I find that as we continue in the Summer Institute I'm constantly amazed at the benefits we can learn from kindergarten teachers. For the most part, after we learn to do anything we forget the process. We forget how difficult it is to learn how to use the internet because we have done it for five years. We forget our struggles of trying to drive a car. Now we just hop in and go! So something as far into our past as learning to read really does seem like a different life. We just read. We do not struggle to make sense of most words, and if we have vocabulary difficulty we know how to solve the problem. Google it!
Today, in Jenny's demo she took me back to my four-year-old self. How did I learn to read? Why did my early teachers focus on phonics and pronunciation? I found that as she refreshed our memories and explained the why and how, I discovered how complicated it is to teach someone to read. It's hard for the child because they don't know the process. And it's hard for us because we forget to identify with the child. This exercise definitely gave me some perspective. Now when my students struggle to pronounce a word, I can remember to help them sound it out instead of quickly reading it for them in a passage and moving on. I can even use this an opportunity to discuss our language and put vocabulary in context of our reading.
Additionally, I found my partner story creation to be interesting. Lil pointed out to me that we can write before we can read. I never thought which came first in this situation. It's kind of that chicken and the egg situation. I also had an opportunity to ask her about adults who don't know how to read. We have all heard the horror stories that a student made it to high school and still can't read. I asked Lil how this could happen and what were some signs we could use to identify student reading struggles.
She explained that as an adult, we have learned a variety of social cues. We know that the symbols on the Mountain Dew bottle say "Mountain Dew" from social situations. We can gather similar visual cues that can help an adult to survive in our world. However, the less visual cues that we give a reader, the more difficult the text. I thought this was a great way to determine if my students were in fact struggling with reading or with something else.
Jenny's demo took me back to my younger days, as well, Ashley. However, my experience was different than yours because I was not hooked on phonetics, as they are taught today. I never really learned things like the formal differences between long and short vowel sounds (which made me terrified to substitute in elementary schools because reading lessons for me could be a nightmare). And yet, I have always been a very strong reader and writer and even speller. I am wondering about the various strategies and practices of the teaching of reading and writing and how we are constantly bombarded with the "latest and greatest" theory-based practices. Lil said it best when she challenged the notion of having to have consensus, in this case one "right" way of teaching. I think the evolution and variety of strategies available to us as teachers reiterates the fact that learning is a crazy-complicated and individual process, one that we can attempt to study with crazy-complicated conclusions. I love thinking about what young students can offer in the way of simple but profound insights about our own learning and evolution as thinkers and writers. I think Lacy hit the nail on the head when she encouraged us to not simply look at their texts as "cute" but to look at their texts as genuine attempts to communicate in new and thoughtfully deliberate ways!
ReplyDeleteI also really liked Jenny's demo this afternoon and how it really got me thinking in a very different way. I liked that we got to focus on our partner's story and really thinking about how to draw out new story details but still keeping the questions open-ended that we didn't impose our own ideas.
ReplyDeleteGood point about not rushing the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word in our classes too. Our phonetics exercise reminded me of how sometimes our idea of words being heard and the words on the page can be a little different. I remember in the sixth grade, I had a social studies teacher who used the word facetious all the time. We were always acting facetious and being facetious. I had never come across the word in writing and for the longest time I thought the word was spelled starting with a 'ph'. I don't think I even ventured to think how the rest of the word was spelled. I remembered being bowled over when I actually saw the word in print.
Haha, sorry random school memory!
But interesting to read about how adults can use those social cues when they can't read the words. I've definitely had some high school freshmen who have trouble with words and spelling and I've not know quite how to help them.
I felt the same way... we can learn a lot from Kindergarten teachers, or just remember from kindergarten. Activities were so much more fun back then, and interactive. Also, the disconnect between what the students needed to learn at that age and understanding how to teach them seemed huge! I wouldn't have the first clue how to teach a child phonics. SO interesting.
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