10. A student knowing how to decode is not the same as one who can really comprehend; and sometimes it can be hard to tell from the outside.
9. Mastery over a Discourse, Mastery over a Discourse, Mastery over a Discourse Mastery -- hmm, how about Practice...ery? I can get behind that.
8. I am inspired and in awe by how smart the teachers and the people entering the teaching profession really are. To that end...
7. ...I love feeling inspired.
6. I will be going back again and again to these writtings...not only because so much of what everyone has written is enthralling to read but...I'mstillalittlefuzzyonsomestuff - There! I said it!
5. Morning, noon or night, a hot cup of caffeinated beverage is perfect for that familiar run down feeling...even if it is 100 degs out, in the shade, with sandals on, this side of the Rio Grande, walking up-hill both ways...er, lost that one.
4. Grad school is going to be way, waaaay, waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy, harder than I thought; but somehow I think it's going to be more amazing than I ever could have imagined.
3. Note to self: read about So Cray Ts.
2. Our brains are the most amazingly complexly beautifully organized systems of tissue and electric current that...wow.
1. Collective knowledge is so
incredible
it is
contageous
bonus: Slow thought is best
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Dsylexia aixelysD
I had to skim through this chapter; the first of three on dyslexia. There, I said it. I will go back to it though, because it, like all of chapters in Ms. Wolf's book "Proust and the Squid" it is fascinating. And I do have this book until December. Its just, its Saturday night. I'm tired, my two boys are tired, my wife is tired and class is over as of tomorrow at noon. Despite my tiredness, my friend from Chicago is coming over because he's visiting his parents in town and I don't get to see him too often...funny thing is, he has dyslexia (or a reading disorder, because dyslexia is a catch-all term that covers a broad spectrum of symptoms).
I don't remember much about his having dyslexia except that after school he had to go to tutoring to help him read better. I do remember that he had a tougher time than me and my other friends did with his studies...I assume it was because of his dyslexia. So often he would sit in his desk and ask questions and try his butt off to understand the concepts we would be going over in class. Funny thing is, we were good kids who got good grades, well, really, we were nerds. You know the dorky, glasses wearing, no girlfriend having, video games on a Friday night kinds of nerds. My friend was as much as I was; only he had to work so much harder to do it. He studied all the time. He woke up early, he stayed up late. Long after the rest of us were finished and had moved on to more fun things, he was still there, plugging away. Working. Hard. He wasn't any less smart, I know he is much smarter than I am; it's just his brain does not process reading very well.
Ms. Wolf says that is typical. Most people with dyslexia are incredibly smart and she goes to great lengths to name incredible minds who had dsylexia (Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein -- to name two among CEOes and Entrepeneurs). But unfortunately because those who do have dyslexia have a terrible time learning to read and more importantly comprehending what they read, they often feel failure and rejection.
Unless they find the other things that they are good at (apparently dyslexics are great with spacial reasoning). My buddy found acting, it's his lifelong passion and is pretty damned good at it too, but he had to work at it. What blows my mind about it is, he can read, comprehend and deliver his lines with power and emotion and understanding no problem. He even says he can read subtitles in a foreign movie no problem, even though if he probably read the same lines in a book, he would have difficulty.
We don't know much about dyslexia, but we know more than we used to. On pg.187 of Ms. Wolfs book she has drawings that illustrate the differences between a normal and a dyslexic reading brain. The illustrations are amazing. From the moment one starts reading at zero milliseconds to 500 milliseconds at semantic processing (word comprehension) nearly every single step of the way the normal human brain literally looks different from the dsylexic brain. Meaning what areas of the brain that show the most activity during the reading process in a dsylexic brain are not the same as in yours and mine. They actually rely much more heavily on the right side of the brain for everything that they do. They also tend to be more creative. No wonder my friend is in acting.
At the end of the chapter, Ms. Wolf tells of her teenage dsylexic son drawing at the kitchen table. He's just completed a detailed drawing of the leaning tower of Pisa. "...upside down. When I asked him why, he said it was easier for him to do it that way." pg. 196.
