DeVries Chapter 8- Comprehension of Narrative Text Please follow the blog criteria for this course and don't forget to reply to a peer for the full points!
Chapter 8 – Comprehension of Narrative Text Comprehension is an active process that requires a complex and higher level thinking skills. This chapter really did a great job on reflecting on how these needed skills are so important for students to learn, in order to comprehend narrative text. One of the things that was re-emphasized throughout this chapter was the importance to discuss the topic of a story before reading it. Also, stop and discuss unknown words. This is important because it will help the student better comprehend and understand the story by addressing new words meanings. Provide examples because examples are easier to understand than abstract definitions. Something that caught my eye in this chapter was when it was talking about predicting, it said, “Good readers make predictions automatically, while struggling reads often make no attempt to predict what will happen next in the story”. I thought this was significant because I never really gave it much thought on why some did or didn’t respond when asking questions about a story. But, looking back at my students from tutoring or even in the classroom, it makes sense! Struggling readers can make predictions using the illustrations from the cover of the book. I always like to ask my students, before every read aloud (even my own children), “What do you think this book is going to be about?” They always enjoy trying to figure it out, but at the same time they don’t realize it is setting them up to get hooked into a fun story. One of the things I like to do with my students and (once again my own children) is to have them visualize what they are hearing. Some books may come without pictures therefore re-telling the story where you left off is a good reminder to them what the story is about. Having them re-tell the story and connecting prior knowledge of the text is important. I always ask questions, and like this chapter discussed questions are a critical dynamic in the process of expanding their relationships and thinking as we read the words. There are many things from this chapter that I obviously found greatly beneficial. I will take many of these strategies in this chapter, many of which I did not mention, into the classroom with me. One thing is for sure…I wish they used these strategies when I was younger – I believe that if I was taught in this format I may not of had an IEP. I don’t remember lots of question before, during, or after the story or illustration discussions, or reflecting it to my own life situations. Oh, how times have changed! I have no questions at this time. by Jennifer Willott
I agree with you and the book Jennifer! It does make perfect sense that struggling readers cannot make a prediction. The best example I have is in my tutoring sessions, I have one student who is a very good reader and my other two struggle. The one student makes the best predictions on the books and is usually spot on with the book. I always ask him if he already read the book and he always says no, its amazing. The other two, through really random predictions to me so I have to walk them through the title, pictures, and so on.
I agree that the pre-reading strategies are so important to comprehend the text. I have adjusted my teaching to focus on vocabulary words more before reading as they play such a key role in comprehending. I love learning all of these little steps that will make such a huge difference!
This chapter is about comprehension of narrative text, and how complex this process is. This chapter states that there are many things included in comprehending text, just as we have been learning throughout our education classes. This chapter lists decoding skills, fluency skills, and vocabulary as skills needed for readers to comprehend text. While reading through this chapter, I felt like I already knew much of the information because of previous classes, however I still think it was good information. Plus, I liked the way it put the information into order- before, during, and after reading strategies. Basically, I thought this chapter was a good reminder of what I should be doing when I go to my tutoring sessions and for my guided reading/read alouds. There are also assessments listed in the chapter, which is also a review for me as well. Although, while reading the assessments, I did like the think-alouds and the computer program assessment tools. I thought these were both something I haven't read about yet and I like the idea of using these. For this chapter, I do not have any questions. This chapter was very understandable, relatable, and a review of previous knowledge.
Danielle, I think your are right one with your point of when comprehension is used right now. Comprehension revolves all the way around the read alouds and parts of the guided reading Ricky
I had not really thought about think-alouds or computer assessment tools to assess comprehension either. I was not sure what a think-aloud was as I was reading the chapter, so I found that to be a valuable tool.
Danielle, I too understood this chapter and enjoyed reading it. I did not realize you could use technology as assessments but come to think of it my home room teacher using technology all the time with her students for math. It’s a way for them to practice, hands on, get involved, and make learning fun. I really felt this chapter helped justify many reading aspects in which I have learned throughout my time at FHSU.
Chapter 8 was good chapter that discussed the comprehension of text and in this case narrative text. The text did a good job really breaking it down to describes what it really mean to comprehend. This text cites some of those things as fluency, vocab, and decoding are just some examples. The chapter also included information about assessments that can be used and then the activities that can be used to look at if the student is actually comprehending. To me I think many people often just think that comprehending is if the student is able to retell what was read about in a reading. There are many things that need to be accounted for when looking at comprehension such as predicting, sequencing and making inferences. The text offered many ways to look at each of things in different ways. I really liked some of the ideas offered during the activities section of the text. Comprehension is always one of the most fun activities to teach, asses, and look at. I think comprehension is always fun to do when the student perform at that level. I have not really had the chance to look at comprehension within the the classroom setting beyong tutoring. So it will be interesting to see where it goes from this point forward
Good point on comprehending not just being a retelling. That was one of my questions from this chapter. During diagnostic assessments that's all we really did in terms of comprehension testing. It seems like there is much more than just a quick silent reading check to really know how well a student is comprehending narrative texts. I really think the students enjoy comprehension activities the most also. They get to draw, write their own stories, and act. These strategies really help to make it fun and interesting for students, helping them want to work on comprehension, even if they don't really know it.
On to my favorite part of the reading Big 5! I love everything about teaching reading, but I would love to teach 4th or 5th grade so that I am able to focus more on comprehension than on phonics and fluency.
This chapter discussed different strategies for helping students comprehend narrative text. The skills that the chapter suggested the reader would need are decoding skills, or recognizing unfamiliar words and fluency, or accurately and automatically recognizing a large bank of words paired with appropriate rate and expression. After these two skills have been mastered, students can move on to comprehension strategies such as predicting, making inferences, visualizing, making connections, etc. In addition, the chapter discussed how to assess the comprehension and suggested doing a miscue analysis to check for words per minute and fluency, retelling the important events, through the use of cloze and maze tests to see if the text was at an easy, instructional or frustration level and more. Lastly, some of the key strategies that chapter mentions to teach comprehension are modeling the strategy, use easy-level reading material, give feedback, present one strategy at a time and provide many opportunities for them to practice the strategy. Some of the activity examples that the chapter provided were several graphic organizers showing the main details of the story, retelling activities and questioning strategies.
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue.
One thing that I do find difficult with comprehension is getting all of the students involved and participating. Many times I will ask the students to make predictions about what will happen next, but I don’t get responses from all of the students. I think some may be struggling with visualization and trying to decide what will happen next. I guess my main question would be how to reach those readers struggling with comprehension during whole group reading sessions.
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently?
As I mentioned above, this is my favorite area of the reading Big 5. I love asking for predictions and hearing what the students think will happen next. I feel that I have been doing a fairly good job of teaching comprehension strategies with my tutoring group thus far, so this chapter stood as reinforcement for some methods that I have been trying. In addition, I found a few other ways to test comprehension during our guided reading sessions.
4. Connecting the reading to you. Examples of your own experience.
One of the ways that I have been incorporating comprehension in to my tutoring group is having the students make daily sketches in their sketch book. I ask them to draw and make predictions every day on the read aloud or guided reading program. Also, I have them share their predictions with their shoulder partner before and during the reading. My other favorite part of comprehension is making inferences. This skill is not always easy to teach, as I think it just comes naturally in our heads many times. I find that I make inferences every day when I’m reading and just interacting with people. I taught my Reading and Language Arts formal observation on making inferences to 5th graders and it was a blast. One of the activities I had them do was pick a occupation from the phone book, make a help wanted ad with some details on the job, then have the other students infer what the job was. They had such a great time with this activity!
I love our idea of havign your students use sketch books to make predictions. I am sure they love doing that. I also thought the help wanted ads activity is absolutely wonderful. What a great way for them to practice making inferences!!
I also love the sketch book idea and have done a similar activity with my 1st grade tutor students. Making connections to prior knowledge is key to successfully comprehending what is read. We all know the pain of reading something that simply does not interest you and you have no prior exposure too. Figuring out how to find narrative story's that interests your student will greatly improve their comprehension skills.
Carissa, This is one of my favorite areas of the big 5 also. I agree that there are many strategies that this chapter discusses that really just come naturally most of the time. I found that many things that were discussed are strategies that I don’t really plan, but just really do them almost out of instinct. It amazes me that you can do something like that and not even realize that you are teaching a strategy in comprehension. For example, there is many times where I ask my students to look at the title and cover page and predict what they think the story is going to be about. It really is just one of those things that you do first without even really thinking about it. I liked reading about the activity with the ad that you presented to your students. I can see where that would have been fun for them. In my blog I was just wondering if an educator teaches comprehension based on the strategies that were discussed in the chapter and determines the comprehension skills that each student may be lacking, or is it just something that we teach as a whole group.
I really like your idea about making sketches in their sketch book for making predictions. I feel this also helps relate to student especially at a younger age when they really enjoy drawing instead of writing. Good idea, I think that I may use this soon. Hanna
This chapter shows the importance of comprehension and just how much goes into comprehending narrative texts. From the beginning it showed how the basics of decoding and vocabulary are crucial to comprehension and how struggling readers usually struggle with this because they have to work so hard with the decoding process. Fluency also plays a big role in comprehending, but it did seem as if it wasn't quite as important as I thought. There are many things students need to do before, during, and after readings to become proficient readers and comprehenders. Making inferences appeared to be one of the most important strategies in terms of comprehending. But there were many different strategies needed. Figure 8.1 showed just how many strategies go into comprehending.
The interventions section had "loads" of strategies for this chapter. Many of them would work well with most elementary grades also. There were many strategies, such as: Alternative Writing, Story Lines, and all the strategies encouraging illustrations that would work great during tutoring session since they wouldn't take too long. As with all chapters this one had some great ideas for tutoring and small group interventions.
I do question one thing. What does it mean if children seem to comprehend well even if they are poor decoders? I have two tutoring students, one especially that lack decoding skills, but did great with the retelling for the diagnostic assessment. One of them can almost summarize the whole chapter of guided reading, even after not reading it for a few days. It seems as if these students are comprehending well though they struggle with decoding and fluency of reading. Also it said retellings isn't just about telling the story back, but doing it in sequence. During our diagnostic assessments we were not asked to check that. This makes me wonder how well they really did, according to the chapter on their comprehension. The chapter was very informative and had some good strategies. I'm noticing many strategies over and over again and can really see that they are important for teaching reading.
That is interesting Ryan, my students that can't decode can't comprehend very well. If your students are reading at their individual reading level they are not going to be at their frustration level. So maybe that would explain why they are able to comprehend because they are not at their frustration level. It is good to know that you have strength to lean on. It is hard when you have to take third graders and go back to basic phonics skills and they still struggle. I still think that fluency does play a larger role in comprehension though. I listen to the group read and when they blend the sentences together it changes the meaning so how could they comprehend the text that well.
Chapter 8 is about comprehension of narrative text. In order to be able to comprehend what you are reading at a higher level you must have background knowledge, adequate vocabulary, and be motivated. In order for children to develop reading comprehension skills they have to be given the opportunity to read books that are at their reading level, is something that they are interested in , and allowed long periods of time to read independently. Comprehension of narrative texts requires that the reader to be able to use decoding and fluency skills, as well as an adequate vocabulary. The reader must be able to decode words in a quick manner. Even though a reader may be fluent this does not mean that they actually comprehend everything that they read. Having a large listening vocabulary is also very beneficial to comprehension. It is helpful for the students if the teacher discusses the topic of the story before reading and , as well as reviewing vocabulary that they will be reading in the text. There are several strategies that the reader can use before during and after they read the text. Predicting, setting a purpose, visualization, and drawing conclusions are just a few strategies a reader can use to help them with comprehension. This chapter has a bunch of great activities to do with students to help them with comprehension. One strategy I really liked is Paining Mental Pictures activity in which the students are read a story without being shown any pictures. Once the readings over the students share the mental pictures they got from the story then draw them out on paper. Finally at the end the students compare their pictures with the ones from the story. What fun! I am tutoring 1st grade students and I think that they would enjoy this activity very much.
