Literacy Centers

I did my inquiry project on literacy centers. I chose this topic because it's a topic I don't know a lot about, but I know I will have them in my classroom (as most teachers do). The concept is pretty self-explanatory.  "A literacy center is one of several learning stations arranged in a classroom designed for students to visit and learn independently. Children often select a literacy center where they can work by themselves or in a small group of children. Literacy centers within an elementary school classroom feature a variety of stations geared toward phonics, phonemic awareness, spelling, reading, and writing" (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-literacy-centers.htm). There are many educational sites online that recommend different activities and different materials to have in the literacy centers. A few ideas I found particularly interesting were the computer centers, book centers (which include auditory book listening), puzzle centers, poetry centers, and word wall centers. There are plenty of centers to create, and even when the centers are chosen, there are still many ways to change it up. For example, one book center I read about was titled "book basket." In this center, students chose a book of their choice to read and sat in a basket (a laundry basket), and read silently. Of coarse centers will vary depending on the grade being taught, but the book basket would be a reading center ideal for first grade through fourth grade, maybe even higher if you can find big enough baskets so that students aren't uncomfortable.


A few important aspects of literacy centers are the establishment of rules. The teacher must decide how he/she will assign literacy centers, if assignments are wanted. If assigning isn't the route taken, then there will be conflicts, so it's important to have rules and regulations about stations. A rotation is one idea for avoiding conflict. This allows everyone e turn at each station and avoids conflict. The negative to this is that students will have preferences or a subject/activity that is interesting to them. If students are assigned to a station they don't enjoy, then it becomes more of an assignment than an enjoyable activity.


It's especially important for the centers to reflect what has been taught in class. If students go to their centers without a purpose it becomes more like recess than a learning experience. It takes time and organization to create effective literacy centers, but once the initial time has been devoted and they serve a purpose, then they're ready for students.
 many factors go into creating the centers. Such factors as:

• space of classroom
• cost of material and where the money will come from
• how many centers will be created

Obviously if there is a small class, there will not be many centers, but this doesn't mean there can't be. Centers can be portable. Materials for centers can be boxed up and stored until time to use them. This all depends on the grade though. Younger grades, K-1, will likely have centers everyday. Whereas older grades, 3-6, will probably have fewer. Cost of materials is important because some schools are limited to such a small budget for class materials that sometimes there isn't sufficient money for literacy centers. This should never discourage a teacher though, there are other options. Donations from parents or even local businesses can be solicited. Of coarse if a teacher receives donated goods it's important to cleanse and check the materials. 

In the article, "Finding Center: How Learning Centers Evolved in a Secondary, Student-Centered Classroom," the uses of literacy centers are discussed as a means to differentiate instruction and the importance of providing meaningful learning activities, "the learning centers contained multisensory and differentiated activities that helped meet the diverse range of student interests, ability levels, and needs." (69) Literacy Centers not only give the teacher an opportunity to meet with small groups for direct instruction, but they also provide meaningful learning activities for all students. Centers, combined with guided reading, offer the structure to deliver differentiated instruction, providing multiple opportunities for success for all students. Many teachers use Literacy Centers and comprehensive assessments to "drive their literacy instruction." The article also gives objectives to literacy centers which is extremely helpful because teachers need to understand the purpose for literacy centers. These objectives include:

• select reading material independently and evaluate their own understanding of texts by visiting the reading center.
  
• listen attentively to audio versions of stories and, in turn, respond to the text by visiting the listening center.
  
• use technology to further their understanding of specific reading skills by visiting the computer center.
  
• find rhyming words and respond to poems through writing or drawing activities by visiting the poetry center.
  
• monitor their own progress and understanding of Literacy Centers.

     Movitz, Allison P. and Kerry P. Holmes. "Finding Center: How Learning Centers Evolved in a Secondary, Student-Centered Classroom." English Journal 96.3 (January, 2007): 68-73.




A few helpful resources for teachers about creating literacy centers:

http://www.msrossbec.com/literacy_index.html - 
this site provides 22 literacy centers and in each literacy center there are many activities.


http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/abc_centers.html -

this site provides activities and examples of centers used in classrooms as well as some classroom rules to set up.

http://www.mandygregory.com/CenterIdeas.htm-

this site was created by a teacher for older grades. This site has teacher resources and printable centers. 