And now ideas worth spreading (Willard Wigan; extreme miniature sculptor and childhood dyslexic)
I don't remember much about his having dyslexia except that after school he had to go to tutoring to help him read better. I do remember that he had a tougher time than me and my other friends did with his studies...I assume it was because of his dyslexia. So often he would sit in his desk and ask questions and try his butt off to understand the concepts we would be going over in class. Funny thing is, we were good kids who got good grades, well, really, we were nerds. You know the dorky, glasses wearing, no girlfriend having, video games on a Friday night kinds of nerds. My friend was as much as I was; only he had to work so much harder to do it. He studied all the time. He woke up early, he stayed up late. Long after the rest of us were finished and had moved on to more fun things, he was still there, plugging away. Working. Hard. He wasn't any less smart, I know he is much smarter than I am; it's just his brain does not process reading very well.
Ms. Wolf says that is typical. Most people with dyslexia are incredibly smart and she goes to great lengths to name incredible minds who had dsylexia (Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein -- to name two among CEOes and Entrepeneurs). But unfortunately because those who do have dyslexia have a terrible time learning to read and more importantly comprehending what they read, they often feel failure and rejection.
Unless they find the other things that they are good at (apparently dyslexics are great with spacial reasoning). My buddy found acting, it's his lifelong passion and is pretty damned good at it too, but he had to work at it. What blows my mind about it is, he can read, comprehend and deliver his lines with power and emotion and understanding no problem. He even says he can read subtitles in a foreign movie no problem, even though if he probably read the same lines in a book, he would have difficulty.
We don't know much about dyslexia, but we know more than we used to. On pg.187 of Ms. Wolfs book she has drawings that illustrate the differences between a normal and a dyslexic reading brain. The illustrations are amazing. From the moment one starts reading at zero milliseconds to 500 milliseconds at semantic processing (word comprehension) nearly every single step of the way the normal human brain literally looks different from the dsylexic brain. Meaning what areas of the brain that show the most activity during the reading process in a dsylexic brain are not the same as in yours and mine. They actually rely much more heavily on the right side of the brain for everything that they do. They also tend to be more creative. No wonder my friend is in acting.
At the end of the chapter, Ms. Wolf tells of her teenage dsylexic son drawing at the kitchen table. He's just completed a detailed drawing of the leaning tower of Pisa. "...upside down. When I asked him why, he said it was easier for him to do it that way." pg. 196.
And now ideas worth spreading (Willard Wigan; extreme miniature sculptor and childhood dyslexic)
Thursday, July 15, 2010
So What's Up With This Whole Reading Thing Anyways? And Why Should I Care?
This is the last chapter of the first two-thirds of Maryanne Wolf's book "Proust and the Squid...Science...Reading Brain." It is kind of a culmination of the normal reading brian (er...brain) before Ms. Wolf switches gears a little bit and focuses on what is obviously near to her heart: The reading brain of a dyslexic (her son has dyslexia, as she noted earlier in her book). A buddy of mine has dyslexia, he says it's minor and I never really gave it much thought other than the fact that it took him longer to learn stuff in high school and he had to work harder to learn it than anyone else in my circle of friends. THAT guy has perseverance...it will be interesting to find out more about how his brain works differently from others'.
But back to the current chapter, since I borrowed this book from UNM's library (I have it until freakin' December; gotta' love being a grad student...) I can't highlight passages in this book and I've been forced to take notes as I read - that must be one of my reading for comprehension strategies because I definitely feel like I've learned more from reading this book than from a lot of others I've read to date...Anyways, my notes say that on page 141 (it's part of chapter 6 in case anyone is curious) Ms. Wolf says that fluent readers feel-. On page 142 she says that an expert reader is efficient and on page 143, an expert reader has time to wonder...
