growing your own practice

Staying Current with Great Literature

I need to make a considered effort to stay current on all the new and wonderful children’s literature being released. It can be hard when you have many things to complete each day, week, month, and year as an educator, and then you need to find time to relax and take care of your family and friends.

I am lucky because I find reading and losing myself in a book relaxing and invigorating.

If you can find the time, many awesome books are out there. You can do a search and find many books on Juneteenth. How exciting is this for our young kids and adults! Juneteenth

Places like GoodReads and other book recommendation sites are very helpful for this.

We also have people like Colby Sharp who share great books they use in their classrooms. Checkout his YouTube channel. Colby Sharp

Checkout his list of great 2024 books: https://www.mrcolbysharp.com/2024

The International Literacy Association (ILA) announced their winners of the ILA 2024 Children’s and Young Adult Book Awards, a program that highlights new authors who have published only their first or second book and already show exceptional promise in the literary world.

This year’s winners are as follows:

Primary Fiction

Winner: Ruth Whiting for Lonely Bird (Candlewick)
Honor: Kevin Johnson for Cape (Macmillan)

Primary Nonfiction

Winner: Jessica Lanan for Jumper: A Day in the Life of a Backyard Jumping Spider (Macmillan)
Honor: Shannon Earle for The Penguin of Ilha Grande: From Animal Rescue to Extraordinary Friendship (Charlesbridge)

Intermediate Fiction

Winner: Zach Weinersmith for Bea Wolf (Macmillan)
Honor: Malia Maunakea for Lei and the Fire Goddess (Penguin)

Intermediate Nonfiction

Winner: Willie Mae Brown for My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement (Macmillan)
Honor: Katharina Weiss-Tuider for Mission: Arctic: A Scientific Adventure to a Changing North Pole (Greystone Kids)

Young Adult Fiction

Winner: Angeline Boulley for Warrior Girl Unearthed (Macmillan)
Honor: Ari Tison for Saints of the Household (Macmillan)

Young Adult Nonfiction

Winner: Sarah Myer for Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story (Macmillan)
Honor: Monica Edinger and Lesley Younge for Nearer My Freedom: The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano by Himself (Lerner)

More information about this year’s selections can be found in ILA’s Literacy Now blog coverage.

Congratulations to the winning authors!

Blending Practice

Once students learn letter sounds, they need lots of practice blending words together. There are a few different ways you can give this practice.

There are two main things that can make blending difficult for some children: auditory processing weakness and short-term memory weakness. You must ensure students are automatic with letter sounds as well. Often, times students are not automatic enough with some sounds, and it slows them down, and they are not hearing the blended word. You should not be discouraged from working with students on blending if they do not know all letters and sounds, however. It is our job to know the letters and sounds we have taught and that each student has internalized. Hold students accountable for what they know. Work with those sounds when practicing blending, while pushing them forward.

When working with readers on blending, you need to keep a few things in mind. Recognize that some sounds are continuous sounds while others are stop sounds. When students recognize this after modeling and discussion, it helps them fluently blend words.

When introducing CVC words to beginning readers, make sure to do so by modeling how to say the words without completely stopping between sounds. We have to make certain that our kids understand that the individual sounds in words blend together. This is also where Set For Variability comes into play. I discussed this in my last blog post.

One strategy that I have found helpful when a student is struggling with blending is teaching them to blend the first two sounds in a word together. This works with CVC words and words with blends and digraphs. The kids who have processing issues often mix up the last sound. Blending the first two sounds together helps alleviate some of the cognitive load. It also activates their word knowledge causing the brain to start making connections with possible words students have in their oral vocabulary and or reading and writing memories.

This can also make easier transitions when working with word chunks and words that rhyme. Our brain is always trying to make meaning and does so when learning to read by recognizing meaningful letter strings and chunks contained in words that can help us understand their meanings.

I have linked a blog post from Burkins & Yates discussing some other great things to keep in mind when teaching blending.

7 Ways to Use Our Decodable Word Lists and Sentences (Part 2)

Enjoy, they offer some great ideas!

Troy

Set For Variability

You may have been hearing the term set for variability being used lately. It is a term often talked about within the science of reading movement. Research discussing Set for variability has been out for a while.