Shanna, I liked everything that you discussed about comprehension. I am tutoring a group of first grade students and this is what we are working on. They are all very fluent and have a big vocabulary however when asked what they read they couldn't retell the necessary key details from the story. I've noticed that when they are engaged and enjoying the story and we complete fun activities that relate to the story their level of comprehension increases dramatically. This is exactly what this chapter is talking about and it has some great activities that will help me in my sessions.
Shanna, Painting mental pictures was one of my favorite activities as well. I think it would be very fun for students of any age and visualizing is one thing that stands out for me every time I read a book. There is nothing better or more rewarding than getting so involved in a book that you can picture and create images in your head, with the help of the author of course! Sharing their ideas with the other students is great for interpersonal interaction and speaking and listening skills. They could even compare and contrast their ideas.
Chapter 8 is all about comprehension. Something I struggled with as a child, and even into adulthood. However, I've learned that in order to understand text you have to build background knowledge, have an adequate vocabulary, and have motivation. All of these components are built into our lesson plans therefore we should be hitting upon each of these components when teaching. In order for students to really build their reading and improve it they need to have the proper decoding skills to attack words, have good fluency, and also they need to be building their vocabulary. Some strategies for building comprehension that they book discusses is predicting, making inferences, setting a purpose, self-motivating, retelling, summarizing, sequencing events, and understanding purpose. When talking about assessments that book talks about the Accelerated Reader program which I really really like. The school that I am interning is has students complete this program and it's great and very individualized. All students are given a goal or number of points that they have to read within the month and they take tests over the books that they read on the computer. This helps teachers monitor their comprehension of books they read independently. At the end of the chapter as usual the book lists several activities to use with students to increase comprehension. I really liked the painting mental pictures activity where I would read a story to the students not showing them any pictures and then they have to draw a picture of the characters and setting as they see it without the pictures. I think that my group of tutoring kids would really enjoy this and they would come up with some really creative pictures.
Kendra, I also noticed similarities between our lesson plan templates and what the book says teachers need to do to build background knowledge. I definitely see the benefit of reminding/asking students to explain what they already know about a topic before introducing new information. I was thinking a lot about background knowledge today because teaching a group of kindergartners or first graders at a high-poverty school could require a teacher to spend extensive time building background knowledge. Many of these students do not have the vocabulary or the experiences to draw on to help them comprehend grade-level text. A good teacher will provide many vicarious experiences from which her students can learn.
Chapter 8 discussed how important comprehension is to reading and provided in-depth instructions for building comprehension. Proficient readers have skills that they use automatically, like inferring, predicting, self-monitoring, and visualizing. Struggling readers need direct instruction, usually through think-alouds, to help them learn and develop these skills. Strategies are divided into three categories: before, during, and after reading.
A crucial piece of information I remember from this chapter is that students need to become proficient in one comprehension strategy and be able to use it independently before they learn a new one. This seems to be a constant issue across curriculum for teachers – do I spend more time on fewer strategies or less time on each strategy so I can teach more of them? I can understand the pressure to teach kids as much as possible in the short time we have with them, but kids need extensive practice for strategies to become automatic.
I have had a heard time making it through these chapters lately because every paragraph reminds me of the kids I tutor. Then I start daydreaming about how this applies to my students and what I could do better for them. For example, the first reading skill the book talks about is decoding and how it helps readers learn to pronounce terms in their aural vocabulary. In the vocabulary section, the book again mentions recognizing words in a student’s listening vocabulary. One of my students has difficulties pronouncing words, like animal and piano. If she can’t pronounce a word correctly, how will she recognize it when she sees it in print? Also, we were reading a book with the phrase “might have been” in it. Every single time she came to the phrase, she pointed at the word might and read “might’ve” and then when she pointed to the word “have” she was stumped. We practiced it over and over and she could not make the connection that “might’ve” should be “might have.” I think she may benefit from some intensive instruction in sight word phrases.
I most enjoyed reading the section about visualizing. It was something I didn’t even realize that some people don’t know how to do. When I read, I rely on visualization to help my comprehension. Even when I read informational books like our class textbooks, I visual it in some way, like by imagining me teaching the information or seeing the qualities and characteristics of struggling readers in children I know. I enjoyed reading the sample about how the teacher asked the students what different things looked like in the story.
This chapter went into a lot of detail about comprehension for narrative text and ways to increase comprehension skills and strategies. There are fundamental skills that a student needs in order to comprehend text and those include decoding, fluency, and a large vocabulary. This chapter also broke down the comprehension strategies into before reading, during reading, and after reading strategies. I am most familiar with the before and after strategies such as predicting and retelling. The chapter also stressed the importance of teaching one comprehension strategy at a time and spending some quality time practicing the strategy before introducing others. I really appreciated figure 8.1 and the basic list of strategies for comprehension. This was a nice list that one could refer to often. I am most unfamiliar and have the most difficulty with comprehension strategies for during reading. In terms of personal use, it comes so naturally that I don’t think about doing these things and when I am engrossed in a good book I don’t feel like I stop to think, but I just keep reading and can’t wait to find out what will happen next. I know I am subconsciously using comprehension strategies, but I need to find ways to be better at getting students to understand these skills. I thought the section on critical literacy was very good and helped me to understand their importance. I also thought the connections to other subjects were very good and appreciated how to use these strategies for other texts and subjects such as science and social studies. I love bringing in literature with other subjects and often times it seems we can forget to do that. My favorite intervention strategies included the teacher-made audiobooks and painting mental pictures. I think it would be a lot of fun to create audio books for my students because I really enjoy doing read alouds. I also love the idea of students sharing their mental images of the story and then creating illustrations. I always get such vivid pictures in my head when I read, and it makes me think of the disappointment I always feel when the book is turned into a movie. Nothing can ever compare to the images you create in your mind and nothing can ever top your own imagination. I want students to feel and understand this!
This chapter takes an in-depth look at comprehension of a narrative text. This chapter expressed the importance of vocabulary, prior knowledge, reading fluency and decoding skills as valuable aspects of the complex comprehension process. I have always been amazed that my son’s comprehension is so advanced since his reading level is about two grades behind his peers. I am now aware that comprehension skills require a higher level of thinking and it makes more since to me. My son is very intelligent and can remember even the littlest detail if giving to him in a way that he can connect it to his prior knowledge. For example he tried memorizing his times tables for months with flash cards and still could not consistently give you the answer for anyone them. Now he has been working on “times tales” and in 1 month has half of them memorized. This is possible because times tales makes a story out of each of the facts. Ashton remember s the story instantly when he sees the multiplication fact. by making a connection to his prior knowledge he was able to memorize something that had been all but impossible for him. Students need to be able to make this type of connection when they are reading so that they can increase their comprehension ability. Devries chapter 8 gave us many strategies to help student with their comprehension skills. Students need to learn to stop and think about what they are reading to help them make the connection necessary to comprehend what they are reading. In my internship class a student was reading a book and ran into a word that she did not know what it meant and after the first chapter she went to the teacher saying she wanted to switch books because the one she had was boring. The teacher questioned her and found out that she did not understand the text because of not understanding what this word was. She then explained its meaning to the student and it was like a switch being turned on. She all the student “got it” and wanted t continue with the book. I think this sis a prime example of just how important key vocabulary is in these primary grades. If they don’t understand what they are reading how can we expect them to comprehend it? I think that it is vital for all teachers to press the importance of key vocabulary and how a student can find out a words meaning if they do not already know what a word means.
I did not know they had stories for times tables. I am going to check it out. What a great way to integrate reading into math. I would love to teach third grade math. I was thinking more along the lines of integrating music into the curriculum so they could learn a song for each set. Like you, I knew vocabulary was very important, but now it is a priority.
Chapter eight was about comprehension. The reason we read is for understandiing. Therefore, it is very important that we help those struggling readers by giving them strategies that they can use to become great readers able to comprehend what they are reading. Some strategies mentioned are: drawing inferences, predicting, self-monitoring, retelling and summarizing, drawing conclusions, activating prior knowledge, using knowledge of text structures and visualizing before, during and after reading. One warning DeVries gives is never to teach skills in isolation because even older students cannot transfer strategies taught in isolation to reading full texts (180). I also like the analogy of a car to a reader. We can’t expect a car to run without tires, an engine, a steering wheel or a chassis. We cannot expect readers to read without decoding skills, fluency skills, and adequate vocabulary. In this chapter all of the strategies are discussed individually and then there are a number of ways we can assess if our students truly comprehend what they are reading. This information is on page 190-193. The intervention section is always my favorite because it gives practical hands-on activities to help our students. One of my favorites is "Story Lines" on page 200. I do not have any questions or contradictions from the reading.
I am using the “Story Lines” activity with my tutoring group this week. I think it will work really well with our lesson. I will read them a story and then we will cooperatively write a story of our own using some of the same vocabulary words in the read aloud. I have written the words on cards and I will go over them prior to the read aloud. This helps them by using the new vocabulary and they become authors and illustrators. We will be using many of our Rebecca Sitton words as well that are on our word wall. This section also talks about teacher-made audio books. I decided to give it a try and I made some audio books for my group to listen to while I do my summatives. They can go to different stations while I am testing others. They also have the option of drawing their favorite part of the story or going to a different station. The thing I love about this text is that there are so many ideas, but sadly too little time. I also loved the websites on page 213. They are super resources. Be sure to check it out each of them if you haven’t already. You will love them. My FAVORITE one is www.storyonline.net where celebrities read books aloud. I hope to have time to do the Rainbow Fish story before our time is up. I will let them color die cut fish and attach sparkly jewel stones to it that I had left over from a summer project. Like I said, so much to do and so little time! Have a great week!
I used something very similar to "story lines" with my students a few weeks ago when our lesson was over and we were waiting for their parents to arrive to get them. I wrote the vocabulary words on the board and had them verbally tell me a story about themselves using the words. I crossed out each word as they used it. The boys were cracking up and laughing the whole time! I think part of what made it fun for them was that there was no chance of failure for them as they were not writing anything down and did not have to spell anything. They did great.
Also - I found the site you mentioned but it is storylineonline.net and it is GREAT! I really liked it, thanks for sharing.
One thing that you might do is have your students do the story lines activity with one of the books from storylineonline.net and then have them do the retelling with puppets on page 210. It sounds fun and depending on the age of your students, they might really enjoy it.
I absolutely love learning about comprehension and the role that it plays in the big 5. To be honest I was really disappointed at first when my fourth grade students that I am now tutoring scored lower in the Phonics and Phonemic Awareness area of reading, because I really wanted to create instruction using comprehension skills. I enjoyed reading about the before, during, and after strategies for comprehension that were discussed in this chapter. I like that fact that they not only talked about the role that comprehension before, during, and after plays in comprehension, but they also gave scenarios that show you the roles as an educator. My favorite part of the reading in this chapter was the visualization. The chapter says that good readers will be able to visualize what they are reading. I know when I am reading a book if I cannot put myself into the characters it is really hard for me to keep my interest in the story. Last summer I read “The Hunger Games” series. I was so into that series of books and the characters that I found myself incredibly disappointed when I went to see the movie. I think that I enjoyed the visualization most because I am also a very visual learner, and I do have a tendency to use this type of teaching method in many of the lessons that I teach. However, going back to the role that comprehension plays in the big 5, I understand that in order for my students to get to this part of reading they must first grasp the phonics and phonemic awareness skills that they lack. The chapter talks about the importance of modeling strategies that are used in instruction. I know many times in my lessons I model reading strategies. I think this is an important strategy to use in helping your students become good readers. The end of the chapter used many activity strategies that can help with comprehension. I think that different graphic organizers are one of the best instructional strategies for me. In knowing that there are so many strategies for comprehension, such as main idea, predicting, making inferences, setting a purpose, visualization, conclusions, and many more, how does an educator determine which part of comprehension a student is lacking in? I guess that before I read this chapter I thought comprehension was basically one strategy. I didn’t realize all of the strategies that came along with comprehension. I am just wondering in a whole reading group does a teacher work on the same comprehension strategies, or do students need to be divided into different groups based on the strategy that they may be lacking? Although my content focus for reading in this course has been phonics, I have also added fluency and comprehension into my lessons through guided reading and read aloud instruction. Many of the strategies that were discussed in this chapter I have added into my lessons. Although, there are many that I haven’t and definitely will use them in the future.
