Week 12

What good readers must do:

· Use prior knowledge

· Make predictions

· Ask questions, not only to the teacher but to themselves as well

· Make connections to their own lives and their prior knowledge

· Reread for meaning and understanding

What teachers do to develop comprehension:

· Motivate their students

· Model good reading behaviors

· Teach good strategies and provide good practice

· Encourage writing

· Help build their students vocabulary

How teachers can help their struggling readers:

· You can use the same strategies for non-struggling readers but make them more intense and more in depth

· Monitor the student more closely to see specifically what they are doing wrong so you can then show the proper adjustments for them to make

After viewing this video I have seen many positive tools that I could use in my classroom as far as teaching my students about comprehension. This video has shown me the many important factors that go in to monitoring your student’s comprehension for all types of readers. It is important to teach strategies to your students and to reinforce the good skills taught. The video goes on to talk about IRE questioning which is a type of one-on-one questioning used between the teacher and their student. Once given the correct answer the student is praised for this and in a way this is good because it is a positive reinforcer but the student really is not fully learning from this type of questioning. Personally I think that classroom discussion is important and getting feedback is helpful for you as the teacher and also for the students and this type of IRE questioning does not promote this. I did like that the video encouraged the use of prior knowledge because I think this is important and can make the difference for your students comprehension and reading level in many cases. Overall this video had many useful tools that I have seen and would like to execute in my classroom.

DIBELS vs QRI-5

After doing examples of both the DIBELS and QRI-5 evaluation I have learned a lot about both. Each of these is an evaluation on the reading comprehension of the students. The DIEBELS evaluation has many more technical parts to it. It breaks down the pronunciation and parts of the words as a student goes through to identify the words. It does letter recognition as well as sounds of letters and parts of word pronunciation to really break apart the students reading abilities. DIBELS also offers something more similar to the QRI-5 evaluation where the student reads a passage and then is asked comprehensive questions after to determine the comprehension. The QRI-5 seems to focus more on general reading skills and comprehension, while it provides word lists and different leveled reading passages as well as comprehensive questions for each passage it is not as technical as the DIBELS seems to be. Also DIBELS is timed in 60 second intervals and nothing more, while the QRI-5 is timed based on the student so they have no time restraints. Each of these evaluations is a great tool to use on your students. You could even use them hand in hand if you wanted to really break down your students reading comprehension abilities. I do think that DIEBELS gets into more technical aspects of word recognition then the QRI-5 does, but however I do believe that they are both excellent options that I would use in my classroom with my students.

Observations

As I continue my observations I am able to see more reading and writing involved in the classroom. While I do observe all subjects, reading is involved in them in some way or another. My target student that I have done the evaluation on has shown great confidence when reading out loud and doing her presentation. Each student had to do their reading report on their independent reading story. They presented their books to the class and created an artistic poster to go along with it that included information about both the story and the author.