This chapter is pretty much dedicated to the brain of the fluent comprehending and expert readers. First, as I stated just moments ago(we're talking literally fifty three words ago)I mentioned that my notes said fluent comprehending readers feel...well, duh, of course they do...but wait! According to Ms. Wolf, feeling is a key and may even be the most important key to reading comprehension "...the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling. Any images of the fluent, comprehending reader shows this clearly through the growing activation of the limbic system-the seat of our emotional life-and its connections to cognition...the limbic region also helps us to prioritize and give value to whatever we read. On the basis of [a book's ability to make us feel pleasure, disgust, horror, and elation etc..], our attention and comprehension processes become either stirred or inert." (pg. 141) Holy Honkin' Molly! Did you get that? If a book gets us to feel emotions when we read it, we comprehend what it is saying much more completely!!! Ok, we're all teachers here right? So that means if we want our students to comprehend what they are reading, we have to help them care about it, we have to help them feel passionate about what they are reading...I'd like to stop there. But there is so much to this chapter. I will touch on a few other points and then back to the emotions.
The brain is FA-AST (if I could use a cool zooming text there I would it's that fast). Everything that we do when we read happens from 0-500 milliseconds (assuming we are fluent comprehending readers by now). Everything. We're talking ten pages worth of information of everything. Everything we learned about de-coding words, making meaning of them connecting them to our emotions 144 pages of information before this point...Everything. 500 milliseconds is 0.5 seconds; just a hair slower than the blink of an eye. That is fast.
And because it is so fast and incredibly efficient at what it does, our brain gives us time to wonder when we read; not think...wonder. That's no small thing. And that is what changes a reader from fluent comprehension to expert (assuming I understand correctly of course). Wondering implies poetry, it's not just information gathering, wondering connects our past experiences to our present contemplations. Wondering lets us leave where we are and go someplace previously unimagined. Wondering and by extension being an expert reader, means that books affect us, they change us...literally; not just emotionally but biologically: "Ultimately, in the expert reader there is greater left-and right-hemisphere involvement [of the brain]...the expert reader's comprehending brain presents a beautiful change from novice reading: by using many parts of the brain, the expert reader is living testimony to our continuously intellectual evolution" (pg 162) Ms. Wolf contends that it is the exchange of ideas between the reader and the text that allows a person to become an expert reader; that and the reading a lot of quality text. She says that if we read the same book at 17, 37, 57 and 77 we will read it differently, we won't come away from it the same way as before. Well, of course...but, wow. Reading is so beautifully complex, yet our experience of it is so simple; strait forward. I love that.
To end, a few notes:
A fluent decoder is not a strategic reader (one step prior to fluent comprehender). In order to get kids from decoding to strategic reading they need to learn to self monitor their comprehension. Ms. Wolf gives some specifics to help people move kids beyond decoding. "Engaging in dialogue with their teachers helps students ask themselves critical questions that get to the essence of what they are reading. For example, in reciprocal teaching, a meathod introduced by Annemarie Palisncsar and Anne Brown, teachers explicitly help students learn to question what they don't understand..." they can:
-summarize the content
-identify key issues
-clarify
-predict and infer happens next
If students do the above successfully, "...this variation on the Socratic dialogue provides students with a lifelong approach to extracting meaning from more and more sophisticated text."
...I've gotta' start reading some Socrates (So-crAY-tes)...
Just in case we're all getting high and mighty about our brains:
and then...
Pretty crazy huh?!?
But back to the current chapter, since I borrowed this book from UNM's library (I have it until freakin' December; gotta' love being a grad student...) I can't highlight passages in this book and I've been forced to take notes as I read - that must be one of my reading for comprehension strategies because I definitely feel like I've learned more from reading this book than from a lot of others I've read to date...Anyways, my notes say that on page 141 (it's part of chapter 6 in case anyone is curious) Ms. Wolf says that fluent readers feel-. On page 142 she says that an expert reader is efficient and on page 143, an expert reader has time to wonder...