I agree with you, I also enjoy activities related to comprehension. Comprehension was also something I was interested in focusing on but my students really needed help with phonics. It is so important that students grasp the basic concepts like phonics and phonemic awareness and your blog really emphasized this. I thought you provided a great example of how books are much better then movies because of the details that cannot be added to the movie. I am often disappointed in watching the movie after reading the book.
Blog Chapter 8 Zoë Greenemeyer Comprehension is the main purpose of reading but there are students who are not able to comprehend what they read. Comprehension requires higher-level thinking skills and for narrative text it is the ability encode and retrieve the basic building blocks of sentences and meaning from the text and align this with scenes and stories from the text. There are fundamental skills that readers need to have to comprehend text; they are decoding skills, fluency, skills, and an adequate vocabulary. Comprehension strategies that take affect prior to reading include predicting and setting a purpose. During reading strategies include making inferences, self-monitoring, visualizing, and connecting prior knowledge to text. After reading strategies include retelling, drawing conclusions, and elaborating. The first grade students that I am tutoring are learning comprehension through the guided reading activities I have planned. I am focusing my lesson on phonics but I feel this will also impact their comprehension level. The one strategy I really found valuable was the activity pairing nonfiction and fiction texts. From my observation in the classroom I found that I do not see as much nonfiction text being used.
Zoe- I was a bit shocked at all of the strategies that help a reader comprehend what they are reading before, during, and after the piece. As future teachers, we have seen demonstrated by other teachers and may have done these strategies ourselves (such as retelling or predicting), but I had no idea that these were aiding in a readers comprehension. From this chapter I will taking away the important before, during, and after strategies for comprehension and know why I am doing them.
Chapter 8 Blog – Hanna Haraughty Chapter 8 explains about comprehension of narrative text. We now know that comprehension is the main purpose of reading. There are many readers who struggle that cannot comprehend what they are reading. The text states that “in the case of narrative text, it is based on the ability to encode and retrieve the basic building blocks of sentences and relate the meaning within them to scenes and stories from a text.” (Pg. 179) In order to comprehend text readers should be able to make predictions, draw conclusions, retell the story, and make inferences. Readers need to be able to read a story and relate the story to any background knowledge that they can connect to. There are many things to do before reading to enhance the reader’s comprehension. Such activities include making predictions and setting a purpose. After reading, students can retell the story and realize the author’s intent. I really like how this chapter broke down what to do before, during and after reading that will enhance a student’s comprehension skills. I will be using these during tutoring in the future. From personal experience I have noticed lately that my second grade students are starting to really work on comprehension skills. According to our book this seems a little early to really focus on this skill. I feel that more phonics needs to be emphasized. I don’t have any questions with this chapter and just feel that there was many scaffold items that can be used in my tutoring sessions. I also really like the activity retelling with puppets. I feel that this will allow student to have a visual understanding of the text instead of relying solely on the student’s visuals of the story. There were many other activities that can be used in the future to enhance student’s comprehension skills. I feel that by reading this chapter I am more aware of what I should be doing and looking for as I tutor.
Hanna, I enjoyed reading your thoughts about chapter 8. Like you I found it very helpful that DeVries chunked out what to do prior, during, and after when using narrative texts. I found it nice to hear you plan to use them for tutoring in the future. I love the activities and the information I have found in this text. This has to be one of my favorite textbooks. I usually do not align favorite and textbook in the same sentence. It was just nice to read someone else is liking the reading and benefiting from it.
Chapter 8 covers the comprehension of narrative text. This was a great time for me to read this chapter and become familiar with the components needed to teach comprehension of narrative text. I used a narrative text as my guided reading text this week and the week prior. The students were able to identify the book as a narrative. The book was formatted in days from the narrator's journal. On page 183 the DeVries talks about setting a purpose which is exactly what I had to do prior to introducing the narrative text. I had to set the tone and draw on background knowledge. The book was about a girl's connection to a horse. We began by talking about horses. Actually both students had a horse of their own. This chapter walks an educator through the steps needed to make narrative text useful in teaching comprehension. For a reader to comprehend what they are reading they have to be able to use the all the skills or parts or reading and put them together. DeVries compares comprehension to a car and it's parts. The reader has to be able to decode, read fluently, and recognize vocabulary to focus on the underlining purpose of what they are reading. I enjoyed all the different ideas and strategies to engage students in prior to actually reading the text. All of these ideas would be wonderful anticipatory sets. Another useful tool chapter 8 offered was the numerous assessments that can be used as comprehension check for narrative texts. The graphic organizer found on page 202 is a one I plan to use in my lesson plan 11 since I am using another narrative text. Again the activities continue to be one of my favorite aspects of this textbook because it allows me to connect on the information I read in the chapters and provides me with a visual to implement in my lessons. Has anyone else been using the activities from the DeVries text?
Jade- I hadn't thought about setting a purpose for reading before reading this chapter. It makes sense though that the student needs to know why is it we are reading this story or piece of text. Is it for enjoyment? Is it to find out who, what, when, where, and why? Is it for information? I really learned that when the reader knows the purpose they can better understand what it is they need to take away from the piece they are reading.
I also really liked the graphic organizer on page 202. This organizer could be used with several types of books! I like that graphic organizers give clear visually help for a students to organize their thoughts.
This week for Chapter 8 we learn about comprehension of narrative text. Comprehending the material you are reading is the main purpose of reading. However, when a child struggles to read the text there is not much comprehending going on. **I see this with my tutoring students. They are so consumed with decoding each sound of every single word, when they come to the end of the page and I ask questions to see what they understood, they don’t have a clue as to what the passage was about that they just read.** There are fundamental skills that are needed in order to comprehend what you are reading. The first skill a reader needs for comprehension is decoding skills so that they can recognize familiar words automatically so time isn’t wasted on trying to sound out each and every letter. The reader needs that ability to “hunk and chunk” parts of words together in order to decode unfamiliar words quickly. **This is truly a skill that both of my girls I am tutoring really need work on. They are both so quick to begin to sound out each and every syllable that it is affecting all other skills needed for comprehension as well as the comprehension itself. The second skill for comprehension is fluency. The reader needs to be able to automatically and accurately recognize a large bank of words so they can read at an appropriate rate. By not stumbling over unfamiliar words, they can read fluently so that they are able to understand what it is that they are reading. **One of the best things I have learned in this class is that just because a child can read fluently doesn’t mean they are comprehending what they are reading. ** The third skill a reader needs for comprehension is an adequate vocabulary. This whole section had my true attention. First, I didn’t realize that if a reader had a large listening vocabulary when they come to an unknown word they need to decode they are better able to recognize and grasp its meaning more quickly. I wish every parent could read this sentence as proof of just one reason it is so great to read to our children!!! As a parent myself, I love to read and have passed that along to both of my children. My goodness, I read children stories to them when they were still in my belly. I never knew that by reading to them all of the years before they began reading that I was building a listening vocabulary in them to help them when they became a reader. I think that this section also really had me connect my class text to what we are learning in our lectures from Mrs. Stoppel. We are doing the Mastery Word Learning with our students to make them more likely to recognize these words and add them to their vocabulary word banks and our text makes this same connection by saying, “when introducing each new word, write it on the board and have students say it so they are more likely to recognize the word in text.” (continued on next comment)
Besides needing skills for comprehension, there are also many strategies that will support reading comprehension. Our book talks about before, during, and after reading strategies. “Before” reading, predicting is a great higher-level thinking skill for a reader. Predicting has the reader using background knowledge, supply details, and then see if their prediction is correct. Also setting a purpose is an important before reading strategy. When it comes to narrative text, the purpose is to find out who did what, when, where, and why. The “during” reading strategies are to make an inferences. The reader goes through processes of judging, concluding, or reasoning, indirectly from the information that is available that far in the story. The reader can self-monitor to see if what they are reading sounds right, looks right, and makes sense. **I would like to know if there is a certain age that this becomes more evident and if this is a skill that is taught in school and at what level. The girls that I tutor do not have this self-monitoring strategy at all. They either guess or sound a word out and just keep going. They don’t stop to see if what they are saying looks like the word they were trying to decode, if it makes sense in the sentence or if it sounds right.** Visualizing the events in the story is another great strategy that is necessary for comprehension. Connecting prior knowledge to text is also very important for comprehension. The “after” reading strategies are just as important for comprehension. Retelling the story elements, drawing conclusions, and elaborating on the author’s intent are all strategies that will help the reader with comprehension. **I liked the puppets that Mrs. Stoppel showed in one of her lectures this week. What a great way to get students to do these before, during, and after strategies for comprehension! I loved them and hope if I get a younger grade to incorporate activities like these puppets in my lessons.** As we have discussed before, the assessments (both informal and formal) are beneficial to the teachers because not only can they see how the students are doing with their lesson and if they need to re-teach, they can also observe what readers do during the reading process. This enables the teacher to meet each individual student on their own level. Again, this chapter is full of strategies and activities that can be used not only for our tutoring students, but also in our future classrooms.
Reading comprehension is something that I struggle with on a regular basis. I read things then realize that I have forgotten what I have just read. Typically it is when I am tired, or overwhelmed, or distracted by one of my children. This being said I read this chapter with a touch of empathy for individuals who struggle with this on a daily basis. I was also, of course, thinking of my students and their ongoing struggle with comprehension. There were many parts of this chapter that were new or newly rediscovered to me. I already understood the importance of comprehension in being a successful reader. Some of the strategies are ones that I use with my students (predicting is the one I tent to use a lot, Dr. W in her Read Alouds in class got me into doing this) as well as visualizing and connecting to prior knowledge. There are some things that I have tried that have not works well for me and that it the visualizing. Some of this is because my students have a hard time with literal vs figurative language. They are not able to connect their real world knowledge to the text that they are reading and they have a very hard time concentrating on at grade level writing. This being said, they are very imaginative and love to draw conclusions about what might happen and to retell the parts that they do remember. One question of have from the text is that when re-telling story elements, my students often will add in parts from other stories. I’m always torn when this happens because they are actually remembering a part of a story but the meshing of several together is not what I’m aiming at. My question her is what should I do when this happens? Any redirection suggestions? I did the Where, Who, When and Did What cards with them already and it has not helped them much. I would love some more guidance. Activities that I want to do with my students soon are the pairing of text and the repeated interactive read aloud (I’ve already got this planned for next week!) I loved most of the suggestions at the end of the chapter but I’m going to try the text mapping as it seemed like it would be another way of doing the Where, Who, When and Did What cards.
I should also mention that I really liked that the text broke the strategies up into before, during, and after reading strategies. I felt that this will be particularly helpful to me when writing my lesson plans.
One suggestion I would have for retelling a story is to have the students draw and write about what happened in the story! I have seen this used in a classroom before and it worked great!
Chapter 8 was about comprehension of narrative text. I am glad that I read this chapter because my content focus for my reading group is comprehension. This chapter gave strategies for before reading. These include predicting and setting a purpose. Also, it gave strategies for during reading. These strategies included making inferences, self monitoring, visualizing, and connecting prior knowledge to the text. Some after reading strategies that were suggested in this chapter were retelling story elements, drawing conclusions and elaborating on author's intent. These strategies are all helpful when focusing on comprehension. One question I have is what if a student lack common prior knowledge. What strategies could a teacher use to help this student. This chapter made me realize that there is a lot to comprehension. Comprehension is an important part of reading. I always thought there was only so many ways to help students with comprehension. After reading this chapter I have a lot of ideas to try. I really liked figure 8.1, which listed strategies for comprehension. For my tutoring group I have been focusing on comprehension. One strategy that I have been using is having my students retell the story after we are done reading it. Since reading this chapter I will also try to use some before reading strategies to further help my students.
I have heard alot in my internship about Self-Monitoring and Connecting prior knowledge so it was really interesting to read about it in the text and be able to put the pieces together.
