers, students need to learn about the English orthographic system and move through the stages of spelling development. They develop strategies to use in spelling unknown words and gain experience in using dictionaries and other resources. A complete spelling program includes these components:

-Teaching spelling strategies

-Matching instruction to students’ stage of spelling development

-Providing daily reading and writing opportunities

-Teaching students to spell high-frequency words

Classroom Application:

In the future, I will teach my students how to read and write. It is important that we as educators fully understand the terms and concepts in this chapter in order to be an effective teacher. Effective teachers teach their students to use phonemic awareness, phonics, and spelling to decode and spell words. Teachers should ensure that their students are successful in “cracking the code” when they use the guidelines presented in this chapter! Teachers develop students’ phonemic awareness, teach high-utility phonics concepts, rules, phonograms, and spelling patterns, and teachers understand that students follow a series of developmental stages as they learn to spell words! It is important that I understand the stages of spelling development, in order to help my students succeed. I really enjoyed learning about the Elkonin boxes and I am sure I will use them in my future!

   

Shared reading: Teachers use shared reading to read aloud books that are appropriate for children’s interest level but too difficult for them to read for themselves. 

Interactive writing: process used to teach students how to write. The process involves the sharing of a pen between the teacher and students. 

Choral reading: is a literacy technique that helps students build their fluency, self-confidence, and motivation in reading. During choral reading a student or a group of students reads a passage together, with or without a teacher. 

Guided reading: is an instructional approach that involves a teacher working with a small group of students who demonstrate similar reading behaviors and can all read similar levels of texts. 

Word wall:  high frequency words fills a partition separating instructional areas; it’s divided into sections for each letter of the alphabet. Arranged on it are nearly 100 words written on small cards cut into the shape of the words. The teachers introduce new words each week and post them on the word wall. 

Minilessons: a short lesson with a narrow focus that provides instruction in a skill or concept. 

Interactive read aloud: : The teacher reads and involves the children in the book as he/she reads and afterwards, they talk about it! 

Concepts about print: Through experiences in their homes and communities, young children learn that print carries meaning and that reading and writing are used for a variety of purposes. Although reading and writing are part of daily life for almost every family, in different communities, families vary how they use written language. 

Preschool and kindergarten teachers demonstrate the purposes of written language and provide opportunities for children to experiment with reading and writing in many ways:

-Posting signs in the classroom

-Making a lists of classroom rules

-Reading and writing stories

-Writing notes to parents and much more!

Concepts about words: At first, children only vague notions of literacy terms, such as word, letter, sound, and sentence, that teachers use in talking about reading and writing, but they develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of these terms. Children develop concepts about words through active participation in literacy activities. 

Concepts about the alphabet: Young children develop concepts about the alphabet and how letters are used to represent phonemes. 

Components of letter knowledge:

-The letter’s name 

-The formation of the letter in upper- and lowercase manuscript handwriting

-The use of the letter represents in isolation

-And much more..

Children use this knowledge to decode unfamiliar words as they read to create spellings for words as they write. Research suggests that children don’t learn letter names in any particular order or by isolating letters from meaningful written language in skill-and-drill activities. 

Environmental print: Parents and other caregivers read to children, and they learn to read signs and other environmental print in their community. They experiment with writing and have their parents write messages for them; they also observe adults writing. 

Assessing concepts of written language: Teacher monitor children’s growing awareness of the concepts about written language as they observe them during shared reading and other reading and writing activities. The most widely used assessment is Marie Clay’s Concepts about Print Test: The CAP Test assesses young children’s understanding of three types of concepts about print: book orientation concepts, directionality concepts, and letter and word concepts. Instead of using the test booklets, teachers can also administer the test using other books available in the classroom. Teachers’ regularly observe children as they look at books and reread familiar ones to monitor their developing knowledge about written language concepts. They also watch as children do pretend writing and write their names and other familiar words and phrases. They notice which concepts children understand and which ones they need to continue to talk about and demonstrate during shared reading. 

Stage 1: Emergent Reading and Writing

Children gain an understanding of the communicative purpose of print and develop an interest in reading and writing during the emergent stage. They notice environmental print in the world around them and develop concepts about print as teachers read and write with them. As children dictate stories for the teacher to record, for example, they learn their speech can be written down, and they observe how teachers write from left to right and top to bottom. During the emergent stage, children can accomplish the following:

Stage 2: Beginning Reading and Writing 

This stage marks children’s growing awareness of the alphabetic principle. Children learn about phoneme-grapheme correspondences; phonics rules in words such as run, band, this, make, day, and road; and word families, including –ill (fill, bill, will)and –ake (bake, make, take). They also apply (and misapply) their developing phonics knowledge to spell words. During the beginning stage of reading and writing development, children accomplish the following:

Stage 3: Fluent Reading and Writing 

The third stage marks children’s move into fluent reading and writing. Fluent readers recognize hundreds and hundreds of words automatically and have the tools to identify unfamiliar words when reading. Fluent writers use the writing process to draft, revise, and publish their writing and participate in revising groups. They’re familiar with a variety of genres and know how to organize their writing. Fluent readers and writers can accomplish the following:

Morning message: Morning message is a daily literacy routine that teachers use to teach literacy concepts, strategies, and skills. Before the children arrive, teachers write a brief message on chart paper, usually in the form of a friendly letter, about what will happen that day; then the message is read at the beginning of the school day. Afterward, children reread it and count the letters, words, and sentences in the message. Teachers usually follow a predictable pattern in their messages each day to make it easier for children to read. 

