Tomkins Chapter 3

I really enjoyed this chapter on young readers and writers because I'm really passionate about teaching younger students at a time when they are just learning to read and write! In my TE 301 class, we spent a lot of time on literacy instruction particularly in the younger grades. We even made binders full of resources on concepts of print, alphabetic principle, fluency, phonological awareness, etc. Also that year I was in a kindergarten classroom for field placement and I was able to really observe some of the strategies talked about in this chapter within that classroom. As this chapter mentions, my CT in the kindergarten classroom gave her students a variety of different types of print to work with. They worked with calendars, newspapers, narrative and informational books, song lyrics, etc. Allowing students to work with different types of print makes them better prepared for literacy in the future. If students are introduced to a wide array of print at a young age, they will feel more confident, know what to expect, and understand the purpose of the lesson more so than their peers with less experience with different types of print.

Jenna Fudge - Tompkins Ch. 3

I found this chapter to have a lot of good practical ideas as far as how to teach children in lower grades to read and write. I have never been in a Kindergarten or first grade classroom before and have always wondered how this is done. I wondered how teachers get a Kindergartner who has never even held a pencil to learn to read and write. I never even thought before that a person actually has to teach children how to make letters.

It was interesting to read about all of the different centers, activities, and styles that can be used in order to teach young children to read and write. I specifically like the idea of the writing center. I can see how young kids would really enjoy this and learn a lot from it at the same time. I thought the idea of writing friendly letters to fellow students was a great idea. I’m sure the students writing them are just as excited as the students are receiving them. I agree that this would be a great way for students to practice writing, learn the format of friendly letters, practice reading, understand the social aspect of reading and writing, as well as being able to practice spelling.

Chapter 7--Jessica Thelen

Teaching comprehension is very important at every grade level. I was happy to see a chapter that would offer strategies for teaching this. I just wish they would have included examples of how to modify these middle school strategies for lower elementary. Being in a kindergarten placement, everything is pretty basic. The students have just started learning about how to make self to text connections. Other than the sequence of events that is about all the comprehension they have done. I think there needs to be more comprehension strategies used in this classroom because this is their first year of school and they need to see the importance. I know it is hard to teach comprehension when everything the students are reacting to is something that has been read to them. They do not have the option of picking out a book that is interesting to them, which makes comprehension easier.

Tompkins Chapter 7

While reading this chapter I was very interested in learning about different comprehension strategies that I could use in my field placement classroom and next year in my internship classroom. Although the example in the book was of a middle school class, I could see how I could adapt those strategies to fit a lower elementary class.

In my field placement class, which is a second grade classroom, there seems to be a lot of focus on comprehension more so than spelling. It seems backwards to put an emphasis on comprehension and not spelling when the two seem to go hand in hand. To me, it seems that in order to understand a word, you would associate the word with it's spelling. Personally, when I learn a word I hear the word and then picture the spelling in my head in order to better remember it. Also, when students are given spelling tests in my field placement they are expected to understand the word in context and be able to spell it correctly.

Tompkins - Ch 7 - Jenna Fudge

I thought this chapter on comprehension contained a lot of useful information. The examples they gave which were used in Mrs. Donnelly's classroom were very helpful in showing me many practical ways comprehension strategies can be taught to students. I was left wondering how these examples from her 6th grade classroom could be used in lower level elementary classrooms.

I know that in my field placement (2nd/3rd grade) much of the focus in the language arts instruction seems to be on spelling and vocabulary. I thought it was interesting that on page 224 in the chart, it says that spelling is not an important component of comprehension. This left me wondering why then so much focus is put on spelling in elementary classrooms? Tompkins made it clear through this chapter that the whole point of decoding and learning how to read is to gain meaning from the text. This seems to me then, that more focus should be put on comprehension rather than on spelling. Reading further, the section on fluency explained that in the primary grades "fluency is the focus of instruction because students need to learn to recognize words automatically so that they can focus their attention on comprehending what they are reading". This makes sense as to why vocabulary would be such a big portion of instruction so that more and more words can become site-words. I still however do not understand why there seems to be so much focus on spelling when the end goal of reading is meaning/comprehension.