I like that you found this chapter to be so beneficial to your tutoring group! I think it is important that you implement more than one strategy to help students with comprehension. Using before reading strategies is a great way to do this! I can remember doing things like this when I was a young student. They always had us predict what we would be reading about. Also, we would use predictions as we would read. Looking back, this was a great way for them to check for comprehension as well as make predictions. As for your question, I am not real sure of one way to help a student who does not have prior knowledge. One thing you could do is give a quick explanation of what your anticipatory set is about. Also, you can use props or use technology tools to try to enhance your anticipatory set. The more tools you use, the better chance they will have of recalling prior knowledge. However, I feel like you may have to modify to fit the needs depending on what it is you are doing and the student.
I liked the quote on the chapter cover page… Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome obstacles to learning- Eugene S. Wilson (chapter 8). I know how to get struggling readers to be curious through doing interest inventories to find out what they love, what they do, where they love to go. My question however, is how do you get them to be resolute, especially if you have a student that is 4 grade levels behind? I use positive reinforcement but do you have any other ideas? Chapter 8 talks about comprehension of narrative text through the use of strategies such as predicting, purpose of setting, making inferences, self-monitoring, visualizing, prior knowledge, and retelling. I had not really thought about discussing the purpose of a story until a couple of videos ago when Mrs. Stoppel talked about it. So I tried to incorporate it into my guided reading last week. The only student that really understood the purpose was the higher leveled reader in the group but she is still really low. I think though if I ask every time from now on it will help the others to be thinking about it during and after the reading. Some of the reading skills students need to be good at comprehension are good decoding skills and fluency. That is why it is so important to pick the appropriate leveled text. I did a running record with my students at the beginning to find their levels. I have found that a little difficult to pick reading texts since one of my students is reading at an E and the higher leveled student is reading at an H level. The third student reads at F so that is where we usually are in our reading choices but the lower student still has trouble decoding. After reading about visualizing in the chapter and hearing Mrs. Stoppel talk about students closing their eyes during reading and then having them describe what they saw, I am itching to do it with the group this week. I think the girl with be accurate but I am curious about the other students. Didn’t you just love the Sad Story Face figure 8.2! If my focus where on comprehension I would be doing a lot of story mapping. However, if I had more time I would throw some in just for more practice with comprehension. The little girl in my group really gets into the stories I read. This is a great sign; she is engrossed and reads a lot so I feel she is on the verge of blossoming as a reader. My students and the entire school in fact, take SRI which is discussed on page 191 under Computer programs as assessment tools. I like that I can read a book or they can, and then they can go to the computer and take SRI test over the book. This allows me to check for comprehension. The only problem I have seen with this is that students that are struggling readers can’t read the test. The school requires each grade to acquire so many SRI points a quarter and it is 10% of their reading grade. Some teachers choose to read the test to them to see if they comprehend the books they are reading or having read to them. How do you guys feel about that?
The 5th grade students I am working lacked motivation to finish a book when we started. I tried to help motivate them by giving them the option of the book. Also, we journal and I try to make the journals a personal connection. For example, our book, Theodore Boone, states that Theo knows he wants to be a lawyer when he grows up and what he will need to do to get there. I had the students journal about the profession they would like to be in, who or what inspired them to be that, and what it would take to get there (schooling, etc). So far, my students have become engrossed in the book and have asked if we can just read the entire class period! It is a huge improvement.
I do not believe I had heard of the Scholastic Reading Inventory program. Of course, I have heard of Scholastic books and quiet possibly have taken one of these tests. The school I am in does AR and this is what I grew up with. I feel that the teachers should read the test to the student to check for comprehension as long as the grade goes only towards comprehension, if that makes sense. I think it is good that it should apply towards the grade but I feel that the teacher should have flexibility in the amount of percent of their grade. As we all know, every student is different and teachers should be able to grade accordingly.
Chapter 8 was about Comprehension. I really enjoyed reading this chapter because I see in my other internships especially in Social Studies that the students have a hard time retelling what they just read five minutes ago. The beginning of the chapter discusses Strategies for Reading Comprehension such as predicting. I really like using Predicting because I think it puts a question or idea in the students head that they themselves want to find out and they are that much more interested in the reading. That can also go along with setting a purpose which is listed in the text as well. There are also during reading strategies that the text gives examples for such as self-monitoring, visualizing, connecting prior knowledge, etc. I have used visualizing in some of my lessons just so that I can make sure the students are getting something from the reading. I also really like the technique of self-monitoring. I have seen some teachers use this technique especially in the older grades and it really seems to work. It is a great way to teach them to be responsible for themselves and then it also teaches them to stay on task. The after reading strategies that the text listed were retelling, drawing conclusions, elaborating etc. I really like retelling and drawing conclusions because you can do this at any age. The students are able to retell information they remember and whether it is a random fact or a vital piece of information atleast they are remembering and able to tell you about it. The strategies and activities section always has a lot of great ideas and suggestions to use. One of the activities that I liked was the Repeated Read Aloud. I have done this in some of my other internships and it seems to work because they hear the information multiple different times and they are able to retell what they know. I also really like the Strategy to use before Reading called Alternate Writing. I love that it integrates writing and reading and I have been trying to do that with my kids to keep their writing skills up and to see if it helps with remembering.
Chapter eight was over comprehension. The book identified comprehension as the main purpose of reading. I agree with the book. Yet, I am surprised at the number of young readers who struggle with reading. I feel like comprehension plays a big part in a lot of students that do not enjoy reading. Figure 8.1 was very helpful for me. It was over the many reading strategies for comprehension. Some of these include finding the main idea, predicting, making inferences, and setting a purpose. The book also mentioned that all of these strategies are needed by the reader. Each strategy depends on the others and all strategies must work for the reader to be able to comprehend what it is they are reading. I also like the section that talked about making inferences when reading. This is a very important strategy for comprehension. To make inferences means to judge, conclude, or reason. This ties in a lot to connecting prior knowledge to the story. The last thing I want to mention in this section is the section over re-telling. I do a lot of re-telling in my tutoring groups. However, I have not been going as in-depth as I should when I have my students re-tell a story. I usually just have them cover the man points. Now, I have a better understanding of what to look for and ask students when I have them re-tell a story.
I can relate to a lot from the reading. I really liked the section about assessments, because I got a lot of different ideas on how to assess comprehension. In all of my read alouds during my tutoring sessions, I have student re-tell the story. However, like I previously mentioned, I have not been going as in-depth as I should. Also, I can relate to assessing a child’s comprehension from the assessments I gave at the beginning of the year. Another thing that comes to mind is Dr. Walizer’s class. She did read-alouds throughout the semester and she was constantly checking for comprehension throughout the book in many ways.
This chapter made it very clear to me how teaching comprehension strategies can directly enhance children’s reading comprehension. I think that teachers need to have a lot of “tools” to help students learn how to better comprehend a reading passage. I do not have a lot of questions about the chapter. However, after reading about all of the ways to teach comprehension strategies, I got to wondering if one way works better than all the others. I understand that effective teachers need to know multiple ways, but does one stand out and work better than others?
Jarett, I agree with you. I like the asessment examples as well in the textbook. It can be difficult at times to think of assessments that will truely evaluation the studnets understanding of the material so this is a great place for me to start off with. I have the students in my tutoring class tell what happened last time in the story and what tehy think will happen next.This putting the material in their own words so I can see if they are on the right track.
1. Analysis of the reading/issue. Chapter eight of the textbook Literacy Assessment & Intervention by B. Devries discusses how to teach students to comprehend narrative text (Devries, 178- 214). There are so much skills that goes into comprehension of text. The students must use many skills to decode words and then the meaning of the words to truly understand the text. As the textbook mentions people must learn to read “critical level” (Devries, 179). These reading skills that are mentioned in the textbook are “decoding, fluency and vocabulary” (Devries, 181- 181). The textbook also mentions reading comprehension strategies that include “predicting, setting a purpose, making inferences, self-monitoring, visualizing, connecting prior knowledge to the text, literacy/world knowledge or text-to-text connections, retelling story elements, drawing conclusions and elaborating on the authors intent” (Devries, 181-188).
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue. None at this time
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently?
I really liked the assessments that are mentioned in this chapter of the textbook on pages 190-193. Assessments for comprehension can sometimes be difficult because the student must show that they truly grasp the material in the text. The students cannot simply recite the story back to the teacher they must give a true explanation of the text in their own way which requires a higher level of thinking.
4. Connecting the reading to you. Examples of your own experience.
When thinking about my own experience with comprehension I remember that comprehending text was always very difficult for me. I always thought it was easy for me to understand the text if I would search for meaning in the text. For example if the teacher would give me a reason for reading the text instead of just say “Please read page___ so we can discuss.” I could not do this because I did not understand what we would be discussing. I think that students need to be told the meaning and purpose for activities that they do in class.
I was horrible at comprehension also, so your idea of giving meaning to the reading will help me to educate the students that struggle just as I did - thanks!!
The first thing that a caught my attention is that Mr. Bradley focused his attention within a novel that the students could relate to. Just as we have been discussing in our lectures, this is vital to students comprehending the text. Another thing that we have been talking about this semester is the use of poetry. I liked seeing the example of how Mr. Bradley used songs/poetry in a higher level of elementary. Having students look at lyrics and listen to them helps students relate to the content once again. I like the use of lyrics and poetry because it is often stated in a way that students don’t usually hear it. Most of the time, metaphors, similes, or other figurative speech is used.
This chapter really breaks down the different types of comprehension and provides many, many different ways to assess and build this skill. One of the parts of the chapter that I found most beneficial was on page 194. It tells us to teach in context and use simple, easy-level reading material. I agree with this but, it reminds me of one of our lectures this week that talked about the level of our of textbooks decreasing. I wonder if the authors and producers of our textbooks were trying to make the levels of our textbooks apply to more of the median reading level in our classrooms. I do think that children benefit more when they can understand the text but, sometimes I think our students need to become familiar with harder texts before they begin to push themselves. I’m not sure how regularly this should be done though. It is something I would like to explore more.
I really, really like the idea of pairing nonfiction and fiction texts. I think students can really relate when they can read facts about a situation and imagine how life would be in a different setting. This is the way I learned the most as a child and still do. It also gave great ideas of book pairings to use. “And This is the Rest of the Story” is a great activity that I think will really appeal to students. I am going to try to implement this into my tutoring session but I feel as though I am running out of sessions to try everything I would like!
Chapter 8 Blog ~ 1. Analysis of the reading/issue. This chapter discussed comprehension in depth. Early in the chapter the text stated that research has shown that the reader must draw conclusions, inferences, predict self-monitor, retell and summarize, draw conclusions, activate prior knowledge, use text structures and visualize before, during and after reading. The text discussed the importance of decoding and having the ability to decode unfamiliar words. The paragraph on fluency pointed out that just because a reader can read about 75 wpm at a 98% accuracy does not mean that the reader is comprehending what was read. Vocaubulary was also discussed as a critical part of comprehension. The text reminded us to discuss the text before having the students read. Predicting was brought to attention as a higher level strategy. The book stated that good readers will be able to make predictions automatically, while a struggling reader will not attempt it! The chapter went on to discuss all the strategies we will use to assist our readers with comprehension. 2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue. The question I had was when should a teacher began teaching comprehension, but Ms. Stoppel answered that for me in the recording! 3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? Comprehension can make or break a reader! It is so important that we address all of the topics in the text to ensure that we are meeting all of the needs of our students. 4. Connecting the reading to you. Examples of your own experience. As a student, I was and still am to some extent horrible at comprehension. I know first hand how frustrating it is not to remember what you have read or how to put the information requested by a teacher on a test.
Chapter 8 – Comprehension of Narrative Text
ReplyDeleteComprehension is an active process that requires a complex and higher level thinking skills. This chapter really did a great job on reflecting on how these needed skills are so important for students to learn, in order to comprehend narrative text.
One of the things that was re-emphasized throughout this chapter was the importance to discuss the topic of a story before reading it. Also, stop and discuss unknown words. This is important because it will help the student better comprehend and understand the story by addressing new words meanings. Provide examples because examples are easier to understand than abstract definitions.