Set for variability refers to the ability to take an approximation error of a word and fix it into the correct word. Some are now labeling it as a strategy to help solve irregular words. It is more of a process readers must be able to perform. For Set for variability to be successful, a child must have phonemic awareness, and letter-sound knowledge, be able to decode and blend, and have a representation of the target word in her oral vocabulary (see Elbro, de Jong, Houter, D., & Nielsen, 2012).

It also requires self-monitoring skills. Readers must be willing to do some self-teaching and take a leap, trying out the word in a slightly different way.

It involves the manipulation of sounds, adjusting the mispronunciation into a word they have heard that makes sense of the sentence. Notice how making meaning never goes away. Our brains naturally try to find meaning.

Be aware that too much phonics and exposure to 100% decodable books will not allow students to use the process of Set for variability. Readers have to be exposed to words they cannot sound out early on. Not just High-Frequency words either. They must learn to play around with sounds in words and change mispronunciations into meaningful words.

Here are a few helpful ideas to set your students up to learn this process.

As teachers, we have to coach kids into listening and switching the sound they say to something that gives the word meaning and sounds like a word they know and have heard

We can use phrases like “What else could it be” (Marnie Ginsberg)
Try it again

In their book Shifting the Balance, Burkins & Yates created a charge to help us teach kids to be flexible. I have provided a snapshot of it.

Help students use it with irregularly spelled High-Frequency words.

Words like: what, saw, was

I see 1st-grade readers try sounding out the word “what” all the time and then self-correcting after a brief pause, an example of students using Set for variability.

I recently worked with a struggling 3rd grader who got stuck on the word “tube.” First, he decoded it perfectly, but with a short u sound. I asked him to try again and pointed to the e. He perfectly sounded it out again with the u saying its name. The long u sound is tricky, however, and it often does not perfectly say its name. I had to help him work through this. He was frustrated because he was following the rules he had been taught, and it was not working. I helped him use meaning and structure to make a leap to the correctly pronounced word.

A short a sound is often tricky for kids first learning short vowels. Think about the words am, ran, etc. The short a sound is not always pure.

So, teach students to first read with their eyes and say all the sounds in the word. If incorrect and their decoding attempt was phonetically accurate, have them use the sense-making processes we are more familiar with. They can cross-check the approximation they said with known words and for meaning.

Troy

Knowledge Is Comprehension in Disguise

Think about content goals as well as literacy skills, goals, and objectives. You should have a content goal for students to engage them in the text. Also, have literacy skill goals and objectives you can pull from your district and state standards.

The content goals will help hook the students into reading. You must give them a reason to read.

For example, consider this content goal or reason to read for students in a well-known text like Chicken Little.

Content Goal: Read to find out a mistake Chicken Little makes. This mistake led her to mislead others into believing something that was not true. Let’s read to figure out what her mistake is. Maybe we can learn from her mistake to help us live better lives.

Then, you can also have a literacy goal or objective that ties into your district curriculum and state standards. But it would be best to keep the text at the center of comprehension work. Use the text to plan your lesson to develop the processes, skills, and knowledge necessary to work with texts and readers. It is not isolated skill work. Consider how the literacy skill, strategy, or objective can support the student in bringing their knowledge to the forefront.

Susan Neuman once said knowledge is comprehension in disguise. We must help students build knowledge, not just skills, to comprehend texts. Oral language that students hear, speak, and interpret becomes the words of the texts they are asked to read. Oral language comprehension must be happening for it to be translated into print. Comprehension depends on what kids bring to the text and how we continue to develop our language competencies.

Kids must use multiple language and cognitive processes to comprehend what they read. They must:

Process the language of the text
Have word recognition and utilize decoding skills
Understand the meaning of the words, working out the syntactic sense of the sentences(sentence comprehension)
Understand the vocabulary and learn new language as they read
Integrate the meaning of multiple sentences as they read. (which requires some inferring).
Incorporate background knowledge and apply it in specific ways
Understand what is not specifically stated, along with literal knowledge

We have to help students integrate and elaborate on what they are reading with the lives they lead within and outside of school.

