Debbie Miller Text Analysis

Content area teachers can implement strategies and scaffold learning when planning and designing instruction so that students will actively engage in literacy. According to Dobbs, content area reading instruction includes: the information present in the text, and the instructional plan teachers use to help students understand the content (2003, p.3). Vacca, Vacca, & Mraz explain that in order to plan instruction effectively, teachers must be aware of the explicit and functional dimensions of content literacy. The explicit aspect of content literacy involves the development of skills and strategies that enable students to comprehend what they are reading. Functional instruction focuses more on the application of strategies needed to derive knowledge from a variety of sources of information.” (2014, p. 134). Forget defined literacy as “listening, thinking, reading, and speaking in such a way that information and ideas are processed and communicated to the benefit of self and society” (2003, p. 5). Content area teachers need to plan and design lessons so that students will actively engage in literacy. Forget goes on to discuss that poor performance in schools can be do to a lack of basic literacy skills. Therefore, teachers need to implement the skills and strategies found to be successful in literacy to ensure

When students learn about subjects they are familiar with, it allows the content area being taught to become meaningful. As mentioned in Chapter 6, on page 149, motivation to read can come because they are interested in the content. When students are interested in the content they are reading, their needs are being met, and they will be well prepared for a successful literacy experience.

In today's society a plethora of information is immediately available at the touch of a button, and long gone are the days of careful hours spent scouring through a library for information. In "How to Read a Book" author Mortimer Adler points out that this ease of access to information has turned the masses into inattentive readers. In the first chapter, "The Activity and Art of Reading" Adler distinguishes between different types of reading such as active vs. inactive reading and goals that should be associated with reading such as reading for information and reading for understanding. In the latter chapter he goes on to point out how to be a successful and demanding reader through critical reading and asking oneself questions about the text.

Most of the other students in her 2nd grade classroom are able to read classroom text and complete work independently. They also read books for enjoyment on their own. The reading time in her classroom consists of a block during which the teacher works with small groups and the children are expected to work quite independently when they are not working directly with the teacher. The class uses a trade book format and this is utilized across the curriculum. Students are provided with short skills building lessons in large and small groups. Most of the time spent during explicit reading instruction is targeted to helping students develop reading fluency.

Books are a great tool to learn new things and escape into another world. As a teacher using books is a great way to teach children different lessons about life. In the future I think excellent books to incorporate in my class would be Katherine Paterson’s book, Bridge to Terabithia, and Natalie Babbitt’s book, Tuck Everlasting. Both of these books are of a middle childhood reading level, perfect for the grades I want to teach. Both Bridge to Terabithia and Tuck Everlasting are good choice to teach in a classroom because they teach lessons and have aspects that children can learn from.

To match a student’s reading, the library needs to have books that can reach across the curriculum. Ercegovac says that the “idea is to align reading-for-pleasure collections with required texts that discuss global, national, regional, and personal concerns” (p.38). As you work on that as a school, you can very easily develop your collection across different expressions. Adding books from movie and television adaptations as well as adding audio books will give you a good variety that meets current levels of interest. You combine that with developing collections across different expressions and you will have a wide variety of of books for students to choose from. As a principal, you need to open to ways to expand your library collection. Combining with the public libraries in your area would be a great way to get students into e-books and audiobooks. It is so easy to download those books to a device but students need to be made aware of these types of

Two studies were conducted on the effects that nonfiction text have on struggling and non struggling students. According to Liebfreund & Conradi (2016) and Kuhn, Rausch, McCarty, Montgomery, & Rule (2015), the studies concluded that utilizing nonfiction text in primary grades has a positive impact on student engagement, reading comprehension, and vocabulary achievement, and decoding efficiency, vocabulary knowledge, prior knowledge, and intrinsic motivation all influence nonfiction text comprehension. Readability of nonfiction text also has an impact on how well students understand nonfiction text. Teachers must be aware of reading levels of nonfiction text being used in the classroom (Gallagher, Fazio, & Gunning,

    During the readings, the teacher and the students are making  real life connections with the story books they are reading, usually when we read we compare the fiction/non fiction we read to our daily life, and we seek some sort of help or ideas from the readings, so it can help us with the real life, forexamle if have problems, like if we want the kids to teach not to lie, we read to them books about liers and we teach them lying

During the week of “Launching Independent Reading”, the activities we did in class help convey the wonderful benefits of reading. For example, when I wrote my childhood book list during class , I had an epiphany. I realized that these books I read when I was a child were some of the happiest times that I could remember . These books helped relieved me of my stress and gave a sense of imagination when I was a child. Those memories made me remember one of the most important benefits of reading: entertainment. Another epiphany popped up when I was writing “My Reading Life” essay. While I was writing, I was thinking to myself, “Wow. I can’t be believe how much one book can benefit me. I can’t believe how one book taught me something useful that

Students that don’t read much can experiment reading different books to see what interest them the most.

Understanding students’ literacy interests will allow me to foster students’ literacy enjoyment, which Krashen (2004) contends improves reading comprehension and facilitates the reading of difficult texts. I will select texts for lessons that are interesting and relevant to students to foster positive literacy attitudes, instil student confidence and aid learning (Ryan, 2005). Students’ interests will inform how the classroom library is stocked. Allington (2002) states it is important to provide students with texts they can read, as well as appropriately challenging texts. My classroom library shall contain a variety of genres and authors that students enjoy, or are likely to enjoy, as well as texts to expand their literacy. Students will be encouraged to read a range of texts, including picture books, novels, graphic texts, non-fiction books, magazines, e-books, websites and books

Students need lots of opportunities and time to apply the comprehension strategies they are learning. This can be achieved when students engage in reading activities that reinforce the specific strategy. For example,

Guthrie (2004) delved further into his research to analyze the specific texts chosen for instruction. He found that students recognize teachers as credible educators when they use authentic, interesting texts rather than basal readers or texts that mirror high stakes tests (Guthrie, 2004). Using authentic texts not only conveys a teacher’s own enthusiasm and love of reading, but also promotes engagement, especially when teachers share those texts aloud. While there are many cognitive benefits of reading aloud, there are also motivational and engagement advantages (Jang et al., 2015; Morrison & Wlodarczyk, 2009). When teachers strategically choose books they enjoy, many times students will likewise develop an interest in the chosen text too, as well as in

One aspect of my lesson that worked well was the Bingo game. My peers were very interested in playing the game and many of them were getting the answers correct. Many of them made comments on

One way to increase Kamil’s desire to reach for a wide variety of books is implementing activity titled Three-piece Kits (Edmunds & Bauserman, 2006). The teacher creates a three-piece kit containing three different types and/or genres of books in a bag. The kit should contain a narrative text, a poem and an expository book on a topic Kamil finds interesting. For example, Kamil’s teacher can collect an autobiography/narrative book titled Knucklehead, a collection of war poems and an informational book about World War I/II. Kamil may find these books interesting