Something that caught my eye in this chapter was when it was talking about predicting, it said, “Good readers make predictions automatically, while struggling reads often make no attempt to predict what will happen next in the story”. I thought this was significant because I never really gave it much thought on why some did or didn’t respond when asking questions about a story. But, looking back at my students from tutoring or even in the classroom, it makes sense! Struggling readers can make predictions using the illustrations from the cover of the book. I always like to ask my students, before every read aloud (even my own children), “What do you think this book is going to be about?” They always enjoy trying to figure it out, but at the same time they don’t realize it is setting them up to get hooked into a fun story.
One of the things I like to do with my students and (once again my own children) is to have them visualize what they are hearing. Some books may come without pictures therefore re-telling the story where you left off is a good reminder to them what the story is about. Having them re-tell the story and connecting prior knowledge of the text is important. I always ask questions, and like this chapter discussed questions are a critical dynamic in the process of expanding their relationships and thinking as we read the words.
There are many things from this chapter that I obviously found greatly beneficial. I will take many of these strategies in this chapter, many of which I did not mention, into the classroom with me. One thing is for sure…I wish they used these strategies when I was younger – I believe that if I was taught in this format I may not of had an IEP. I don’t remember lots of question before, during, or after the story or illustration discussions, or reflecting it to my own life situations. Oh, how times have changed!
I have no questions at this time.
by Jennifer Willott
I agree with you and the book Jennifer! It does make perfect sense that struggling readers cannot make a prediction. The best example I have is in my tutoring sessions, I have one student who is a very good reader and my other two struggle. The one student makes the best predictions on the books and is usually spot on with the book. I always ask him if he already read the book and he always says no, its amazing. The other two, through really random predictions to me so I have to walk them through the title, pictures, and so on.
DeleteJennifer,
DeleteI agree that the pre-reading strategies are so important to comprehend the text. I have adjusted my teaching to focus on vocabulary words more before reading as they play such a key role in comprehending. I love learning all of these little steps that will make such a huge difference!
Carissa
This chapter is about comprehension of narrative text, and how complex this process is. This chapter states that there are many things included in comprehending text, just as we have been learning throughout our education classes. This chapter lists decoding skills, fluency skills, and vocabulary as skills needed for readers to comprehend text. While reading through this chapter, I felt like I already knew much of the information because of previous classes, however I still think it was good information. Plus, I liked the way it put the information into order- before, during, and after reading strategies. Basically, I thought this chapter was a good reminder of what I should be doing when I go to my tutoring sessions and for my guided reading/read alouds. There are also assessments listed in the chapter, which is also a review for me as well. Although, while reading the assessments, I did like the think-alouds and the computer program assessment tools. I thought these were both something I haven't read about yet and I like the idea of using these. For this chapter, I do not have any questions. This chapter was very understandable, relatable, and a review of previous knowledge.
ReplyDeleteDanielle, I think your are right one with your point of when comprehension is used right now. Comprehension revolves all the way around the read alouds and parts of the guided reading
DeleteRicky
Danielle,
DeleteI had not really thought about think-alouds or computer assessment tools to assess comprehension either. I was not sure what a think-aloud was as I was reading the chapter, so I found that to be a valuable tool.
Carissa
Danielle, I too understood this chapter and enjoyed reading it. I did not realize you could use technology as assessments but come to think of it my home room teacher using technology all the time with her students for math. It’s a way for them to practice, hands on, get involved, and make learning fun. I really felt this chapter helped justify many reading aspects in which I have learned throughout my time at FHSU.
ReplyDelete1Literacy
ReplyDeleteChapter 8
Chapter 8 was good chapter that discussed the comprehension of text and in this case narrative text. The text did a good job really breaking it down to describes what it really mean to comprehend. This text cites some of those things as fluency, vocab, and decoding are just some examples. The chapter also included information about assessments that can be used and then the activities that can be used to look at if the student is actually comprehending. To me I think many people often just think that comprehending is if the student is able to retell what was read about in a reading. There are many things that need to be accounted for when looking at comprehension such as predicting, sequencing and making inferences. The text offered many ways to look at each of things in different ways. I really liked some of the ideas offered during the activities section of the text. Comprehension is always one of the most fun activities to teach, asses, and look at. I think comprehension is always fun to do when the student perform at that level. I have not really had the chance to look at comprehension within the the classroom setting beyong tutoring. So it will be interesting to see where it goes from this point forward
Good point on comprehending not just being a retelling. That was one of my questions from this chapter. During diagnostic assessments that's all we really did in terms of comprehension testing. It seems like there is much more than just a quick silent reading check to really know how well a student is comprehending narrative texts. I really think the students enjoy comprehension activities the most also. They get to draw, write their own stories, and act. These strategies really help to make it fun and interesting for students, helping them want to work on comprehension, even if they don't really know it.
Delete1. Analysis of the reading/issue.
ReplyDeleteOn to my favorite part of the reading Big 5! I love everything about teaching reading, but I would love to teach 4th or 5th grade so that I am able to focus more on comprehension than on phonics and fluency.
This chapter discussed different strategies for helping students comprehend narrative text. The skills that the chapter suggested the reader would need are decoding skills, or recognizing unfamiliar words and fluency, or accurately and automatically recognizing a large bank of words paired with appropriate rate and expression. After these two skills have been mastered, students can move on to comprehension strategies such as predicting, making inferences, visualizing, making connections, etc. In addition, the chapter discussed how to assess the comprehension and suggested doing a miscue analysis to check for words per minute and fluency, retelling the important events, through the use of cloze and maze tests to see if the text was at an easy, instructional or frustration level and more. Lastly, some of the key strategies that chapter mentions to teach comprehension are modeling the strategy, use easy-level reading material, give feedback, present one strategy at a time and provide many opportunities for them to practice the strategy. Some of the activity examples that the chapter provided were several graphic organizers showing the main details of the story, retelling activities and questioning strategies.
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue.
One thing that I do find difficult with comprehension is getting all of the students involved and participating. Many times I will ask the students to make predictions about what will happen next, but I don’t get responses from all of the students. I think some may be struggling with visualization and trying to decide what will happen next. I guess my main question would be how to reach those readers struggling with comprehension during whole group reading sessions.
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently?
As I mentioned above, this is my favorite area of the reading Big 5. I love asking for predictions and hearing what the students think will happen next. I feel that I have been doing a fairly good job of teaching comprehension strategies with my tutoring group thus far, so this chapter stood as reinforcement for some methods that I have been trying. In addition, I found a few other ways to test comprehension during our guided reading sessions.
4. Connecting the reading to you. Examples of your own experience.
One of the ways that I have been incorporating comprehension in to my tutoring group is having the students make daily sketches in their sketch book. I ask them to draw and make predictions every day on the read aloud or guided reading program. Also, I have them share their predictions with their shoulder partner before and during the reading. My other favorite part of comprehension is making inferences. This skill is not always easy to teach, as I think it just comes naturally in our heads many times. I find that I make inferences every day when I’m reading and just interacting with people. I taught my Reading and Language Arts formal observation on making inferences to 5th graders and it was a blast. One of the activities I had them do was pick a occupation from the phone book, make a help wanted ad with some details on the job, then have the other students infer what the job was. They had such a great time with this activity!
I love our idea of havign your students use sketch books to make predictions. I am sure they love doing that. I also thought the help wanted ads activity is absolutely wonderful. What a great way for them to practice making inferences!!
DeleteI also love the sketch book idea and have done a similar activity with my 1st grade tutor students. Making connections to prior knowledge is key to successfully comprehending what is read. We all know the pain of reading something that simply does not interest you and you have no prior exposure too. Figuring out how to find narrative story's that interests your student will greatly improve their comprehension skills.
DeleteCarissa,
DeleteThis is one of my favorite areas of the big 5 also. I agree that there are many strategies that this chapter discusses that really just come naturally most of the time. I found that many things that were discussed are strategies that I don’t really plan, but just really do them almost out of instinct. It amazes me that you can do something like that and not even realize that you are teaching a strategy in comprehension. For example, there is many times where I ask my students to look at the title and cover page and predict what they think the story is going to be about. It really is just one of those things that you do first without even really thinking about it. I liked reading about the activity with the ad that you presented to your students. I can see where that would have been fun for them. In my blog I was just wondering if an educator teaches comprehension based on the strategies that were discussed in the chapter and determines the comprehension skills that each student may be lacking, or is it just something that we teach as a whole group.
I really like your idea about making sketches in their sketch book for making predictions. I feel this also helps relate to student especially at a younger age when they really enjoy drawing instead of writing. Good idea, I think that I may use this soon.
DeleteHanna
This chapter shows the importance of comprehension and just how much goes into comprehending narrative texts. From the beginning it showed how the basics of decoding and vocabulary are crucial to comprehension and how struggling readers usually struggle with this because they have to work so hard with the decoding process. Fluency also plays a big role in comprehending, but it did seem as if it wasn't quite as important as I thought. There are many things students need to do before, during, and after readings to become proficient readers and comprehenders. Making inferences appeared to be one of the most important strategies in terms of comprehending. But there were many different strategies needed. Figure 8.1 showed just how many strategies go into comprehending.
ReplyDeleteThe interventions section had "loads" of strategies for this chapter. Many of them would work well with most elementary grades also. There were many strategies, such as: Alternative Writing, Story Lines, and all the strategies encouraging illustrations that would work great during tutoring session since they wouldn't take too long. As with all chapters this one had some great ideas for tutoring and small group interventions.
I do question one thing. What does it mean if children seem to comprehend well even if they are poor decoders? I have two tutoring students, one especially that lack decoding skills, but did great with the retelling for the diagnostic assessment. One of them can almost summarize the whole chapter of guided reading, even after not reading it for a few days. It seems as if these students are comprehending well though they struggle with decoding and fluency of reading. Also it said retellings isn't just about telling the story back, but doing it in sequence. During our diagnostic assessments we were not asked to check that. This makes me wonder how well they really did, according to the chapter on their comprehension. The chapter was very informative and had some good strategies. I'm noticing many strategies over and over again and can really see that they are important for teaching reading.
That is interesting Ryan, my students that can't decode can't comprehend very well. If your students are reading at their individual reading level they are not going to be at their frustration level. So maybe that would explain why they are able to comprehend because they are not at their frustration level. It is good to know that you have strength to lean on. It is hard when you have to take third graders and go back to basic phonics skills and they still struggle. I still think that fluency does play a larger role in comprehension though. I listen to the group read and when they blend the sentences together it changes the meaning so how could they comprehend the text that well.
DeleteChapter 8 is about comprehension of narrative text. In order to be able to comprehend what you are reading at a higher level you must have background knowledge, adequate vocabulary, and be motivated. In order for children to develop reading comprehension skills they have to be given the opportunity to read books that are at their reading level, is something that they are interested in , and allowed long periods of time to read independently. Comprehension of narrative texts requires that the reader to be able to use decoding and fluency skills, as well as an adequate vocabulary. The reader must be able to decode words in a quick manner. Even though a reader may be fluent this does not mean that they actually comprehend everything that they read. Having a large listening vocabulary is also very beneficial to comprehension. It is helpful for the students if the teacher discusses the topic of the story before reading and , as well as reviewing vocabulary that they will be reading in the text. There are several strategies that the reader can use before during and after they read the text. Predicting, setting a purpose, visualization, and drawing conclusions are just a few strategies a reader can use to help them with comprehension. This chapter has a bunch of great activities to do with students to help them with comprehension. One strategy I really liked is Paining Mental Pictures activity in which the students are read a story without being shown any pictures. Once the readings over the students share the mental pictures they got from the story then draw them out on paper. Finally at the end the students compare their pictures with the ones from the story. What fun! I am tutoring 1st grade students and I think that they would enjoy this activity very much.
ReplyDeleteShanna, I liked everything that you discussed about comprehension. I am tutoring a group of first grade students and this is what we are working on. They are all very fluent and have a big vocabulary however when asked what they read they couldn't retell the necessary key details from the story. I've noticed that when they are engaged and enjoying the story and we complete fun activities that relate to the story their level of comprehension increases dramatically. This is exactly what this chapter is talking about and it has some great activities that will help me in my sessions.
