If a child cannot read all facets of their life (socially, academically, relationally, financially, etc.) then they will suffer and this will continue into adult hood. Reading and understanding what you read is essential in almost everything we do such as school work, homework, buying a car, buying a house and much more. It is our job as educators to not only teach a child to read but to ignite a passion for reading, striving to make it something that comes almost as natural as breathing, and something we cannot live without. Developing a comprehensive literacy classroom is an integral part of doing exactly that.
What is a comprehensive literacy classroom? To answer that you first must understand that each child in a classroom is different and therefore will have diverse needs. A teacher must figure out a way to meet the needs of all the children which can be very challenging and complex. The term used in the education world for this is differentiation. In a comprehensive literacy classroom a teacher must differentiate instruction, often by utilizing small groups, pairs or one on one sessions. You also must make sure you create engaging lessons. By this I mean that students are having so much fun they almost forget they are actually learning. In a comprehensive literacy classroom teacher lecture very little and let the students do most of the work.
Ellery (2009), states that there are three critical components in order to build a comprehensive literacy classroom. These components are curriculum, assessment and instruction. Research suggests that your curriculum should include the five essential components for teaching reading; Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (Learning ...
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... You must be prepared and have all materials ready and very little lag time. This helps to keep your students focused and engaged. A teacher should never stop learning themselves and utilize any professional development opportunities presented. A comprehensive literacy classroom is a place where learning can flourish and students of all different backgrounds and learning abilities can succeed.
Works Cited
Ellery, V. (2009).Creating strategic readers: Techniques for developing competency in
phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Learning Point Associates. (2004).A closer look at the five essential components of effective
reading instruction: a review of scientifically based reading research for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.learningpt.org/pdfs/literacy/components.pdf.
For this assignment, I completed a survey to assess my school’s literacy program by using a survey that was adapted from by Patty, Maschoff, & Ransom (1996) to analyze the instructional program and the school’s infrastructure. To be able to answer my survey, I needed to go colleagues of mine in the English Department and to my administration to help with these questions. Being a math teacher, we hardly ever discuss the literacy and the students’ acquisition of it in our department meeting during staff development days. Since I am not truly current with literacy acquisition in education, I am hoping to understand more from this process so I can help all my students. I want them to be able to read texts related to math and find information that will be useful to them during the year.
I was placed in the Title 1 Reading classroom while spending time at Maplehurst Elementary. The environment of the classroom was fun and colorful. She had a large table that would seat 8 students at a time and a large carpet behind her desk for when we did floor work. Everyday when the students arrived to class we had a routine of starting the class off with letter sounds, trick words, and digraphs. It’s good for the students struggling in these specific areas for them to keep practicing and also good reception for some students.
“Literacy—the ability to access, evaluate, and integrate information from a wide range of textual sources—is a prerequisite not only for individual educational success but for upward mobility both socially and economically,” states Sean Reardon (18). Literacy plays a significant role in civilized society. As Reardon mentioned, literacy is an important part of social and economic progression; therefore, it is unsurprising that thousands of dollars are poured into the education system each year to ensure that students can be considered literate. Reardon continues on to claim, “by third grade virtually all students can “read” in the procedural sense—they can sound out words and recognize simple words in context” (20). However,
The causes of reading difficulties often arise because of learning disabilities such as dyslexia, poor preparation before entering school, no value for literacy, low school attendance, insufficient reading instruction, and/or even the way students were taught to read in the early grades. The struggles that students “encounter in school can be seen as socially constructed-by the ways in which schools are organized and scheduled, by assumptions that are made about home life and school abilities, by a curriculum that is often devoid of connections to students’ lives, and by text that may be too difficult for students to read” (Hinchman, and Sheridan-Thomas166). Whatever the reason for the existence of the reading problem initially, by “the time a [student] is in the intermediate grades, there is good evidence that he will show continued reading g...
... learning literacy desirable to the student, which obviously increases learning. The United States has to move toward implementing better literacy-directed learning in our school’s classrooms. In the long-run, this will help the U.S. compete on the national level with other countries.
Content Area Literacy is the term used to describe the reading done in subjects other than language arts. I chose the term literacy, rather than reading, because literacy encompasses all of the necessary elements in the field of reading. While informed professionals understand that reading is not simply decoding words, many teachers are ignorant of this fact. McClure, Garthwait, and Kristo
Literacy is defined as “the ability to use available symbol systems that are fundamental to learning and teaching for the purposes of comprehending and composing, for the purposes of making and communicating meaning and knowledge” (Stock, 2012), and it is one of the most essential skills that an early year student will learn. Literacy serves to provide the building blocks for the continued knowledge acquisition and general education of individuals of all ages; by working to understand and identify how and why literacy is taught using the structured literacy block format in Australian schools, and in identifying the benefits of utilizing this type of tool for teaching literacy in student’s early years, it will be possible to gain a better understanding of the organization, planning, and teaching approaches that are used in a literacy block approach. A sample standard literacy block will be provided, offering the means of understanding the applications of the tool, which will serve to further stress the necessity of this tool’s usage.