The following link is to the  Glogster presentation:

http://shay25.glogster.com/reed-430/

Assessment and Bringing It All Together

Marie Clay's, Running Records, was an informative book about using running records as an assessment of text reading. Clay emphasized the importance of running records, such as being a method to guide teaching, assess text difficulty, capture progress, and compare running records. After reading the book, I discovered how useful running records can be for students, especially if a lot of students are struggling with the same thing. Running records can be used to help guide future lesson planning. It's also important to note that teachers should be properly trained on using running records before they start using them.

Rog and Burton's article, Matching Texts and Readers: Leveling Early Reading Materials for Assessment and Instruction, was an interesting article about a book leveling system developed to support emergent literacy. After reading this article I came to realize how difficult it is to level reading material, there's many factors that go into it. These factors include: the length of the book, appearance and placement of the print on the page, degree of support offered by illustrations, complexity of concepts and familiarity of subject matter, degree of predictability, and proportion of unique or repeated words to familiar words. With some of these factors, one school district sorted them into a 10-step leveling system. The table displayed in the article was very helpful in understanding what each level represents. I found the level system to be very useful and beneficial to the students and the teachers. By following the guide in the article, teachers can determine when a student is ready to progress to the next level. Although it takes many steps to get to the level of reading a "real story,' it's important to keep in mind that reading and comprehension don't happen overnight, it takes a lot of practice to master the steps in each level.

Looking Inside Classrooms: Reflecting on the "How" as Well as the "What" in Effective Reading Instruction analyzed classroom practices that were studied to identify those that were most useful for improving students' reading ability. The article reviews studies that have been done in the past as well as a study they conducted as well. The findings showed that how teachers teach reading is just as important as the material used for teaching. A few interesting ideas the article discuss that I plan on using in my classroom is active involvement, high level questions, and balanced small-group and large-group instruction. The article gives accounts of positive teaching methods as well as not-so-positive methods. These examples are a great source for us soon-to-be-teachers to learn from.

In the article The Schools We Have. The Schools We Need, Allington explores "confusions" about literacy teaching and learning that have limited the ability to foster positive changes in classrooms and schools. I found the comparison of experience and ability quite interesting. It's so very true how people label students with less experience as having limited ability, and lower our expectations for literacy learning. And as we've discussed in class, the article also states that we continue to organize the school days so that most children have little opportunity to actually read and write. Although the article stresses how many people are unsatisfied with the school system today, it has improved from the past. The article concludes with a proposed solution- create schools where classroom literacy instruction is continuously adapted and improved. Another step would be to throw out the old notion of distributed learning that fosters the current approaches to instructional planning.

Guided Reading

The article I read, "Looking Back to Move Forward with Guided Reading," by Michael Ford and Michael Opitz, discusses how important guided reading is and that it's one of the most common elements of today's reading programs. The article defines guided reading as reading instruction in which the teacher provides the structure and purpose for reading and for responding to the material read. We've mentioned in other education courses that we can find guided reading lessons in most basal books. The article states the purpose of this guided reading is to help students relate background knowledge to the story, establish a purpose for reading, help students make connections with previous read stories, get a "wholeness" of the story, promote fluency, foster rhythmical reading, relate details to a big idea, and help develop organizational skills and promote efficient study habits. The article also provides teacher procedures, such as asking students major motivating questions, ask questions to guide the children through the stories, and help answer major motivating questions. I really liked how this article distinctly defined the difference between small group reading and guided reading. I must admit, I wasn't sure of the difference before I read this article. But the article explains how in small reading groups, all the students read the same story from the basal. But now, with guided reading becoming more practices, basal reading programs started to separately package leveled readers.  The article states that in guided reading, scaffolding becomes the metaphor for teaching and learning. Since we've been discussing scaffolding and it's importance in reading education, this article definitely hit home. I was able to relate many of the previous articles read to this one.

Comprehension and Think Alouds

The Cunningham-Allington chapter summarized the importance of comprehension in the classroom. I really enjoyed the point they made when discussing how struggling readers are unaware that they should be thinking while they are reading. As a soon-to-be-teacher, it's scary to think that some of my students are going to have an enormous amount of difficulty not only with reading, but comprehending what they're reading. The thinking strategies will be a helpful guide to use when teaching students how to comprehend what they read. I also really liked the section on literate conversations, reminded me of how important it is to ask students open-ended questions as opposed to closed ones. The book says that literature circles would be a good way to conduct the conversations, this is a great idea but doesn't just happen on it's own. As a teacher, you must make your students feel comfortable enough to talk in front of others, especially about issues or topics they are unsure of. The modeling portion of the chapter was especially interesting for me because I believe students learn from watching others model, so I feel strongly toward the modeling theory of learning.