DeleteShanna, Painting mental pictures was one of my favorite activities as well. I think it would be very fun for students of any age and visualizing is one thing that stands out for me every time I read a book. There is nothing better or more rewarding than getting so involved in a book that you can picture and create images in your head, with the help of the author of course! Sharing their ideas with the other students is great for interpersonal interaction and speaking and listening skills. They could even compare and contrast their ideas.
DeleteChapter 8 is all about comprehension. Something I struggled with as a child, and even into adulthood. However, I've learned that in order to understand text you have to build background knowledge, have an adequate vocabulary, and have motivation. All of these components are built into our lesson plans therefore we should be hitting upon each of these components when teaching. In order for students to really build their reading and improve it they need to have the proper decoding skills to attack words, have good fluency, and also they need to be building their vocabulary. Some strategies for building comprehension that they book discusses is predicting, making inferences, setting a purpose, self-motivating, retelling, summarizing, sequencing events, and understanding purpose. When talking about assessments that book talks about the Accelerated Reader program which I really really like. The school that I am interning is has students complete this program and it's great and very individualized. All students are given a goal or number of points that they have to read within the month and they take tests over the books that they read on the computer. This helps teachers monitor their comprehension of books they read independently. At the end of the chapter as usual the book lists several activities to use with students to increase comprehension. I really liked the painting mental pictures activity where I would read a story to the students not showing them any pictures and then they have to draw a picture of the characters and setting as they see it without the pictures. I think that my group of tutoring kids would really enjoy this and they would come up with some really creative pictures.
ReplyDeleteKendra,
DeleteI also noticed similarities between our lesson plan templates and what the book says teachers need to do to build background knowledge. I definitely see the benefit of reminding/asking students to explain what they already know about a topic before introducing new information. I was thinking a lot about background knowledge today because teaching a group of kindergartners or first graders at a high-poverty school could require a teacher to spend extensive time building background knowledge. Many of these students do not have the vocabulary or the experiences to draw on to help them comprehend grade-level text. A good teacher will provide many vicarious experiences from which her students can learn.
Chapter 8 discussed how important comprehension is to reading and provided in-depth instructions for building comprehension. Proficient readers have skills that they use automatically, like inferring, predicting, self-monitoring, and visualizing. Struggling readers need direct instruction, usually through think-alouds, to help them learn and develop these skills. Strategies are divided into three categories: before, during, and after reading.
ReplyDeleteA crucial piece of information I remember from this chapter is that students need to become proficient in one comprehension strategy and be able to use it independently before they learn a new one. This seems to be a constant issue across curriculum for teachers – do I spend more time on fewer strategies or less time on each strategy so I can teach more of them? I can understand the pressure to teach kids as much as possible in the short time we have with them, but kids need extensive practice for strategies to become automatic.
I have had a heard time making it through these chapters lately because every paragraph reminds me of the kids I tutor. Then I start daydreaming about how this applies to my students and what I could do better for them. For example, the first reading skill the book talks about is decoding and how it helps readers learn to pronounce terms in their aural vocabulary. In the vocabulary section, the book again mentions recognizing words in a student’s listening vocabulary. One of my students has difficulties pronouncing words, like animal and piano. If she can’t pronounce a word correctly, how will she recognize it when she sees it in print? Also, we were reading a book with the phrase “might have been” in it. Every single time she came to the phrase, she pointed at the word might and read “might’ve” and then when she pointed to the word “have” she was stumped. We practiced it over and over and she could not make the connection that “might’ve” should be “might have.” I think she may benefit from some intensive instruction in sight word phrases.
I most enjoyed reading the section about visualizing. It was something I didn’t even realize that some people don’t know how to do. When I read, I rely on visualization to help my comprehension. Even when I read informational books like our class textbooks, I visual it in some way, like by imagining me teaching the information or seeing the qualities and characteristics of struggling readers in children I know. I enjoyed reading the sample about how the teacher asked the students what different things looked like in the story.
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ReplyDeleteThis chapter went into a lot of detail about comprehension for narrative text and ways to increase comprehension skills and strategies. There are fundamental skills that a student needs in order to comprehend text and those include decoding, fluency, and a large vocabulary. This chapter also broke down the comprehension strategies into before reading, during reading, and after reading strategies. I am most familiar with the before and after strategies such as predicting and retelling. The chapter also stressed the importance of teaching one comprehension strategy at a time and spending some quality time practicing the strategy before introducing others. I really appreciated figure 8.1 and the basic list of strategies for comprehension. This was a nice list that one could refer to often. I am most unfamiliar and have the most difficulty with comprehension strategies for during reading. In terms of personal use, it comes so naturally that I don’t think about doing these things and when I am engrossed in a good book I don’t feel like I stop to think, but I just keep reading and can’t wait to find out what will happen next. I know I am subconsciously using comprehension strategies, but I need to find ways to be better at getting students to understand these skills. I thought the section on critical literacy was very good and helped me to understand their importance. I also thought the connections to other subjects were very good and appreciated how to use these strategies for other texts and subjects such as science and social studies. I love bringing in literature with other subjects and often times it seems we can forget to do that. My favorite intervention strategies included the teacher-made audiobooks and painting mental pictures. I think it would be a lot of fun to create audio books for my students because I really enjoy doing read alouds. I also love the idea of students sharing their mental images of the story and then creating illustrations. I always get such vivid pictures in my head when I read, and it makes me think of the disappointment I always feel when the book is turned into a movie. Nothing can ever compare to the images you create in your mind and nothing can ever top your own imagination. I want students to feel and understand this!
ReplyDeleteThis chapter takes an in-depth look at comprehension of a narrative text. This chapter expressed the importance of vocabulary, prior knowledge, reading fluency and decoding skills as valuable aspects of the complex comprehension process. I have always been amazed that my son’s comprehension is so advanced since his reading level is about two grades behind his peers. I am now aware that comprehension skills require a higher level of thinking and it makes more since to me. My son is very intelligent and can remember even the littlest detail if giving to him in a way that he can connect it to his prior knowledge.
ReplyDeleteFor example he tried memorizing his times tables for months with flash cards and still could not consistently give you the answer for anyone them. Now he has been working on “times tales” and in 1 month has half of them memorized. This is possible because times tales makes a story out of each of the facts. Ashton remember s the story instantly when he sees the multiplication fact. by making a connection to his prior knowledge he was able to memorize something that had been all but impossible for him.
Students need to be able to make this type of connection when they are reading so that they can increase their comprehension ability. Devries chapter 8 gave us many strategies to help student with their comprehension skills. Students need to learn to stop and think about what they are reading to help them make the connection necessary to comprehend what they are reading.
In my internship class a student was reading a book and ran into a word that she did not know what it meant and after the first chapter she went to the teacher saying she wanted to switch books because the one she had was boring. The teacher questioned her and found out that she did not understand the text because of not understanding what this word was. She then explained its meaning to the student and it was like a switch being turned on. She all the student “got it” and wanted t continue with the book.
I think this sis a prime example of just how important key vocabulary is in these primary grades. If they don’t understand what they are reading how can we expect them to comprehend it? I think that it is vital for all teachers to press the importance of key vocabulary and how a student can find out a words meaning if they do not already know what a word means.
I did not know they had stories for times tables. I am going to check it out. What a great way to integrate reading into math. I would love to teach third grade math. I was thinking more along the lines of integrating music into the curriculum so they could learn a song for each set. Like you, I knew vocabulary was very important, but now it is a priority.
DeleteChapter eight was about comprehension. The reason we read is for understandiing. Therefore, it is very important that we help those struggling readers by giving them strategies that they can use to become great readers able to comprehend what they are reading. Some strategies mentioned are: drawing inferences, predicting, self-monitoring, retelling and summarizing, drawing conclusions, activating prior knowledge, using knowledge of text structures and visualizing before, during and after reading. One warning DeVries gives is never to teach skills in isolation because even older students cannot transfer strategies taught in isolation to reading full texts (180). I also like the analogy of a car to a reader. We can’t expect a car to run without tires, an engine, a steering wheel or a chassis. We cannot expect readers to read without decoding skills, fluency skills, and adequate vocabulary. In this chapter all of the strategies are discussed individually and then there are a number of ways we can assess if our students truly comprehend what they are reading. This information is on page 190-193. The intervention section is always my favorite because it gives practical hands-on activities to help our students. One of my favorites is "Story Lines" on page 200.
ReplyDeleteI do not have any questions or contradictions from the reading.
I am using the “Story Lines” activity with my tutoring group this week. I think it will work really well with our lesson. I will read them a story and then we will cooperatively write a story of our own using some of the same vocabulary words in the read aloud. I have written the words on cards and I will go over them prior to the read aloud. This helps them by using the new vocabulary and they become authors and illustrators. We will be using many of our Rebecca Sitton words as well that are on our word wall. This section also talks about teacher-made audio books. I decided to give it a try and I made some audio books for my group to listen to while I do my summatives. They can go to different stations while I am testing others. They also have the option of drawing their favorite part of the story or going to a different station. The thing I love about this text is that there are so many ideas, but sadly too little time. I also loved the websites on page 213. They are super resources. Be sure to check it out each of them if you haven’t already. You will love them. My FAVORITE one is www.storyonline.net where celebrities read books aloud. I hope to have time to do the Rainbow Fish story before our time is up. I will let them color die cut fish and attach sparkly jewel stones to it that I had left over from a summer project. Like I said, so much to do and so little time! Have a great week!
I used something very similar to "story lines" with my students a few weeks ago when our lesson was over and we were waiting for their parents to arrive to get them. I wrote the vocabulary words on the board and had them verbally tell me a story about themselves using the words. I crossed out each word as they used it. The boys were cracking up and laughing the whole time! I think part of what made it fun for them was that there was no chance of failure for them as they were not writing anything down and did not have to spell anything. They did great.
DeleteAlso - I found the site you mentioned but it is storylineonline.net and it is GREAT! I really liked it, thanks for sharing.
One thing that you might do is have your students do the story lines activity with one of the books from storylineonline.net and then have them do the retelling with puppets on page 210. It sounds fun and depending on the age of your students, they might really enjoy it.
I absolutely love learning about comprehension and the role that it plays in the big 5. To be honest I was really disappointed at first when my fourth grade students that I am now tutoring scored lower in the Phonics and Phonemic Awareness area of reading, because I really wanted to create instruction using comprehension skills. I enjoyed reading about the before, during, and after strategies for comprehension that were discussed in this chapter. I like that fact that they not only talked about the role that comprehension before, during, and after plays in comprehension, but they also gave scenarios that show you the roles as an educator. My favorite part of the reading in this chapter was the visualization. The chapter says that good readers will be able to visualize what they are reading. I know when I am reading a book if I cannot put myself into the characters it is really hard for me to keep my interest in the story. Last summer I read “The Hunger Games” series. I was so into that series of books and the characters that I found myself incredibly disappointed when I went to see the movie. I think that I enjoyed the visualization most because I am also a very visual learner, and I do have a tendency to use this type of teaching method in many of the lessons that I teach. However, going back to the role that comprehension plays in the big 5, I understand that in order for my students to get to this part of reading they must first grasp the phonics and phonemic awareness skills that they lack. The chapter talks about the importance of modeling strategies that are used in instruction. I know many times in my lessons I model reading strategies. I think this is an important strategy to use in helping your students become good readers. The end of the chapter used many activity strategies that can help with comprehension. I think that different graphic organizers are one of the best instructional strategies for me. In knowing that there are so many strategies for comprehension, such as main idea, predicting, making inferences, setting a purpose, visualization, conclusions, and many more, how does an educator determine which part of comprehension a student is lacking in? I guess that before I read this chapter I thought comprehension was basically one strategy. I didn’t realize all of the strategies that came along with comprehension. I am just wondering in a whole reading group does a teacher work on the same comprehension strategies, or do students need to be divided into different groups based on the strategy that they may be lacking? Although my content focus for reading in this course has been phonics, I have also added fluency and comprehension into my lessons through guided reading and read aloud instruction. Many of the strategies that were discussed in this chapter I have added into my lessons. Although, there are many that I haven’t and definitely will use them in the future.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, I also enjoy activities related to comprehension. Comprehension was also something I was interested in focusing on but my students really needed help with phonics. It is so important that students grasp the basic concepts like phonics and phonemic awareness and your blog really emphasized this. I thought you provided a great example of how books are much better then movies because of the details that cannot be added to the movie. I am often disappointed in watching the movie after reading the book.
