I'm writing up the weekly workshop notes this week. Basically I am going to recap what we talked about in the provided discussion time. Firstly we identified that all the readings were about different reading styles. After acknowledging this we went on to talk about guided reading. What we didn’t know was that this is done with a group of students of the same abilities. They are sat down and given a book that is slightly harder than their normal reading levels and they read this. We learnt in class that the text book confuses the topic a bit but Carol fixed up these misconceptions with a great video clip (which I’m sure you all remember). With the topic of guided reading we also talked about how we had seen some examples in our placement and how reading groups were put in place to establish different student abilities.
We then went on to talk about how we could personally tell if a child reads in their spare time by just talking to them. We all agreed that children who read often seem more confident in the way they speak and hold conversations and they often find talking to groups of people a lot easier.
Next we jumped to talking about how students need to read to understand. Learning how to read isn’t just being able to speak the words but to also understand what is going on in the book. Basically we said that some students read books a few times before they absorb them and this as a teacher is important to note. On placement my class has a reading strategy called connections. It is a good way to help with reading comprehension. Basically before students read their books they needed to guess what might happen in them and then after they had read their books they needed to make connections with the setting, characters and plot. This reading is done with pairs with their teacher or support teacher.
We also talked about independent reading and how students need to be reading at a lower level when doing this. This is because they are obviously getting no support and therefore if the book is easier they have more chance of understanding it and feeling confident reading it. It is important that students feel confident and with this we talked about how teaching certain books can be hard for a teacher. This is because different students like different texts and this means that there needs to be a diverse range of readers in the classroom.
That was a long re-cap but we did do some serious talking! See you next week :)
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