Literacy embraces reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Integrating all of these into a literacy program is key. Teachers must provide endless and ongoing opportunities for their student to read, write, listen, and speak.
...ents to make a good reader. Therefore, without a certain piece of reading students skills the scaffolding is unstable. Due to a student’s faulty scaffolding, reading does not work cohesive to make the end product a successfully understood story. This concerns me. If I feel like they are falling behind on these skills and their other teachers, my colleagues, are not teaching them these skills, I will and do my best at making it appropriate for my class. Without reading skills, they will be faced with horrible ramifications from their problems to comprehend and understand the vocabulary words they see in their textbooks.
Every child deserves a positive, safe, nurturing, and stimulating learning environment where they will grow academically, socially, emotionally, and physically. My role as an educator is to provide my students with this type of environment as well as an education that will help them succeed academically and become life long learners. It is the responsibility of a literacy educator to provide students with this type of environment, but also to provide instruction that will help students become successful readers and writers. There are numerous programs and philosophies about literacy and reading. Through years of experience and research, one begins to develop their own creative approach on teaching these skills. After looking at different programs and seeing the positive and negatives of each, an integrated and balanced approach of literacy seems to be the best way to teach the differing needs of each student.
A comprehensive approach to literacy instruction is when reading and writing are integrated. This happens by connecting reading, writing, comprehension, and good children’s literature. A comprehensive approach to literacy should focus on the many different aspects of reading and writing in order to improve literacy instruction. This includes teachers supporting a comprehensive literacy instructional program by providing developmentally appropriate activities for children. Comprehensive literacy approaches incorporate meaning based skills for children by providing them with the environment needed for literacy experiences. This includes having a print rich classroom where children are exposed to charts, schedules, play related print, and
My first impression after reading the title of the article “Three Views of Content-Area Literacy: Making Inroads, Making it Inclusive, and Making up for Lost Time,” was that this was going to be an article entirely about the importance about using literature within a given content area. I believed that the three sections could be translated into the uses of content area literacy in the future of education, making content literacy included into base curriculum, and how to do all of this in a limited amount of time. After reading the entire article, it came to my attention that because of my assumptions I was just like the teachers burying their faces in the newspaper and disregarding the importance of the information placed in front of them (Hoffman, Topping, Wenrich, 2006, p. 159). Upperclassman from my area of content had discussed with me the lack of value that a class about content area literacy would provide for someone who would go on to teach ensembles in secondary institutions or higher. I now know that these views are equal to those of the ignorant teachers from the first story in the article. We believe that as content specialists that the concepts of reading and writing have no place to be taught in our classrooms, however the article has helped me realize that as future educators we need to put down the paper and listen to what is really being said about content area literacy.
Literacy education must be conceptualized as more than reading and writing (Auerbach et al. 1996). According to Fingeret (1992), "our understanding of literacy has changed from [a] focus on individual skills, separated from meaningful content .
In class, we have been focusing on the explanation of what Literacy III: Research and Pedagogy in Content Area Literacy actually means. Content Area Literacy is defined by as “the ability to use reading and writing for the acquisition of new content in a given discipline” (McKenna and Robinson 1990). Because of the explanation of the class, I feel as if I am learning about the background and deepening my knowledge and understanding of the class as a whole. Content Area Literacy gives each subject areas a reason to include reading strategies in those lessons. These subject areas include mathematics, science, history, and English (Hodges 2015). When you can include reading strategies in these lessons, you are expanding student’s horizons and giving them multiple exposures. I think that this is extremely beneficial in the all classrooms. As for the negatives on Content Area Literacy, it should be noted that teachers should not only focus on reading during the other subject areas. Teachers need to have a medial balance between the content area and the literacy strategies
Reading to children can teach them skills they’ll need throughout their entire life. Reading aloud not only enhances their skills, it also affects how the their school life is. Being read to regularly is important to maintain the skills that the child learns, the earlier a child is being read to, the more skills they acquire. Parents will benefit from reading also, it creates a bond with their child that last a lifetime. Reading aloud will introduce children to books and reading so they can eventually do it on their own. Reading to children can improve many aspects of their life.