DeleteBlog Chapter 8
ReplyDeleteZoë Greenemeyer
Comprehension is the main purpose of reading but there are students who are not able to comprehend what they read. Comprehension requires higher-level thinking skills and for narrative text it is the ability encode and retrieve the basic building blocks of sentences and meaning from the text and align this with scenes and stories from the text. There are fundamental skills that readers need to have to comprehend text; they are decoding skills, fluency, skills, and an adequate vocabulary. Comprehension strategies that take affect prior to reading include predicting and setting a purpose. During reading strategies include making inferences, self-monitoring, visualizing, and connecting prior knowledge to text. After reading strategies include retelling, drawing conclusions, and elaborating. The first grade students that I am tutoring are learning comprehension through the guided reading activities I have planned. I am focusing my lesson on phonics but I feel this will also impact their comprehension level. The one strategy I really found valuable was the activity pairing nonfiction and fiction texts. From my observation in the classroom I found that I do not see as much nonfiction text being used.
Zoe- I was a bit shocked at all of the strategies that help a reader comprehend what they are reading before, during, and after the piece. As future teachers, we have seen demonstrated by other teachers and may have done these strategies ourselves (such as retelling or predicting), but I had no idea that these were aiding in a readers comprehension. From this chapter I will taking away the important before, during, and after strategies for comprehension and know why I am doing them.
DeleteChapter 8 Blog – Hanna Haraughty
ReplyDeleteChapter 8 explains about comprehension of narrative text. We now know that comprehension is the main purpose of reading. There are many readers who struggle that cannot comprehend what they are reading. The text states that “in the case of narrative text, it is based on the ability to encode and retrieve the basic building blocks of sentences and relate the meaning within them to scenes and stories from a text.” (Pg. 179) In order to comprehend text readers should be able to make predictions, draw conclusions, retell the story, and make inferences. Readers need to be able to read a story and relate the story to any background knowledge that they can connect to. There are many things to do before reading to enhance the reader’s comprehension. Such activities include making predictions and setting a purpose. After reading, students can retell the story and realize the author’s intent.
I really like how this chapter broke down what to do before, during and after reading that will enhance a student’s comprehension skills. I will be using these during tutoring in the future. From personal experience I have noticed lately that my second grade students are starting to really work on comprehension skills. According to our book this seems a little early to really focus on this skill. I feel that more phonics needs to be emphasized. I don’t have any questions with this chapter and just feel that there was many scaffold items that can be used in my tutoring sessions.
I also really like the activity retelling with puppets. I feel that this will allow student to have a visual understanding of the text instead of relying solely on the student’s visuals of the story. There were many other activities that can be used in the future to enhance student’s comprehension skills. I feel that by reading this chapter I am more aware of what I should be doing and looking for as I tutor.
Hanna,
DeleteI enjoyed reading your thoughts about chapter 8. Like you I found it very helpful that DeVries chunked out what to do prior, during, and after when using narrative texts. I found it nice to hear you plan to use them for tutoring in the future. I love the activities and the information I have found in this text. This has to be one of my favorite textbooks. I usually do not align favorite and textbook in the same sentence. It was just nice to read someone else is liking the reading and benefiting from it.
Chapter 8 covers the comprehension of narrative text. This was a great time for me to read this chapter and become familiar with the components needed to teach comprehension of narrative text. I used a narrative text as my guided reading text this week and the week prior.
ReplyDeleteThe students were able to identify the book as a narrative. The book was formatted in days from the narrator's journal. On page 183 the DeVries talks about setting a purpose which is exactly what I had to do prior to introducing the narrative text. I had to set the tone and draw on background knowledge. The book was about a girl's connection to a horse. We began by talking about horses. Actually both students had a horse of their own. This chapter walks an educator through the steps needed to make narrative text useful in teaching comprehension. For a reader to comprehend what they are reading they have to be able to use the all the skills or parts or reading and put them together. DeVries compares comprehension to a car and it's parts. The reader has to be able to decode, read fluently, and recognize vocabulary to focus on the underlining purpose of what they are reading. I enjoyed all the different ideas and strategies to engage students in prior to actually reading the text. All of these ideas would be wonderful anticipatory sets.
Another useful tool chapter 8 offered was the numerous assessments that can be used as comprehension check for narrative texts. The graphic organizer found on page 202 is a one I plan to use in my lesson plan 11 since I am using another narrative text. Again the activities continue to be one of my favorite aspects of this textbook because it allows me to connect on the information I read in the chapters and provides me with a visual to implement in my lessons. Has anyone else been using the activities from the DeVries text?
Jade- I hadn't thought about setting a purpose for reading before reading this chapter. It makes sense though that the student needs to know why is it we are reading this story or piece of text. Is it for enjoyment? Is it to find out who, what, when, where, and why? Is it for information? I really learned that when the reader knows the purpose they can better understand what it is they need to take away from the piece they are reading.
DeleteI also really liked the graphic organizer on page 202. This organizer could be used with several types of books! I like that graphic organizers give clear visually help for a students to organize their thoughts.
DeleteThis week for Chapter 8 we learn about comprehension of narrative text. Comprehending the material you are reading is the main purpose of reading. However, when a child struggles to read the text there is not much comprehending going on. **I see this with my tutoring students. They are so consumed with decoding each sound of every single word, when they come to the end of the page and I ask questions to see what they understood, they don’t have a clue as to what the passage was about that they just read.**
ReplyDeleteThere are fundamental skills that are needed in order to comprehend what you are reading. The first skill a reader needs for comprehension is decoding skills so that they can recognize familiar words automatically so time isn’t wasted on trying to sound out each and every letter. The reader needs that ability to “hunk and chunk” parts of words together in order to decode unfamiliar words quickly. **This is truly a skill that both of my girls I am tutoring really need work on. They are both so quick to begin to sound out each and every syllable that it is affecting all other skills needed for comprehension as well as the comprehension itself. The second skill for comprehension is fluency. The reader needs to be able to automatically and accurately recognize a large bank of words so they can read at an appropriate rate. By not stumbling over unfamiliar words, they can read fluently so that they are able to understand what it is that they are reading. **One of the best things I have learned in this class is that just because a child can read fluently doesn’t mean they are comprehending what they are reading. ** The third skill a reader needs for comprehension is an adequate vocabulary. This whole section had my true attention. First, I didn’t realize that if a reader had a large listening vocabulary when they come to an unknown word they need to decode they are better able to recognize and grasp its meaning more quickly. I wish every parent could read this sentence as proof of just one reason it is so great to read to our children!!! As a parent myself, I love to read and have passed that along to both of my children. My goodness, I read children stories to them when they were still in my belly. I never knew that by reading to them all of the years before they began reading that I was building a listening vocabulary in them to help them when they became a reader. I think that this section also really had me connect my class text to what we are learning in our lectures from Mrs. Stoppel. We are doing the Mastery Word Learning with our students to make them more likely to recognize these words and add them to their vocabulary word banks and our text makes this same connection by saying, “when introducing each new word, write it on the board and have students say it so they are more likely to recognize the word in text.” (continued on next comment)
Besides needing skills for comprehension, there are also many strategies that will support reading comprehension. Our book talks about before, during, and after reading strategies. “Before” reading, predicting is a great higher-level thinking skill for a reader. Predicting has the reader using background knowledge, supply details, and then see if their prediction is correct. Also setting a purpose is an important before reading strategy. When it comes to narrative text, the purpose is to find out who did what, when, where, and why. The “during” reading strategies are to make an inferences. The reader goes through processes of judging, concluding, or reasoning, indirectly from the information that is available that far in the story. The reader can self-monitor to see if what they are reading sounds right, looks right, and makes sense. **I would like to know if there is a certain age that this becomes more evident and if this is a skill that is taught in school and at what level. The girls that I tutor do not have this self-monitoring strategy at all. They either guess or sound a word out and just keep going. They don’t stop to see if what they are saying looks like the word they were trying to decode, if it makes sense in the sentence or if it sounds right.** Visualizing the events in the story is another great strategy that is necessary for comprehension. Connecting prior knowledge to text is also very important for comprehension.
DeleteThe “after” reading strategies are just as important for comprehension. Retelling the story elements, drawing conclusions, and elaborating on the author’s intent are all strategies that will help the reader with comprehension. **I liked the puppets that Mrs. Stoppel showed in one of her lectures this week. What a great way to get students to do these before, during, and after strategies for comprehension! I loved them and hope if I get a younger grade to incorporate activities like these puppets in my lessons.**
As we have discussed before, the assessments (both informal and formal) are beneficial to the teachers because not only can they see how the students are doing with their lesson and if they need to re-teach, they can also observe what readers do during the reading process. This enables the teacher to meet each individual student on their own level. Again, this chapter is full of strategies and activities that can be used not only for our tutoring students, but also in our future classrooms.
Reading comprehension is something that I struggle with on a regular basis. I read things then realize that I have forgotten what I have just read. Typically it is when I am tired, or overwhelmed, or distracted by one of my children. This being said I read this chapter with a touch of empathy for individuals who struggle with this on a daily basis. I was also, of course, thinking of my students and their ongoing struggle with comprehension. There were many parts of this chapter that were new or newly rediscovered to me. I already understood the importance of comprehension in being a successful reader. Some of the strategies are ones that I use with my students (predicting is the one I tent to use a lot, Dr. W in her Read Alouds in class got me into doing this) as well as visualizing and connecting to prior knowledge. There are some things that I have tried that have not works well for me and that it the visualizing. Some of this is because my students have a hard time with literal vs figurative language. They are not able to connect their real world knowledge to the text that they are reading and they have a very hard time concentrating on at grade level writing. This being said, they are very imaginative and love to draw conclusions about what might happen and to retell the parts that they do remember.
ReplyDeleteOne question of have from the text is that when re-telling story elements, my students often will add in parts from other stories. I’m always torn when this happens because they are actually remembering a part of a story but the meshing of several together is not what I’m aiming at. My question her is what should I do when this happens? Any redirection suggestions? I did the Where, Who, When and Did What cards with them already and it has not helped them much. I would love some more guidance.
Activities that I want to do with my students soon are the pairing of text and the repeated interactive read aloud (I’ve already got this planned for next week!) I loved most of the suggestions at the end of the chapter but I’m going to try the text mapping as it seemed like it would be another way of doing the Where, Who, When and Did What cards.
I should also mention that I really liked that the text broke the strategies up into before, during, and after reading strategies. I felt that this will be particularly helpful to me when writing my lesson plans.
DeleteOne suggestion I would have for retelling a story is to have the students draw and write about what happened in the story! I have seen this used in a classroom before and it worked great!
DeleteChapter 8 was about comprehension of narrative text. I am glad that I read this chapter because my content focus for my reading group is comprehension. This chapter gave strategies for before reading. These include predicting and setting a purpose. Also, it gave strategies for during reading. These strategies included making inferences, self monitoring, visualizing, and connecting prior knowledge to the text. Some after reading strategies that were suggested in this chapter were retelling story elements, drawing conclusions and elaborating on author's intent. These strategies are all helpful when focusing on comprehension.
ReplyDeleteOne question I have is what if a student lack common prior knowledge. What strategies could a teacher use to help this student.
This chapter made me realize that there is a lot to comprehension. Comprehension is an important part of reading. I always thought there was only so many ways to help students with comprehension. After reading this chapter I have a lot of ideas to try. I really liked figure 8.1, which listed strategies for comprehension.
For my tutoring group I have been focusing on comprehension. One strategy that I have been using is having my students retell the story after we are done reading it. Since reading this chapter I will also try to use some before reading strategies to further help my students.
I have heard alot in my internship about Self-Monitoring and Connecting prior knowledge so it was really interesting to read about it in the text and be able to put the pieces together.