What is Reading Comprehension Part 2

When it comes to helping our students develop comprehension as they read, we need to remember that, as teachers, we can have a separate or slightly different routine or strategy than the students. We often get caught up in oversimplifying instruction for students and mix strategies that need to be for us as teachers and strategies kids might need to use to help them when understanding breaks down.
For students, the focus should always be on learning something new, building knowledge, learning about life, and growing as humans. This will keep them more engaged. We should have kids focusing less on standards and strategies that are for us as teachers to help us teach.
We need kids to be engaged in the lessons and what they are reading, not the standards. We need to give them a goal for reading. It can be a content goal focused on learning something about the topic they are reading or learning more about life and how to handle different situations that might arise from characters of fiction. We can then have our own goals focused on standards and a strategy or strategies to support students as understanding breaks down. Kids are not excited about standards and strategies. Students find these boring and need to be more engaged. When we get them excited about learning a topic or life skills when reading about interesting fictional or real-life characters, we will see higher engagement. We can then bring in the strategies, check in with students, and see if they are meeting the standards we need to use to help us focus our instruction.
We can continue to think about comprehension as a process to help us do this. Think of it as an assembly line making a product in a factory. Multiple processes and steps have to happen to get to the finished product. The product is text understanding that can be applied and transferred to multiple situations. Getting students to explain the main idea is a product. Understanding text structures is a process that can be used to help readers get there. Thinking about the author’s purpose is also a process that can help. They are not the final product. The main idea is a product, but it can also be combined with other texts and applied in different situations that can further our learning and understanding.

As teachers, we must consider which of these many processes our students might struggle with. This will help us consider what we have to focus on to plan for instruction. This includes instruction as you confer individually with students within the reader’s workshop or at the guided reading table, not just whole group lessons. Consider what fixup strategies you can give the reader to help them understand what they are reading. Consider how you can help them access their background knowledge. Consider how you might help them build new knowledge. It takes integration and elaboration.
When students are having difficulty with a product, it is usually because of a breakdown in a process. It is not the product itself that is faulty.
In future posts, we will dig into some of the processes that could be causing a breakdown. Realize that utilizing background knowledge, which includes content knowledge, we expect students to have as they move through grade levels. You have to consider what the student is bringing and what the text is demanding.

Consider this:

We do not want to be choosing texts for kids to practice a strategy. We want students to choose texts they find interesting to grow their knowledge of a topic or to learn more about life through characters they enjoy. When we do, we lose kids natural curiosity and engagement. Reading becomes less authentic, and when we ask them to transfer knowledge, skills, strategies, etc., into new situations, it becomes cumbersome for students. We lose sight of reading for an authentic purpose. Kids stop reading to learn something. We get caught up reading to do something.

Troy

What is Reading Comprehension?

Thinking about Word Study

I think there is a time and place for word sorts. When kids are sorting printed words, they look for differences in words. One issue with word sorts is that kiddos often sort without reading the words. Make sure to require kids to read the words as they sort them and after sorting.

When using word sorts, we often use them to teach a pattern or rime. However, we can also use them to help students recognize more words by sight. I will be doing more research on these two objectives for word sorts soon.

When completing Word Study activities, you need to understand your objective and know your students and how they learn. An alternative to word sorts is analogy charts. Here is a video showing how they work.

The objectives for analogy charts are to identify the vowel sound in a given word and use a word they already know to help them spell the word. This required encoding. Words sorts require decoding. Furthermore, Jan Richardson, the teacher in the video, has added a step to the analogy chart routine. At the end, the teacher, without saying the word, writes a challenging word (or two) that includes the targeted vowel concept on a dry-erase board. Students break the word up into chunks and read. For example, if you were doing an analogy chart for ow/ai from the video. A challenge word might be belowground, brainteaser, or arrowhead. There is value in doing word sorts and value in doing Analogy charts. Which one will have more of an impact on your objectives? Which one impacts a student’s ability to read (decode) and write (encode) words more?

One thing I am trying out is Word Mapping. The technical term would be Grapheme Phoneme Mapping. You can use a form similar to this.