This chapter is pretty much dedicated to the brain of the fluent comprehending and expert readers. First, as I stated just moments ago(we're talking literally fifty three words ago)I mentioned that my notes said fluent comprehending readers feel...well, duh, of course they do...but wait! According to Ms. Wolf, feeling is a key and may even be the most important key to reading comprehension "...the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling. Any images of the fluent, comprehending reader shows this clearly through the growing activation of the limbic system-the seat of our emotional life-and its connections to cognition...the limbic region also helps us to prioritize and give value to whatever we read. On the basis of [a book's ability to make us feel pleasure, disgust, horror, and elation etc..], our attention and comprehension processes become either stirred or inert." (pg. 141) Holy Honkin' Molly! Did you get that? If a book gets us to feel emotions when we read it, we comprehend what it is saying much more completely!!! Ok, we're all teachers here right? So that means if we want our students to comprehend what they are reading, we have to help them care about it, we have to help them feel passionate about what they are reading...I'd like to stop there. But there is so much to this chapter. I will touch on a few other points and then back to the emotions.
The brain is FA-AST (if I could use a cool zooming text there I would it's that fast). Everything that we do when we read happens from 0-500 milliseconds (assuming we are fluent comprehending readers by now). Everything. We're talking ten pages worth of information of everything. Everything we learned about de-coding words, making meaning of them connecting them to our emotions 144 pages of information before this point...Everything. 500 milliseconds is 0.5 seconds; just a hair slower than the blink of an eye. That is fast.
And because it is so fast and incredibly efficient at what it does, our brain gives us time to wonder when we read; not think...wonder. That's no small thing. And that is what changes a reader from fluent comprehension to expert (assuming I understand correctly of course). Wondering implies poetry, it's not just information gathering, wondering connects our past experiences to our present contemplations. Wondering lets us leave where we are and go someplace previously unimagined. Wondering and by extension being an expert reader, means that books affect us, they change us...literally; not just emotionally but biologically: "Ultimately, in the expert reader there is greater left-and right-hemisphere involvement [of the brain]...the expert reader's comprehending brain presents a beautiful change from novice reading: by using many parts of the brain, the expert reader is living testimony to our continuously intellectual evolution" (pg 162) Ms. Wolf contends that it is the exchange of ideas between the reader and the text that allows a person to become an expert reader; that and the reading a lot of quality text. She says that if we read the same book at 17, 37, 57 and 77 we will read it differently, we won't come away from it the same way as before. Well, of course...but, wow. Reading is so beautifully complex, yet our experience of it is so simple; strait forward. I love that.
To end, a few notes:
A fluent decoder is not a strategic reader (one step prior to fluent comprehender). In order to get kids from decoding to strategic reading they need to learn to self monitor their comprehension. Ms. Wolf gives some specifics to help people move kids beyond decoding. "Engaging in dialogue with their teachers helps students ask themselves critical questions that get to the essence of what they are reading. For example, in reciprocal teaching, a meathod introduced by Annemarie Palisncsar and Anne Brown, teachers explicitly help students learn to question what they don't understand..." they can:
-summarize the content
-identify key issues
-clarify
-predict and infer happens next
If students do the above successfully, "...this variation on the Socratic dialogue provides students with a lifelong approach to extracting meaning from more and more sophisticated text."
...I've gotta' start reading some Socrates (So-crAY-tes)...
Just in case we're all getting high and mighty about our brains:
and then...
Pretty crazy huh?!?
Saturday, July 10, 2010
A exercise in reading...and perseverance
This happens to me every time...every freakin' time. I start a book, I get excited about it, enjoy reading it...then, somewhere in the middle, I get bogged down. It doesn't even matter how good the book is. For some reason, towards the middle of every book that I can remember ever reading, I hit this point where finishing it becomes somewhat of a chore; an exercise in pushing on and forcing myself to finish the book I am reading.