DeleteI like that you found this chapter to be so beneficial to your tutoring group! I think it is important that you implement more than one strategy to help students with comprehension. Using before reading strategies is a great way to do this! I can remember doing things like this when I was a young student. They always had us predict what we would be reading about. Also, we would use predictions as we would read. Looking back, this was a great way for them to check for comprehension as well as make predictions.
DeleteAs for your question, I am not real sure of one way to help a student who does not have prior knowledge. One thing you could do is give a quick explanation of what your anticipatory set is about. Also, you can use props or use technology tools to try to enhance your anticipatory set. The more tools you use, the better chance they will have of recalling prior knowledge. However, I feel like you may have to modify to fit the needs depending on what it is you are doing and the student.
I liked the quote on the chapter cover page… Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome obstacles to learning- Eugene S. Wilson (chapter 8). I know how to get struggling readers to be curious through doing interest inventories to find out what they love, what they do, where they love to go. My question however, is how do you get them to be resolute, especially if you have a student that is 4 grade levels behind? I use positive reinforcement but do you have any other ideas?
ReplyDeleteChapter 8 talks about comprehension of narrative text through the use of strategies such as predicting, purpose of setting, making inferences, self-monitoring, visualizing, prior knowledge, and retelling. I had not really thought about discussing the purpose of a story until a couple of videos ago when Mrs. Stoppel talked about it. So I tried to incorporate it into my guided reading last week. The only student that really understood the purpose was the higher leveled reader in the group but she is still really low. I think though if I ask every time from now on it will help the others to be thinking about it during and after the reading.
Some of the reading skills students need to be good at comprehension are good decoding skills and fluency. That is why it is so important to pick the appropriate leveled text. I did a running record with my students at the beginning to find their levels. I have found that a little difficult to pick reading texts since one of my students is reading at an E and the higher leveled student is reading at an H level. The third student reads at F so that is where we usually are in our reading choices but the lower student still has trouble decoding.
After reading about visualizing in the chapter and hearing Mrs. Stoppel talk about students closing their eyes during reading and then having them describe what they saw, I am itching to do it with the group this week. I think the girl with be accurate but I am curious about the other students.
Didn’t you just love the Sad Story Face figure 8.2! If my focus where on comprehension I would be doing a lot of story mapping. However, if I had more time I would throw some in just for more practice with comprehension. The little girl in my group really gets into the stories I read. This is a great sign; she is engrossed and reads a lot so I feel she is on the verge of blossoming as a reader.
My students and the entire school in fact, take SRI which is discussed on page 191 under Computer programs as assessment tools. I like that I can read a book or they can, and then they can go to the computer and take SRI test over the book. This allows me to check for comprehension. The only problem I have seen with this is that students that are struggling readers can’t read the test. The school requires each grade to acquire so many SRI points a quarter and it is 10% of their reading grade. Some teachers choose to read the test to them to see if they comprehend the books they are reading or having read to them. How do you guys feel about that?
The 5th grade students I am working lacked motivation to finish a book when we started. I tried to help motivate them by giving them the option of the book. Also, we journal and I try to make the journals a personal connection. For example, our book, Theodore Boone, states that Theo knows he wants to be a lawyer when he grows up and what he will need to do to get there. I had the students journal about the profession they would like to be in, who or what inspired them to be that, and what it would take to get there (schooling, etc). So far, my students have become engrossed in the book and have asked if we can just read the entire class period! It is a huge improvement.
DeleteI do not believe I had heard of the Scholastic Reading Inventory program. Of course, I have heard of Scholastic books and quiet possibly have taken one of these tests. The school I am in does AR and this is what I grew up with. I feel that the teachers should read the test to the student to check for comprehension as long as the grade goes only towards comprehension, if that makes sense. I think it is good that it should apply towards the grade but I feel that the teacher should have flexibility in the amount of percent of their grade. As we all know, every student is different and teachers should be able to grade accordingly.
Chapter 8 was about Comprehension. I really enjoyed reading this chapter because I see in my other internships especially in Social Studies that the students have a hard time retelling what they just read five minutes ago. The beginning of the chapter discusses Strategies for Reading Comprehension such as predicting. I really like using Predicting because I think it puts a question or idea in the students head that they themselves want to find out and they are that much more interested in the reading. That can also go along with setting a purpose which is listed in the text as well. There are also during reading strategies that the text gives examples for such as self-monitoring, visualizing, connecting prior knowledge, etc. I have used visualizing in some of my lessons just so that I can make sure the students are getting something from the reading. I also really like the technique of self-monitoring. I have seen some teachers use this technique especially in the older grades and it really seems to work. It is a great way to teach them to be responsible for themselves and then it also teaches them to stay on task. The after reading strategies that the text listed were retelling, drawing conclusions, elaborating etc. I really like retelling and drawing conclusions because you can do this at any age. The students are able to retell information they remember and whether it is a random fact or a vital piece of information atleast they are remembering and able to tell you about it. The strategies and activities section always has a lot of great ideas and suggestions to use. One of the activities that I liked was the Repeated Read Aloud. I have done this in some of my other internships and it seems to work because they hear the information multiple different times and they are able to retell what they know. I also really like the Strategy to use before Reading called Alternate Writing. I love that it integrates writing and reading and I have been trying to do that with my kids to keep their writing skills up and to see if it helps with remembering.
ReplyDeleteChapter eight was over comprehension. The book identified comprehension as the main purpose of reading. I agree with the book. Yet, I am surprised at the number of young readers who struggle with reading. I feel like comprehension plays a big part in a lot of students that do not enjoy reading. Figure 8.1 was very helpful for me. It was over the many reading strategies for comprehension. Some of these include finding the main idea, predicting, making inferences, and setting a purpose. The book also mentioned that all of these strategies are needed by the reader. Each strategy depends on the others and all strategies must work for the reader to be able to comprehend what it is they are reading. I also like the section that talked about making inferences when reading. This is a very important strategy for comprehension. To make inferences means to judge, conclude, or reason. This ties in a lot to connecting prior knowledge to the story. The last thing I want to mention in this section is the section over re-telling. I do a lot of re-telling in my tutoring groups. However, I have not been going as in-depth as I should when I have my students re-tell a story. I usually just have them cover the man points. Now, I have a better understanding of what to look for and ask students when I have them re-tell a story.
ReplyDeleteI can relate to a lot from the reading. I really liked the section about assessments, because I got a lot of different ideas on how to assess comprehension. In all of my read alouds during my tutoring sessions, I have student re-tell the story. However, like I previously mentioned, I have not been going as in-depth as I should. Also, I can relate to assessing a child’s comprehension from the assessments I gave at the beginning of the year. Another thing that comes to mind is Dr. Walizer’s class. She did read-alouds throughout the semester and she was constantly checking for comprehension throughout the book in many ways.
This chapter made it very clear to me how teaching comprehension strategies can directly enhance children’s reading comprehension. I think that teachers need to have a lot of “tools” to help students learn how to better comprehend a reading passage. I do not have a lot of questions about the chapter. However, after reading about all of the ways to teach comprehension strategies, I got to wondering if one way works better than all the others. I understand that effective teachers need to know multiple ways, but does one stand out and work better than others?
Jarett,
DeleteI agree with you. I like the asessment examples as well in the textbook. It can be difficult at times to think of assessments that will truely evaluation the studnets understanding of the material so this is a great place for me to start off with. I have the students in my tutoring class tell what happened last time in the story and what tehy think will happen next.This putting the material in their own words so I can see if they are on the right track.
1. Analysis of the reading/issue.
ReplyDeleteChapter eight of the textbook Literacy Assessment & Intervention by B. Devries discusses how to teach students to comprehend narrative text (Devries, 178- 214). There are so much skills that goes into comprehension of text. The students must use many skills to decode words and then the meaning of the words to truly understand the text. As the textbook mentions people must learn to read “critical level” (Devries, 179). These reading skills that are mentioned in the textbook are “decoding, fluency and vocabulary” (Devries, 181- 181). The textbook also mentions reading comprehension strategies that include “predicting, setting a purpose, making inferences, self-monitoring, visualizing, connecting prior knowledge to the text, literacy/world knowledge or text-to-text connections, retelling story elements, drawing conclusions and elaborating on the authors intent” (Devries, 181-188).
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue.
None at this time
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently?
I really liked the assessments that are mentioned in this chapter of the textbook on pages 190-193. Assessments for comprehension can sometimes be difficult because the student must show that they truly grasp the material in the text. The students cannot simply recite the story back to the teacher they must give a true explanation of the text in their own way which requires a higher level of thinking.
4. Connecting the reading to you. Examples of your own experience.
When thinking about my own experience with comprehension I remember that comprehending text was always very difficult for me. I always thought it was easy for me to understand the text if I would search for meaning in the text. For example if the teacher would give me a reason for reading the text instead of just say “Please read page___ so we can discuss.” I could not do this because I did not understand what we would be discussing. I think that students need to be told the meaning and purpose for activities that they do in class.
I was horrible at comprehension also, so your idea of giving meaning to the reading will help me to educate the students that struggle just as I did - thanks!!
DeleteThe first thing that a caught my attention is that Mr. Bradley focused his attention within a novel that the students could relate to. Just as we have been discussing in our lectures, this is vital to students comprehending the text. Another thing that we have been talking about this semester is the use of poetry. I liked seeing the example of how Mr. Bradley used songs/poetry in a higher level of elementary. Having students look at lyrics and listen to them helps students relate to the content once again. I like the use of lyrics and poetry because it is often stated in a way that students don’t usually hear it. Most of the time, metaphors, similes, or other figurative speech is used.
ReplyDeleteThis chapter really breaks down the different types of comprehension and provides many, many different ways to assess and build this skill. One of the parts of the chapter that I found most beneficial was on page 194. It tells us to teach in context and use simple, easy-level reading material. I agree with this but, it reminds me of one of our lectures this week that talked about the level of our of textbooks decreasing. I wonder if the authors and producers of our textbooks were trying to make the levels of our textbooks apply to more of the median reading level in our classrooms. I do think that children benefit more when they can understand the text but, sometimes I think our students need to become familiar with harder texts before they begin to push themselves. I’m not sure how regularly this should be done though. It is something I would like to explore more.
I really, really like the idea of pairing nonfiction and fiction texts. I think students can really relate when they can read facts about a situation and imagine how life would be in a different setting. This is the way I learned the most as a child and still do. It also gave great ideas of book pairings to use. “And This is the Rest of the Story” is a great activity that I think will really appeal to students. I am going to try to implement this into my tutoring session but I feel as though I am running out of sessions to try everything I would like!
Hannah, I also liked the idea of pairing nonfiction and fiction texts. This strategy could be very helpful to many students!
DeleteChapter 8 Blog ~
ReplyDelete1. Analysis of the reading/issue. This chapter discussed comprehension in depth. Early in the chapter the text stated that research has shown that the reader must draw conclusions, inferences, predict self-monitor, retell and summarize, draw conclusions, activate prior knowledge, use text structures and visualize before, during and after reading. The text discussed the importance of decoding and having the ability to decode unfamiliar words. The paragraph on fluency pointed out that just because a reader can read about 75 wpm at a 98% accuracy does not mean that the reader is comprehending what was read. Vocaubulary was also discussed as a critical part of comprehension. The text reminded us to discuss the text before having the students read. Predicting was brought to attention as a higher level strategy. The book stated that good readers will be able to make predictions automatically, while a struggling reader will not attempt it! The chapter went on to discuss all the strategies we will use to assist our readers with comprehension.
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue. The question I had was when should a teacher began teaching comprehension, but Ms. Stoppel answered that for me in the recording!
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? Comprehension can make or break a reader! It is so important that we address all of the topics in the text to ensure that we are meeting all of the needs of our students.
4. Connecting the reading to you. Examples of your own experience. As a student, I was and still am to some extent horrible at comprehension. I know first hand how frustrating it is not to remember what you have read or how to put the information requested by a teacher on a test.
Thank you all for your great chapter posts and replies to your classmates.
ReplyDeleteChrista