Pardo's article on comprehension is a guide for helping teachers support readers. A few suggestions they offer are providing scaffolding support, teach decoding skills, help students build fluency, activate prior knowledge, and motivate students. By using these teaching techniques, teachers help students become interested and focused on reading. Like the other articles discussed, motivation and modeling are important, and both of these can be practiced in the classroom through teacher behaviors. If teachers show they are happy and intrigued by something, it is likely the students will be as well.

Gregory and Cahill's article discusses the revolution of comprehension and how new intellectual tools have been developed, people are starting to realize there is more learning involved with reading than just decoding. The article stresses how there is little research available for comprehension for young students, but Mrs. Hope (teacher used in article) found a way to adapt lessons from work with older grades and use those lessons in her younger classroom. Mr.s Hope used schema's as the basis for interactions with text. A few other strategies discussed were making connections, visualization, questioning, and inferring. I really liked the questioning strategy, I find it very useful to work with students and help them understand better if they're asking appropriate questions. A teacher can also base whether or not students are on task and comprehending based off the questions they ask. Overall, the article did great stressing the importance of using comprehension strategies not only for older grades, but also for the younger grades. The students in Mrs. Hope's class benefited from her instruction and were able to construct meanings and interpretations for texts.

I found it interesting how Gill researched how people understand comprehension. The three factors affecting comprehension were the reader, the text, and the situation. The article mentioned how good readers adjust their reading in different situations and for different purposes. Although elementary students do not have the skill to do this, we teachers can teach them these skills. Activating prior knowledge is a very important idea in this article. It's discussed how children use their prior knowledge to understand text. This schema theory tells us that readers must have adequate background knowledge to understand what they read. So if a teacher gets students with few life experiences, it will be even more difficult to help them understand the text their reading. The comprehension matrix is a great tool for teachers to use to apply their knowledge of the various factors effecting comprehension. The strategies and activities of prereading, during reading, and postreading are great resources for new teachers. This article, along with the others, will be a great tool for me when i enter my own classroom.

Vocabulary and Read-Alouds

The Vocabulary Lessons article by Blachowitz emphasized the importance of instilling students with an appreciation for words and encouraging them to want to build their vocabulary. The article focused a lot on creating environments that expose students to activities, materials, and other resources that is helpful in expanding the students vocabulary. The STAR model was introduced as a way to deliver explicit, rich instruction to develop important vocabulary.By Selecting, Teaching, Activating, and Revisiting, the teacher chooses a word, teaches that word (explaining the concepts associated with that word), activating the word with what students already know (referring it back to their real life), and revisit the words with activities such as games and writing. I found this article helpful especially because of the STAR model. It's easy to choose a new word to discuss in class, but by using this model you reinforce what you are learning, which is important for teaching at any grade level.


The chapter by Cunningham and Allington discusses how vocabulary is critical to reading comprehension, and when reading or listening to something, you comprehend, or understand, if you instantly access the appropriate meanings for the words. In other words, your comprehension is impaired if you are reading or listening to something and don't have meaning for many of the words. The article states vocabulary is one of the most valuable tools for literacy and it's crucial for us, as teachers, to build vital vocabularies to help our students become the very best readers and writers.I especially found the section on definition copying informative because I remember from being in school myself that I was assigned definitions to copy down and memorize for a test. If you asked me now what even one of those definitions were, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Research has shown that definitional approaches vocabulary instruction have no effect on reading comprehension. It's obviously more important for students to know and understand words than to just memorize them. As a teacher I plan to use research-based methods to teach vocabulary and comprehension.

Lane and Allen's article on the Vocabulary-Rich Classroom also explained how vocabulary is a critical factor in the development of reading skills and that vocabulary knowledge is one of the best predictors of reading comprehension. The article discusses the four types of vocabulary- oral, print, receptive, and productive- and the importance of developing all the types of vocabulary. It's explained that's not only important about knowing a high number of words, but about how well you know those words. The three-tier model is introduced as a method for determining which words to teach, these include the basic words that most children already know, tier tow includes words that are key to comprehension and are used by "mature language users," and tier three includes low-frequency words. I think introducing these tiers are important, but only if you can relate them back to the child. Just by introducing a word and having a student copy it and define it, doesn't mean they are going to comprehend it. In a situation like this, using the STAR method described in the previous article would be useful. I also found the section about "dumbing-down" language for students interesting. Just because students are young and not as progressed as older grade students, doesn't mean we have to use simple language around them. When introducing a more sophisticated word, be confident in the students to be able to learn it. By modeling ways to learn to students (asking questions, looking up definitions), teachers can help their students to become intrinsically motivated.