I ask students to repeat the target word after I say it. Then I ask them to tap it out on their fingers. They tap out words with 3-4 sounds on one hand by tapping a finger to their thumb for each sound heard in a word.

I ask how many sounds the word has, and then they write it. This is very similar to using Elkonon Boxes, often called Sound Boxes. When two or three letters represent one sound, they go in one box together. The word “see” above is an example of this.

When mapping words, you do not need to include words that follow a single pattern. Know your focus for the activity. Mapping words is an excellent way to review words or several patterns already taught.

Sunday Cummins and Jan Richardson have created a Mapping activity for high-frequency words. It has been added to the steps Richardson wrote about in her Next Step books. Click this link to find those books. This additional step is not in these books. Find it below. It was placed as step one, replacing What’s Missing as step one and moving it down to step two. The routine now has 5 steps.

As you consider words with patterns for mapping, analogy charts, sorts, or other activities, keep in mind the students’ level of alphabetic knowledge. They are just not ready for some words, even when using analogies.

Also, understand that the sequence does matter when studying words. Do not overlook this. When building words, it is essential. You must make sure students attend to the feature you are working on. Understand that when it comes to working with words, the part of the word that we change or move when building words is the part students focus on. Therefore sequence matters! If working with vowel sounds, many teachers start with a list of short vowels and then move to long vowels. For example, they may ask them to read, write, or build this list of words: kit, bit, sit, kite, bit, site. This will cause the students to focus on what is changed, the initial consonant. Not the vowels. Sequence the words this way instead: kit, kite, bit, bite, sit, site. This focuses the student’s attention on how the e changes the vowel sound. You can do similar sequences for digraphs. Order matters.

Consider:

Words to build: kite, kit, bit, bite,hit, dim, dime, him

Words to read: dim, dime, time, tide, hid, hide

Words to write or map or use in an Analogy Chart: kite, kit, side, sit, site, dime, spit, spite

Children’s analysis of words is often very different than we realize. Don’t assume they notice, and note the same details in the words you expect them to. How they focus on words and what they see and hear depends on their current knowledge. We must observe and listen to them. When considering an activity, we must weigh its benefits against concerns. We cannot embrace an activity and assume it will work because it worked in a different setting with different students with their current level of knowledge. You can make those minor adjustments.

More to come on word sorts and analogy charts

Troy

The Science of Reading includes all components of Reading

As of late, there has been much talk about the science of reading in the reading world.

When many discuss the science of reading, they really mean what scientific research has said about phonemic awareness and phonics. I agree that there has not been enough emphasis given to phonemic awareness and phonics instruction in many classrooms and districts across the United States. There is however scientific research in all areas of reading.

Awareness of the smallest speech units is a huge part of learning to read. Words in any language are made up of sounds. We must be aware of those sounds and make the connection that individual letters and letter combinations represent those sounds in print. We can hear and speak many words before reading them. Phonological processing is a crucial aspect of how our brains process language when we read. The more language we hear and speak ourselves, the easier it is for us as readers. The more automatic phonological awareness becomes, the better word recognition is for beginning readers. This leaves readers better able to attend to different aspects of a text.

Those different aspects of a text are essential, especially for readers in grades second on up. These other skills are learned in parallel with phonics skills for school-age kids. The science of reading goes well beyond phonemic awareness and phonics.

There is science-backed research in all aspects of reading instruction. Shanahan (2020) states, “I think our field has dropped the ball with regard to teaching phonic. I see too little of it in primary classrooms, and what is there is not necessarily consistent with research findings.” He adds that, in all fairness, those same gaps of thoroughness, explicitness, and quality are apparent in reading comprehension, writing, and oral reading fluency.

Duke, Ward, and Pearson(2021) share some of the science of reading comprehension instruction. They tackle this question: What have decades of research told us about the nature of comprehension and how to develop students’ comprehension in schools? They state that research has revealed a great deal about what goes on in the mind when readers comprehend oral and written text and how instruction and other experiences can affect that development. Researchers from many disciplines, such as developmental psychology, cognitive science, education, and linguists, have been working on the science of comprehension for years.

