Building a Foundation and Growing As Readers

I personally feel the interactive model would be the best choice for myself. In the top-down model, which I would use frequently, is the concept about reading for meaning. Comprehension is important; I feel if a student needs to skip a word or two that they don’t know it would be allowed, as long as they can grasp the meaning of the text. I also love that reading and writing are primarily the mode for instruction. This is useful, and helpful when teaching kids. It allows for repetition and practice of reading and writing. However, in some cases especially students who are below average in their reading skills some strategies need to be provided and mastered before comprehension can occur. Students need to have prior background knowledge about phonics, and word usage. The whole idea is to build both top-down model strategies, and bottom-up skills and word identification at the same time. The foundation has to be set before students can build and grow as readers. They must be immersed in reading and surrounded by it as well. As a teacher I plan on using phonemic awareness, and word identification skills while also practicing reading, and writing comprehension. Students are constantly building scaffold’s to reach the desired reading level. For example in my classroom if I were teaching a lesson on bears I would use a language arts experience with them. For instance I would read a book about different species of bears. Then I would tell the students to tell me what happened in the book, and discuss the book aloud (comprehension part). Students will then tell me their sentences and I will write it word for word on the board. Once we have completed our sentences I would go through and read each sentence slowly and break down words ...

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...odels fit into my preference of the interactive reading model. The students need to learn literacy at the correct developmental level. In order to keep scaffolding with the interactive reading model you have to find what their reading readiness level is and set the correct scope and sequence of skills. Teachers also need to be aware that there has to be progress, and that certain students learn differently. When using emerging literacy into my model I need to find out what the student’s background knowledge is on reading, print, and what they want to read about. This helps them stay engaged and constantly gives them opportunity to grow and challenge themselves at their appropriate literacy level. Both reading readiness, and emergent literacy go hand in hand and provide a wide array of scaffolding within the scaffolding and building of the interactive reading model.