Nicole Ashley Routman Chapter 11 April Blog

As I was reading about building the best practices, so many things came to mind.  We are really starting to look into best practices at school and I'm seeing so many new ideas to use.  One being inquiry based learning- where they kids are actively engaged and questioning during a lesson.I love the close reading idea.  I am sure we can adapt it to use in our first grade classrooms. In chapter I see charts with bullets on best practices.  Some are very general and common sense.  My favorite was: struggling readers need to spend more time reading, not doing activities about reading.  That's a hard one for some; especially the young ones.  It's hard to get past the thinking of a struggling reader sitting their "struggling" with their book- when they really can't read that well in the first place. Putting a solid independent reading time into my day has changed my perspective on this.  My lowest readers probably enjoy this time more than any of my other students- when they are focused and on task.  I also enjoyed the research findings on the most effective teachers.  The 2 that stood out to me were- teachers promote purposeful, open-ended talk that is more conversational than interrogational and teachers assign tasks that are meaningful and challenging, involve some student choice, and integrate content areas.  The first one has really worked for me this year- especially during reading conferences.  I learn more about an individual student during that little amount of time than I do during most other times and activities.  Our "talks" lend themselves to learning so much about a reader.  I really enjoy that time with them and when they walk away- I have made such wonderful and useful notes to help me in the future.  The other one I agreed with was assigning meaningful and challenging work- with student choice.  I like to see them engaged in their learning and at the same time- making the assignment meaningful and relating- not busy work.  We've really worked on this during out basal time, making the most of our assignments and covering our standards in a meaningful way.  Integrating subjects has helped tons with this- especially since first grade teaches lots of science this way!  The last point in the chapter was the pros and cons of a computerized reading program.  We have used several of them in our school.  Some stay and some go!  I guess what I took out of this section the most was to make sure it's an effective program- and not used as the main teaching guide.  I don't think you can ever replace an effective reading program with one on the computer.  I also see the point about kids reading "just to get the points".  That takes away from the joy of pleasure reading....just for fun- not a reward.