Please understand that the science of reading is not limited to phonemic awareness and phonics. It goes beyond the so-called reading wars, and gets to the heart of researched reading instruction, and does not limit itself. Scientific studies are being done in the areas of vocabulary learning, comprehension, and others areas of reading instruction as well.

When using research to inform your practice, be sure that the research will stand up. Shanahan (2020) suggests that you should think of educational research this way, “We tried this routine and managed to make it beneficial to students—not a small thing—and perhaps you too could make it work under your circumstances and with your students.”

When considering research, remember that it is not guaranteed to work with your student and circumstances.

Shanahan discusses the importance of looking for studies that have been replicated and have used Meta-Analysis.

Meta-Analysis refers to a method used to synthesize multiple studies into a new, more extensive analysis. When conducting Meta-analysis, it is expected that all relevant studies are included no matter the outcome. For example, the ILA journal Reading Research Quarterly publishes many meta-analysis studies. One such analysis is Effects of Expository Text Structure Interventions on Comprehension (Pyle et al., 2017).

Shanahan (2020) emphasizes that scientists try to consider all of the available data. He states, “they seek the weight of evidence, not the unusual outcomes when trying to determine what works.

Good research explains all outcomes of the research and how it was set up, and if it was a replication or not. It describes any variations from similar studies. It explains things out in detail, not leaving out information.

Shanahan suggests asking these questions when deciding to use research findings to influence what happens in your classroom.

Was the study Peer-Reviewed and Published in a Rigorously Reviewed Journal?
Was there a comparison group, and were the Groups Equal at the Beginning?
What other Differences may explain these outcomes?
Was the Instruction Really Delivered?
What were the control and comparison groups doing?
Who was delivering the teaching, and how were they prepared?
What were the students like? Did the program have different outcomes for different kinds of students?

Asking these questions should not get you to disqualify Action Research done by classroom teachers from consideration of a type of replication in your classroom. I would apply the same questions for Action Research. Remember, teachers do action research with their own students in mind, which is an enormous difference from implementing a program that was successful with an entirely different set of students, even if they might be minorities like students you might have.

Please take the time to read the references that are listed in any journal article or research study. It will help you out tremendously when trying to understand if something will work for your students.

Remember that there are sound scientific research studies done across the board by educators, linguists, and many types of scholars that go beyond phonemic awareness and phonics.

Troy

Duke, N., Ward, A., Pearson, D. (2021). The science of reading comprehension instruction. The Reading Teacher, 74(6), 663-672. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1993

Pyle, N., Vasques, A.C., Lignugaris/Kraft, B., Gillam, S.L..Reutzel, D.R., Olszewski, A., … Pyle, D. (2017). Effects of expository text structure interventions on comprehension: A meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 52 (4), 469-501. HTTP://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.179

Shanahan, T. (2020). The science of reading: Making sense of research. The Reading Teacher, 74(2), 119-125. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1940

What Does It Really Mean? Part 2

Hello everyone. I was able to ask Sunday Cummins a few follow-up questions after she read my last blog post, What Does it Really Mean?

I reflected on using the STP strategy in conjunction with her strategy Explode & Explain in that post. Below are her answers to the questions.

Question 1: What improvements have you seen over time with the use of this strategy?

Sunday: That’s a good question. I guess your blog post reveals my best answer – the integration of other strategies into the Explode to Explain experience!

Question 2: What are the biggest challenges you have noticed with students using this strategy and what suggestions do you have to overcome them?

Sunday: Sometimes, students don’t know what to write in an annotation. They have a sense that a particular detail is important but they don’t know what to write. I’ve added a scaffold to support this – at the end of any shared annotating (whether it’s with Explode to Explain or for some other purpose), we analyze and name the types of annotations. Some examples include:

name a type of detail an author has used like “comparisonreal-lifeinition” or “real life example”
create a quick sketch to help visualize,
share a helpful connection,
jot a question mark when you don’t understand and may need to come back to that detail.

We list these annotations on an anchor chart students can reference as they annotate on their own.

Question 3: Do you ever ask students to try and explain vocabulary words with this strategy?

