EDRG 3321 Wed. Night - Chapter 4

In this past weeks meeting we discussed chapter four, Responding to literature. While going through the chapter we learned that when children make connections with what they are reading, the world around them almost disappears, and they are totally engrossed in the story. I am actually one of these kinds of readers, once I start reading and get into a story it is hard for me to stop. We also learned that connections children make are usually formed by their own background or schema. This means that the student come with their own personal knowledge when reading literature, and this affects how they will perceive the material. I think that as teachers we must do our best to help our students make connections in literature, as well as providing them with a positive experience with literature. Something that I liked from out last class were they activities that Professor Pickett had us do. The one that I liked the most was the story that we had to read from different perspectives. I think that this was a helpful and fun way to show us that students will not always have the same perspective on the stories that are being read. This helped me understand that children need to be guided while they are reading.

Another thing that chapter four mentioned was proficient versus poor readers. This is where they said that proficient readers always stay proficient readers, and poor readers always stay poor readers. Personally I don't believe that this is true. This is because I was a poor reader in school and I didn't learn how to read until the second grade. I was a poor reader, put I did not stay a poor reader. I liked how the book mentioned that if the reader was motivated that the teacher should help them out. I think this is something very imortant for teachers to do, even if the student doesn't seem motivated, we need to try to get them interested in reading because many times children don't seem motivated because they think that they can't read correctly or on a higher level. If they know the teacher believes that they can do it, they will start to believe in themselves as well. So I agree with the book that teachers should motivate their students in reading. This is actually something that worked for me. Since I just learned to read in second grade I moved on to third grade reading on second grade level, but my teacher was always motivating my class to read. During our free time we could read whatever we wanted and as a class we would read books that were between the third and sixth grade level. Even though the books were hard at first I felt more comfortable and motivated to read because we were reading them as a class. It was because of this teacher that I had a complete turn around in reading. I started the year on second grade level and ended on the fifth or sixth grade level. If we as teachers believe in our students like my teacher believed in me we will take them excel, even the ones who are the poor readers.

Something that I was conflicted about was the discussion we had about giving the students who are on a lower reading level, that we should give them material that is for the level they are on. An example being that if you have a fifth grader who is on the third grade level, you should be giving them third grade work, because the fifth grade work is not developmentally appropriate for them, or it the class is reading a book, give them the lower level version of the book. Personally, I think that this is a helpful thing to do for the student who are on a lower level, but in certian situations I think it may cause more harm than good. I think that you should give students the lower level work on the subjects they have the most trouble with, and give them the other work in the subjects they are better in. Another thing where I believe that it is good to let them do the lower level work is in their free reading time. When students go to the library I dont think that you should ever tell them what books they have to check out, if the kid is on third grade level they should be allowed to check out a third grade level book. The part of this that I had trouble agreeing with was that if you were reading a book or studying something as a class you would give that student the lower level version of what the rest of the class was doing. I think that sometimes this can be damaging to the student, they may feel dumb, or like the teacher doesn't believe they can read the same book as everyone else. I know that if this had happened to me in the third grade I wouldn't have wanted to read at all, becasue it wasnt even the same book as everyone else had and I would have felt like the teacher didn't think I could read with the class, so why bother.

Overall chapter four was very interesting, and I enjoyed reading it as well as the class activities and discussions. There were a lot of things that I found interesting, many things I agreed with and a few I didn't agree with. As always I enjoyed the activities that we did.