Ok, here's an illustration of what I mean (beyond the obvious one of my being on page 133 of a 229 page book called "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Etc...): I've been reading Giant by Pulitzer Prize winning author Edna Ferber (according to the Wiki about her she wrote the original novel for the musical Showboat--music by Jerome Kern, lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II). INCREDIBLE book! So well written, fascinating characters, huge sweeping story; but I got stuck mid way through about a year ago and have yet to finish it. It has gotten so bad in fact that I've started to ask my wife where that book I've been reading is "you know, that one by that female author that you should read next...Big!", I ponder. "You mean Giant?" she asks with just the right amount of sarcasm. "Yeah, Giant; do you know where it is?" "So you lost it?" "No, I just don't know where it is.." This usually continues for a bit before I either find it or...ahh who am I kidding, I lost it; maybe it will turn up sometime within this next year. Besides, you get my point. Sometimes it takes an amazing amount of perseverance for me to finish a book. Fortunately, I have an outside influence (this class) to provide added perseverance in helping me finish "Proust..." so...I press forward.
Chapter five (of nine) introduces some interesting terms and information as well as continues to pound home ideas about the brain.
First the terms, there are five of them of interest and they can be found on page 113 (in case anyone wants to happily follow along). These terms are used to describe the various steps a child needs to take towards becoming a "fluent comprehending reader" (more on that later on) and are all important developmental stages, or developments.
-Phonological development: "how a child gradually learns to hear, segment and understand the small units of sounds that make up words". According to Ms. Wolf, this is critical.
-Orthographic development: "how a child learns that his or her writing system represents oral language". Talk about an aha moment!
-Semantic and Pragmatic development: "how children learn more and more about the meanings of words from the language and culture around them". Sounds like Gee theory to me...
-Syntactic development: "how children learn the grammatical forms and structures of sentences" essentially learning sentence structure like I went to the store as opposed to I to the store went.
and...
-Morphological development: "prepares the child to learn the conventions of surrounding how words are formed from smaller, meaningful roots and units of meaning" Ms. Wolf's example is the word unpacked; it is one word with three parts: un-pack-ed. Once kids learn how to recognize these smaller 'morphemes', their reading comprehension accelerates.
So, why are those terms important? Apparently, those are all different steps that we all who are "expert readers" progressed through to mastered the art of reading. They are also places a person who is teaching another to read can focus on teaching that skill. Ms. Wolf is particularly interested in teachers helping students develop Morphological awareness. She contends that it is an important tool that helps kids learn to read very efficiently and shares a story about a child who was tutored in and intensive reading program her and her colleagues ran and how that child went from reading several levels below his grade level to reading above his grade level in a few short months. It is a touching story, but I don't really have time to go into it just now...
Anyways...Ms. Wolf continues to categorize children (and I would assume anyone who is learning to read for the first time)in the following ways:
1. Emerging reader
2. Novice reader
3. Decoding
4. Fluent comprehending
5. Expert
An Emerging reader is what was described in chapter 4 (and in my previous blog) that is when kids are exposed to reading by a loved one and it a warm and precious experience.
A Novice reader is where some really cool things happen and decoding of simple sentences begins. Kids discover that words like cat (her example) consists of three sounds: /k/ + /a/ + /t/. They learn things like 'ch' makes a totally different sound than a /c/ and /h/ do individually and all the other crazy idiosyncrasies of the English language that make it both beautiful and a pain in the ass to learn (I do believe that pain in the ass was one of her technical terms). Kids learn that often times words can have one, two, three or even more separate meanings depending on context. Her example was the word 'Bug'; it is an insect, can spy on someone, is an automobile, is a computer glitch...are there any others? Oh yes, can be a pain in the a-- (ok...hopefully that is the time I use that joke...). Kids begin to learn new words based on the content of a story. Etc...Essentially, all the stuff that we think about when we imagine a kid learning to read. Slow sentences, sounding out words, gradual comprehension. Ms. Wolf says that the key to getting to the next phase is TONS of practice and that some kids get quite stuck in this phase...necessitating intensive reading intervention.
A Decoding reader is beginning to become much more fluent. In this stage people (notice I didn't say kids?...AhHa...) start to read in chunks. Like: Be-head-ed. And recognize the differences in words like bear and dear. They also start to master suffixes like Sing, sing-er, sing-ing etc...
