Although high school students have history classes to learn about historical facts, learning it through literature gives students a new perspective on what has already been taught in a previous class. As said by Nancy Methelis, “The history books will give us facts, which we are told are true, but we know they are chosen for the particular text. It generally doesn’t connect in the same emotional way that a fictional work does” (Methelis). Reading Huck Finn gives students a greater understanding of how life was back when slavery was still accepted and common. Its historical accuracy makes it an essential book to be read and discussed in the classroom.
With this learning strategy students may look up definition, write it down, and discuss with teacher but will most likely forget it. Students need to be taught with twenty-first century tactics that will engage students and promote cooperative learning. This paper will outline a plan to introduce best practices for giving vocabulary instruction for sixth grade Language and Arts. Number of Words For this plan there will be thirty words from the book we will be reading titled “The Giver”. The words were selected throughout each chapter as terms that were less easily identifiable for students.
My English is so poor; I want to improve my English. First time, I avoided classes that involved a lot of writing, as I was still intimidated by past failures. But when poor writing began to affect my grades in other courses, I decided to take a composition class. Now, I use my On Course textbook in my English class, this journal will help me about self-awareness. I began to see how negative scripts could cause problems.
“The disconnect between text and reader is especially noticeable in content areas where readers must interact with highly specialized and technical language” (Vacca & Vacca, 2008, p. 348). For students to find success in a content area classroom, educators need to engage students in reading with the use of instructional strategies (Vacca & Vacca, 2008). Strategies used in content area classrooms vary with purpose. “What a teacher does before reading, during reading, and after reading (B-D-A) is crucial to active and purposeful reading” (Vacca & Vacca, 2008, p. 346). Before reading activities help students get ready to read by motivating the readers, activating prior knowledge, and introducing key vocabulary.
During the class on reading and the brain we discussed what reading was and the five areas of reading. The brain is not naturally able to read; we must train and practice it to be able to derived meaning from text. Based on this statement alone I can now see how reading and literacy are similar. During the class on comprehension and reading and writing the notes and videos really helped me tie both literacy and reading together. When we watch the videos the teachers were thinking out loud and discussing the little voice in her head that tells her things while she is reading, like “oh I have no idea what I just read” or “hum I wonder who this person is?” or “wow that’s neat!”.
Students must ask themselves, “What did my instructor say about this chapter or subject when it was assigned?” and “What do I already know about this subject?” Reading in order to find the answer gives students a purpose for reading. Read. As students begin to read, they must look for answers to the questions they asked in the prior step. Students will reread captions under pictures and graphs, note all underlined and bold printed words or phrases, and pay special attention to underlined, italicized, bold printed words or phrases. For more difficult passages, reading speed should be reduced.
So I feel teachers need to know and be aware of the one-to-one, extended, cognitively challenging conversations and how to engage in such communication, even with students that are reluctant talkers. Teachers need to know how the lexicon is acquired and what instructional practices support vocabulary acquisition. They also need to know how to conduct story reading and other early literacy experiences that promote phonological awareness and prepare children for later success in reading (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Most early childhood teachers do not have sufficient training in how to support early literacy learning. They need to know how much phonics children need to know, how to know which children need more or less explicit phonics instruction, and when to stop teaching phonics to which children.
Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how? “Reading fluency is one of the defining characteristics of good readers...a lack of fluency is a reliable predictor of reading comprehension problems”(702). Once children learn phonemic awareness, the next step is phonics; once they learn the basic sound-symbol relationship, they must go through the different stages of literacy development until they gradually reach the fluent stage. If students do not advance to become fluent readers, their comprehension will suffer greatly; they will consequently read word for word, struggle with word-reading accuracy, rate, and prosody, and they will also struggle with the understanding of chunking groups of words together to build fluent sentences. Because of these problems, a child’s comprehension will diminish on a consistent basis because they will be concentrating solely on pronouncing the words rather than understanding what the words mean and how they connect to a story or passage.
Also, how it should be banned, there are, believe it or not, some positives to all of the negatives. One, it is good for kids who are behind or need extra help. For example, a student does not understand the material and is academically struggling. This student should be given homework to help the material to gradually become easier and raise the students grades. Greg Toppo agrees with these statements on the positivity of homework for struggling students.
Running head: COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES ESSAY Comprehension Strategies Essay Grand Canyon University: EED 475 January 20, 2013 Comprehension Strategies Essay Comprehension is one of the biggest areas in reading that many have struggles. It is often found that students have the ability to read a given text, however, they are reading without the basis of understanding what they actually read. In essence, students are reading without a purpose. In an effort to help students build upon their comprehension skills, teachers should develop strategic activities that facilitate comprehension of narrative, expository and poetic texts. Strategic activities may include presentation of the text, vocabulary development, using graphic organizers, and/ or previewing the text.