Sunday: Just like you have folded STP into Explode to Explain, I think you could fold in conversations about unfamiliar vocabulary and the types of context clues that authors use to help readers understand those words. This could help the students think about what to write in their annotations.

I think conversations are essential to learning new words. Think back to how we learned to read. We first learned to talk and communicate by hearing others use words. We had learned the sounds of the English language before we could talk. We heard words used by others before we used them ourselves. I know and use words today I have rarely seen in print or written. I struggle to spell some of these and automatically recognize them in print. It is the same way for our students when they are exposed to new language, even more so because they have limited experiences. Having conversation and building connections to new vocabulary is essential.

Thanks for answering these questions and your insight Sunday.

Troy

What does it really mean?

I have been working with a group of 5th graders on using STP (Stop, Think, & Paraphrase) in combination with Sunday Cummins Explode & Explain strategy. Here is another article about it. Explode & Explain. A version of STP is really embedded into Explode & Explain when you think about it.

A common way I see STP being used is shown below.

I alter this method. I do not ask students to cover up the text. I think it is essential for students to see the words and their notes when talking them, to help them paraphrase. Also, students may be able to pull out and use keywords/phrases to intermix within their paraphrasing, but still not truly understand the writer’s intended meaning. I want students to be able to use STP to help them stop and focus on unknown vocabulary that is helpful for readers to figure out what the writer wants them to understand. We worked on figuring out the meaning of unfamiliar words, as we explode and explain. That is why STP alone is not enough for a lot of students.

Using Explode & Explain prepares students for the next step of paraphrasing. I want students to look at the text and to use their annotations and notes to refer back to. This is important for ELL students or any student who needs support with vocabulary. Students are very hesitant to express out loud what they are thinking a word might mean. However, when I ask them to slow down and explode and explain certain parts of the text it starts to happen naturally. Faces light up, I hear an “Oh, I get it”.

Another important component of STP is helping students understand that they need to self-monitoring for meaning as they read. With the striving readers I work with as a reading specialist, I have to really work hard to help students understand how to read with an intent to grow their intellect, academically and emotionally. They often want to read just to finish and want the act of finishing to be the accomplishment.

How often should students “stop, think & paraphrase”?” How often depends on the individual student/group, and the text. I do not always think set stopping point need to be required. Students have to learn to do the self-monitoring work for themselves. Self-monitoring brings authenticity to the strategy and helps the students gain some agency when they figure out when and where to pause and apply it when reading independently. They are not just following steps mindlessly.

For my lessons with this guided reading group, I chose the places we would stop and use a combination of the two strategies. This decision was more about saving time and limiting the cognitive load for this group, so we could focus on learning the strategies.

I started this journey by explaining and reiterating how these strategies can be done in our heads as we read, or in a written format, digitally, or on paper. I want them to know that my hope is for them to internalize the strategies and to be able to use them in their head after they become comfortable enough with them. I also try to keep in mind that students may be able to use these strategies in their heads with some texts and not with others. The content of the text and the student’s knowledge will affect this. I am the same way as an avid reader.

I am also using these strategies to help them carry on a conversation about their reading and apply what they are learning to other situations. We discuss using the notes we create when Exploding & Explaining to help us then paraphrase the information. I model paraphrasing using my notes and then ask them to do the same with a partner. I stress speaking in complete sentences that can easily be transferred into writing. I emphasize with older students that what and how we speak and write affects how others see us. We want what we say and write to make sense not only to ourselves but to others as well. We do a lot of oral rehearsing because of this and I provide sentence stems when I feel the group/student needs it.

Below is a sample of one student’s work that I gave some support with figuring out the meaning of some words. I took a few sentences from the article The Amazing Penguin Rescue by Lauran Tarshis that we had been reading, and used a note-taking app to project it. We worked on the first sets of sentences together. Students worked on the finals sentences on their own with me providing support when confering with them. They will use the notes to help them discuss and write about the article.

For this article I chose to have the students write about the challenges faced by the penguin and the humans trying to save them. When rehearsing for the writing I had planned to use a sentence frame like this one:

____________ was challenging for the humans/penguins because ______________

These students started planning without the need for it, however.

Hope this provides you with something to think about and reflect on.

Troy

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