My Dream:
To begin with my personal experience as a reader throughout school
would be defined as someone who would not willingly pick up a book and
read. While I was in school I did however enjoy most of the books given to
me for assessing my understanding of the text. Since I am not such an avid
reader, it is something that I would want to encourage in my future class.
Reading and understanding text is foundation to understanding the other strands
of language arts such as writing and oral communication. As the eyes gaze upon
a written text, the mind reads, deciphers and forms meaning behind the text. Hence
training students to be exceptional readers can lead to comprehension in other
areas of language arts. As we have learned in class, to be good teacher in the
reading strand, we need to ourselves read. To see my goal through, I need to
envision a goal for myself as the teacher. That dream is to one day own a library
that holds my personal collection of books.
The Curriculum:
At my placement in the grade 6 class it is so wonderful to
observe students reading books beyond English class. The grade 6 curriculum highlights
these overall expectations:
- Comprehension demonstrated by reading variety of text
- Recognition of a variety of text and how they are used to communicate meaning
- Knowledge of words to read fluently
- Strategies used before, during and after reading. Reflecting and identifying their strengths and areas of improvement
An interesting way to observe a student’s comprehension is
to check to see if students make connections to three things, text-to-text,
text-to-self, and text-to-world. Using various texts, (a specific reading expectation
such as short stories and poetry) along with comprehension strategies is a
great way for teachers to assess student’s understanding of the text.
Resources?
There are a wealth of resources for teachers to use and modify,
and I will be looking to these sources to make my students reading experiences
engaging and memorable. One resource I especially liked was to see what shared
reading looked like and how it can be used in the classroom. This is a powerful
tool for teachers to use. It allows students to share ideas and thoughts of
what the meaning behind certain text is as a group. For example, students make inferences
to meaning of unknown words by understanding the context in which the word is placed.
Another great resource is, “read.write.think” that contains various templates
for lesson plans and templates for making students thinking visible. Here is a
list of resources that can be used for the reading strand of the Ontario
Curriculum:
It is comforting to know that we have various maps to guide us through this journey but the path we shape for ourselves and our students is left to our creativity as long as they reach their final destination, Learning!
