Reading Recovery Webcast

Promising Literacy for Every Child: Reading Recovery and a Comprehensive Literacy System

            This short webcast from Reading Recovery really emphasizes the importance of having a solid foundation to build a comprehensive literacy system that is effective to the students’ reading and writing skills.  Incorporating this kind of system in your school’s current literacy practices supports high literacy instruction and requires you to collaborate with your colleagues to construct the most beneficial program for your students’ learning.  It is repeated several times that we must know where our current literacy practices stand.

·       Where are we as a program currently?

·       What are our goals for the future?

·       How are we going to reach these goals?

These are all questions that need to be asked when trying to build a stronger literacy system.  Discussing and assessing your school’s current literacy practices will help you figure out where you need to be as a school and how you are going to get there.  Collecting and analyzing student data will be beneficial when trying to figure out what needs to be introduced and practiced for reading and writing which will eventually boost test scores.  This semester we have learned a variety of strategies on how to teach comprehension and literacy.  We have been introduced to an endless amount of activities to practice reading and writing with young learners.  This five-minute video now tells us how important it is to incorporate everything we have learned into our own future classrooms and how it will highly benefit our students’ literacy skills.

Notes: What is Guided Reading?

·       Reading aloud, shared reading, literature circles are all activities that will help children learn how to read BUT guided reading allows teachers to show children how to read.  They are also able to support children as they read.

·       Guided reading leads to the independent reading that builds the process.

·       Guided Reading—a context in which a teacher supports each reader’s development of effective strategies for processing novel texts at increasingly challenging levels of difficulty.

·       Purpose—to enable children to use and develop strategies “on the run”, focus mainly on constructing meaning.

·       We want independence and fluency!

·       Also involves ongoing observations and assessment

·       Has students practicing self-monitoring

·       Essential components—observation, powerful examples, and support

·       Work with small groups—students in each group should be in the same general level.

·       Enable children to read for meaning at all times

·       Provide good reading materials—variety, appropriate levels (not too easy, not too challenging)