Tompkins Chapter 5

This chapter served mostly as a review for me because my TE301 class last year really focused on many of the same topics and especially on fluency. Reading the section on word recognition reminded me of the Kindergarten field placement class I was in last year; the CT in that classroom used a lot of strategies to help the students become fluent readers and writers. In particular, I remember that she had an enormous word wall that covered almost one whole wall. She started off with several high-frequency words that the students were familiar with. Then she added words to the word wall as the weeks progressed, and she would constantly refer back to the word wall during intruction.

Also, I always thought that word walls were only used for younger children as they learned to read and write, but in the chapter it mentions that "teachers can create word walls for older students too." After reading this part in the chapter, I realized that the second grade classroom I used to be in used a form of a word wall to aid them while writing. Each of the students had writing journals that included a glossary of high-frequency words and other words that the students may be familiar with but just not know how to spell. There was also space for the students to add more words in themselves. I thought this was a good resource for the students while writing and also for reading. I have not seen evidence in my new field placement of any type of word wall, but I haven't been in there that long and I haven't gotten to see a lot of literacy instruction.