Predictable books: The stories and other books that teachers use for shared reading with young children often have repeated sentences, rhyme, or other patterns; books that incorporate these patterns are called predictable books. These are the four most common patterns:

Language Experience Approach: the LEA is based on children’s language and experiences. In this approach, teachers do shared writing: Children dictate words and sentences about their experiences, and the teacher writes down what the children say; the text they develop becomes the reading material. 

Interactive Writing: Children and the teacher create a text together during interactive writing, “sharing the pen” as they write the text on chart paper. The children compose the message together, and then the teacher guides them as they write it word by word on chart paper. Children take turns writing known letters and familiar words, adding punctuation marks, and leaving spaces between words. 

Manuscript Handwriting: Children enter kindergarten with different background of handing writing experience. Some 5 year olds have never help a pencil, but many other have written cursivelike scribbles or manuscript letterlike lines and circles. This writing consists of unjoined letters made with lines and circles.

Classroom Application:

Within Chapter 4 there were many concepts that will be useful in my future classroom. Within my classroom, I’m sure my students and I will participate in shared reading, interactive reading, choral reading, and guided reading. It is useful that I know and understand these terms so that I am more knowledgeable about them. In my future classroom, I will have a word wall so understanding more about word walls will help me in my classroom as well! In my placements thus far I am have observed a lot of different morning meetings and in this chapter I learned more about morning meetings and what teachers usually discuss in their morning meetings! These terms and concepts will help me greatly in my future as an educator.

Blooms Taxonomy

Understanding the levels of Bloom’s words is critical to using them in learning objectives.

Examples of useful bloom words: list, identify, predict, describe, conclude, solve, analyze, sort, categorize, design, generate, justify, construct.

Examples of weasel words: imagine, understand, appreciate, explore, learn, realize, discover, comprehend, know, see, exposed to, familiar with, sense of.

Learning objectives need to be time bound, measurable, results-oriented, relevant, attainable, and specific. (SMART)

Learning objectives are measurable, observable statements of what students will be able to do at the end of a unit of learning.

Before you understand a concept, you must remember it. To apply a concept, you must first understand it. In order to evaluate a concept, you muse have analyzed it. To create an accurate conclusion, you must have completed a thorough evaluation.

How to write an objective:

Step 1: start with a stem sentence.

Step 2: Determine the learning outcome.

Step 3: Consult the Bloom’s Wheel to select the appropriate level of verb.

Step 4: Write the verb and learning outcome into a statement that, when combined with the stem, forms a complete sentence.

Running Records: listening to children reread familiar books to monitor their ability to recognize high-frequency words, decode unfamiliar words, and use reading strategies. This is a way to assess a student’s reading progress by systematically evaluating a student’s oral reading and identifying error patterns. 

Minilessons: Teachers teach, short focused lessons, called minilessons on literacy strategies and skills. Topics include how to write an entry in a reading log, use commas in a series, draw inferences, and use sentence combining. In these lessons, teachers introduce a topic and connect it to the reading or writing students are in involved in, provide information, and supervise as students practice the topic. Minilessons usually last 15-30 minutes and some teachers extend the lesson over several days.

Steps of a minilesson:

Classroom Assessment

Step 1: Planning for assessment

Teachers plan for assessment at the same time they’re planning for instruction. They think about these questions and choose the assessment tools they’ll use to get answers:

• Are any students struggling to understand?
• Are students completing assignments?
• Are students exhibiting good work habits?
• Have students learned the concepts that have been taught?

By planning for assessment before they begin teaching, teachers are prepared to use assessment tools wisely; otherwise, classroom assessment often turns out to be haphazard and inpromtu. 

Step 2: Monitoring Students’ Progress

Monitoring is vital to student success. Teachers monitor students’ learning everyday and use the results to make instructional decisions. As they monitor students’ progress through observations, conferences, and other informal, formative procedures, teachers learn about students and their individual strengths and weaknesses and about the impact of their instruction. 

To monitor students’ progress, teachers observe, make anecdotal notes, have conferences and checklists to understand the student progress. 

Anecdotal Notes:Teachers write brief notes in notebooks or on self-stick notes as they observe students. The most useful notes describe specific events, report rather than evaluate, and relate the events to other information about the student.

