I looked at and reviewed the children's books Fox in Sox by Dr. Seuss and Disney's Aladin by the Little Golden Books series. I chose these books because I think that both play important parts in a child's learning to read and how it can affect comprehension due to cultural aspects.
Aladin
- Student might not have ever heard of Aladin, due to age, and if Disney was present in the child's life prior
- Student might have trouble pernouncing some of the worlds as they are not common in English, especially when English is the second language
- Student might follow a long more by the pictures and understand the story more so than by the words
- There might be too many words on each of the pages for the ELL student/s and they might get discouraged or intimidated
Fox in Sox
- Student might not understand rhyming schemes
- Student might not be aware of phonemes and the phonetic sounds that a letter might make, i.e. /x/ in "fox"
- Pictures might confuse a student
- Rhyming might confuse the student on comprehension, but could help them understand how to pernounce words
How I would introduce this to an ELL reader would be to ask questions (kind of like and KWL but not to that extent) to find out their prior knowledge of what they might now. I would then read the story to the student/students and ask questions as they go along, pointing out harder words and having them repeat the words. I would also have the students underline words they might not know or know how to say. I would then, with a dictionary, have the students look up the words so that they could see the word, how to pronounce it, and what it means. I would should the different elelments to rhyming, but introducing songs, reading other rhyming schemes and have the students understand the different schemes.
This entry definitely had me thinking... I could not find a book that i was unfamiliar with unless it was a new book I wanted to read, but the language I understood so that did not work out so well. The story that comes to my mind that I always had a hard time with the language, or how it was writen was "Romeo and Juliet." I would always get confused by the language in that play. So some strategies I came up with for that was:
- Contex clues in the sentence to figure out what the sentence is trying to convey
- Re-read the sentence
- Look in a doctionary to determine defintions
- Ask for help
- Close your eyes and envision yourself in the scene you are reading, and imagine what you would say if you were the character
I will add more as I come across texts I am unsure of and see how I would respond.
The relationship between oral language and the reading process I believe goes hand in hand. To an extent, you cant have one if you don't have the other. There are always the cases where someone can learn to read but not to speak orally or visa versa. But I feel the oral language guides someone in the reading process. People learn how to speak first, before they start writing, which means that oral language is the "key" to learning to read.
I took a spin an looked at what I talked about previously and thought in the eyes of an ELL student. In the case of an ELL student, the reading process is key to the oral language part. The students learn to read the English language first before they can actually speak it.
Writing instruction that I have received has been a lot. It seems like I have liked to write my whole life. The very first type of writing that was encouraged was "free" writing, my mom always told me to just write, write about my pets, write about how my day was, write a story, write about my feelings, if I was sad, mad, happy, etc. I should just write about and let it all go out.
When I was older, I received several forms of writing instruction. So I guess I can really pin point the specific type of writing as I did. But from my writing instruction I have really liked to write, whether it is expository, poetry, research papers, anything, I really have objection to writing.
Entry 1: Philosophies on teaching literacy
When I spoke with the fourth grade teacher I work with about her thoughts on teaching literacy to the students and her philosophy for teaching literacy she looked at me, and said, "ya know, I have never been asked that so I have never really thought about it much, other than what can I DO for EACH of my students to help improve their literacy."
After talking for a while about her different approaches, she finally said her philosophy would be "what ever it takes to help my kids 'get it' is what I will do." She told me about the ways she teaches her reading lessons: 1) by her reading the story then having the students read the story and discussing as they go along; 2) She reads the story once, over two days (1/2 one day, 1/2 the next) then have the CD read the story to them. She said both ways work, but she likes reading the story then play the CD and have the students read along, she said it build fluency and it helps the struggling readers feel confident to read out loud with their classmates instead of "by themselves" outloud when the class reads. She then introduces the vocabulary words on the very first day of the reading lesson, then goes over the vocab words as they read them in the story, and she has them define it in the story and then has the students define it in the world around them.
She said that she has learned to look in to what EACH child needs, she said sometimes she can't help them individually but will never give up on them and constantly finds things that "might" be able to help the student. For example she had one student who had very poor fluency and just didn't like to read, she tried many different things with him, until one day she let him check out a book from her personal library (one that she felt was too advanced for him), "BONES", she said he never put that book down. So she found more books like that for him and when they did mid-year scantron testing, his reading level had improved the most in the entire class!
I completely agree with her philosophy in that I would do anything I could to help improve a students literacy skills, math skills, or even musical skills!