The Early Catastrophe article was like previous articles read for the class, in which research is done on families to see how children's vocabulary is effected by the environment they are brought up in. I found it informative because learning the vast difference in vocabulary levels that my students will have makes it easier for me to know when I become a teacher that all my students are going to be different and at different learning levels. Unrelated to teaching, these articles are helping me make choices of how I plan on parenting when I have children. Socioeconomic status does have a lot to do with students vocabulary levels, but doesn't mean that students with low SES can be expected to not know as much, some students with low SES may have been in a richer vocabulary environment than a student with a high SES. As a teacher it's important to get to know each of your students so you know where they are on academic level and where you want them to be. 

Word Study

Yopp & Yopp's article on promoting phonemic awareness in the classroom was intimidating at first because I am preparing to become a teacher and can't distinguish between phonetics, phonics, and phonemes. Although I am still confused between their definitions, I feel more confident in discussing phonemic awareness. The article argues that phonemic awareness instruction for young children should be playful and engaging, interactive and social, should stimulate curiosity, AND be deliberate and purposeful. I feel like being a new teacher it would be difficult to integrate all of those expectations and still teach what needs to be taught. Although I had some worries after reading the article, there were some great insights to help teachers find interesting ways to teach phonetic awareness. The article was especially helpful by elaborating on what phonemic awareness instruction looks like in the classroom.The stories and rhymes seem like they would be really fun to teach. I plan on using at least one of the activities focused on rhyming. I also didn't realize the importance of unit of sound and use of cues. The article talks about how the combination of phonemic awareness activities and letter-sound instruction has been found to be particularly supportive of children's emerging understanding of the alphabetic principle. Great article! Definitions, explanations, and activities were very helpful!

 Clark's article was fantastic in describing the benefits of coaching as a highly effective instructional technique. In many of the education courses, we are being taught that modeling is an effective teaching method. Social cognitive theorists believe students learn from watching others, so Clark's article relates back to modeling as a useful method for teaching. The section that lists factors to consider discuss coaching techniques for teachers and will be a great resource to use as a new teacher. Clark's article as well as Cunningham and Allington's chapter discuss the reading process and give examples of lessons to use with students.The chapter explains that in order to move students along in their decoding and spelling abilities in the upper grades, instruction needs to focus on morphemes and how they help us decode, spell, and gain meaning. I really like the chapter help explains different methods and tells you what is most important for students to know at different grade levels.

After reading these articles and the chapter I feel like I'll be spending a LOT more time preparing curriculum and activities than I previously expected. But with all the newer approaches to teaching phonics, I'm sure the new generation of teachers will find effective methods that work best for them.

Fluency

Denney and Rasinski's articles, as well as Cunningham's chapter, all discuss the important aspects of fluency. The major components of fluency discussed were accuracy, speed, and prosody. Fluency is important for all students and is directly related to the complexity of the text being read. In Deeney's article, she discusses the importance of one-minute fluency measures, which reliably identify students who are at risk for reading difficulty. Students who are not fluent struggle and become discouraged to read. The articles and text discuss a few ways to help students improve on their fluency. One effective method includes giving students text that is at their level. If you give a child a book to read that isn't at their level, they will not only lose fluency, but they will not comprehend what they're reading. Rasinski discusses a good point when he says that teachers often put too much emphasis on speed rather than meaningful reading. Another thing that discourages children is forcing them to read in front of their peers. The readings discussed how many teachers will interrupt the student to make corrections, this deters a child from wanting to participate in class, as well as from reading in general. The sample writing the textbook displayed was very helpful in helping me understand what a child who suffers from fluency anxiety feels like. I think it's very important that teachers work individually with students to help them with their reading. Being kind and patient will encourage students to keep trying. Getting parents involved would also be very beneficial to the student. If a parent is aware of the issue their child is having, they may be more likely to help them practice their reading skills. One idea I read from the article that I can suggest to parents when I become a teacher is to allow the child a later bedtime by allowing them an extra 5 or 10 minutes to practice reading in bed. This is appealing to children and will help them with their reading skills. Also, by allowing the child to choose a text of their choice they will grasp more a text they're interested in than a text that is assigned to them.

Very interesting articles. Gave me a good insight as to what I need to watch for and guidelines I need to follow to help my students become fluent readers.