Book Talk: Book Talk Checklist shows a teacher’s evaluation of a fourth grade’s book talk; the student grade was B.  At the beginning of the school year, the teacher introduced book talks, modeled how to do one, and developed the checklist with the students. Students use the checklist whenever they’re preparing to give a book talk, and the teacher uses it as a rating scale to evaluate the effectiveness of their book talks. 

Step 3: Evaluating Students’ Learning

Teachers document students’ learning to make judgments about their achievement. At this stage, the assessment is summative. Tests are a traditional way to evaluate students’ learning, but most teachers prefer to evaluate students’ actual reading and writing to make judgments about their achievement. 

Rubrics:Teachers use rubrics, or scoring guides, to evaluate student performance according to specific criteria and levels of achievement. 

Portfolios: Students also collected their best work in portfolios to document their own learning and accomplishments.

Step 4: Reflection on Students’ Learning 

Teachers reflect on their instruction to improve their teaching effectiveness. They ask themselves questions about lessons that were successful and those they weren’t and how they might adapt instruction to meet their students’ needs. They also analyze students’ achievement, because teachers aren’t effective if students aren’t learning. 

Determining Students’ Reading Levels

Guided Reading: is an instructional approach that involves a teacher working with a small group of readers.During the lesson, the teacher provides a text that students can read with support, coaching the learners as they use problem-solving strategies to read the text. 

Leveled Books: To match students to book in grades K-8, Fountas and Pinnell, developed a text gradient, or classification system that arranges books along a 26-level continuum from easiest to hardest. Their system is based on these variables that influence reading difficulty:

Lexile Framework: Another approach to matching books to readers in the Lexile Framework developed by MetaMetrics. This approach is different because it’s used to measure both students’ reading levels and the difficulty level of books. Word familiarity and sentence complexity are the two factors used to determine the difficulty level of books. Lexile sores range from 100 to 1300, representing kindergarten through 12^thgrade reading levels. 

Informal Reading Inventories: commercial tests to evaluate students’ reading performance. The can be used at first through eighth grade levels, but first grade teachers often find that IRIs don’t provide as much useful information about beginning readers as running records do. Teachers use IRIs to identify struggling students’ instructional needs, particularly in the areas of word identification, oral reading fluency, and comprehension. 

Miscue Analysis: its purpose is to understand the reading process. It is a diagnostic tool that helps researchers/teachers gain insight into the reading process. The student’s miscues are classified and charted down. Only words that students mispronounce or substitute can be analyzed.

SOLOM: an authentic assessment tool that many teachers use is the Student Oral Language Observation Matrix. The SOLOM is a rating scale that teachers use to assess students’ command of English as they observe them talking and listening in a real, day-to-day classroom activities. The SOLOM addresses five components of oral language.

KWL Chart: is a graphical organizer designed to help in learning.The letters KWL are an acronym, for what students, in the course of a lesson, already know, want to know, and ultimately learn. The KWL chart is divided into three columns. 

High-Stakes Testing: These tests are designed to objectively measure students’ knowledge according to grade level standards. High-stakes testing is different than classroom assessment. The test scores typically provide little information for making day-to-day instructional decisions, but students, teachers, administrators, and schools are judged and held accountable by the results. 

Test Taking Strategies: 

Portfolio Assessment:Students collect their work in portfolios and use them to evaluate their progress and showcase their best work. These systematic and meaningful collections of artifacts document students’ literacy development over a period of time. Students select the pieces to be placed in their portfolios, and in the process they learn to establish criteria for their selections. Portfolios help students, teacher, and parents see patterns of growth from one literacy milestone to another in ways that aren’t possible with other types of assessment. 

Application to the Classroom:

Chapter 3 has some very useful terms and ideas that would benefit my future classroom. I really enjoyed reading through the 4 steps of assessment. As a future educator, it is vital that we understand and use many different ways to assess our students. We need to make sure we are documenting students progress, evaluate their learning and reflect on their learning. Teachers are not effective if students aren’t learning, so as teachers our main job is to make sure that students are learning and understanding the content we are teaching in our classrooms. Back in elementary school, we used to have reading levels and participate in KWL charts often. KWL charts help students with learning and can be used often in a classroom setting. Reading levels are also important, because it helps us as teachers, help our students pick the proper books for them to read. Within my classroom, I also want to display test-taking strategies that I know will help my students. There are many ideas and concepts within chapter 3 that would benefit my future classroom.

UW Superior Teacher Education Program

Lesson Plan Template

Notes:

• Download the lesson plan template from resource center or teacher will provide the template within the class.
• In the Prior Knowledge and Conceptions part, be as specific as possible. 
• You need to be proactive when giving students objectives. 
• In expectations for student learning we are NOT addressing student behavior or student participation. Focus on learning objective. 
• When doing group work, monitor the whole group
• Feedback isn’t a grade its scaffolding
• During the Launch/Hook, we want to engage our students (60 seconds)
• Explore section SHOULD read like a cookbook!
• Close the lesson without just excusing them to their next class.
• Attach materials to the resources part of the lesson. If using a text, cite the text.