Fluent readers have mastered all of the above and one essential new tool: "comprehension monitoring", which is...just what it sounds, a reader monitors her/his own comprehension to make sure that she/he really understands or is just glossing her/his eyes over the words for the last ten pages or so...that's happened to me...I don't mind it when I'm reading, but don't really like it when I'm driving...but that's probably a topic for another blog at an entirely different time.
Ms. Wolf really didn't get into Expert reading. I assume that will be next chapter. She did include a few interesting/fun things though that I will include below:
1. A neat way to help kids learn Phonologically (which she contends is an uber-important step in learning to read well) is by doing those clapping hands for each syllable of a word games. Like SAM (one clap for one syllable) or volks-wag-en (three claps for three syllables). I remember doing those when I was a kid and always had fun with them; my wife and I are doing the same thing for our five year old and he gets a kick out of it too. C'mon good reader!!
2. A poem about the pain in the ass-ness (oooh, there's that joke again) of the english language:
I take it you already know
Of touch and bough and cough an dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
And dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to read it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
Good night.
Ok, here's an illustration of what I mean (beyond the obvious one of my being on page 133 of a 229 page book called "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Etc...): I've been reading Giant by Pulitzer Prize winning author Edna Ferber (according to the Wiki about her she wrote the original novel for the musical Showboat--music by Jerome Kern, lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II). INCREDIBLE book! So well written, fascinating characters, huge sweeping story; but I got stuck mid way through about a year ago and have yet to finish it. It has gotten so bad in fact that I've started to ask my wife where that book I've been reading is "you know, that one by that female author that you should read next...Big!", I ponder. "You mean Giant?" she asks with just the right amount of sarcasm. "Yeah, Giant; do you know where it is?" "So you lost it?" "No, I just don't know where it is.." This usually continues for a bit before I either find it or...ahh who am I kidding, I lost it; maybe it will turn up sometime within this next year. Besides, you get my point. Sometimes it takes an amazing amount of perseverance for me to finish a book. Fortunately, I have an outside influence (this class) to provide added perseverance in helping me finish "Proust..." so...I press forward.
Chapter five (of nine) introduces some interesting terms and information as well as continues to pound home ideas about the brain.
First the terms, there are five of them of interest and they can be found on page 113 (in case anyone wants to happily follow along). These terms are used to describe the various steps a child needs to take towards becoming a "fluent comprehending reader" (more on that later on) and are all important developmental stages, or developments.
-Phonological development: "how a child gradually learns to hear, segment and understand the small units of sounds that make up words". According to Ms. Wolf, this is critical.
-Orthographic development: "how a child learns that his or her writing system represents oral language". Talk about an aha moment!
-Semantic and Pragmatic development: "how children learn more and more about the meanings of words from the language and culture around them". Sounds like Gee theory to me...
-Syntactic development: "how children learn the grammatical forms and structures of sentences" essentially learning sentence structure like I went to the store as opposed to I to the store went.
and...
-Morphological development: "prepares the child to learn the conventions of surrounding how words are formed from smaller, meaningful roots and units of meaning" Ms. Wolf's example is the word unpacked; it is one word with three parts: un-pack-ed. Once kids learn how to recognize these smaller 'morphemes', their reading comprehension accelerates.
So, why are those terms important? Apparently, those are all different steps that we all who are "expert readers" progressed through to mastered the art of reading. They are also places a person who is teaching another to read can focus on teaching that skill. Ms. Wolf is particularly interested in teachers helping students develop Morphological awareness. She contends that it is an important tool that helps kids learn to read very efficiently and shares a story about a child who was tutored in and intensive reading program her and her colleagues ran and how that child went from reading several levels below his grade level to reading above his grade level in a few short months. It is a touching story, but I don't really have time to go into it just now...
Anyways...Ms. Wolf continues to categorize children (and I would assume anyone who is learning to read for the first time)in the following ways:
1. Emerging reader
2. Novice reader
3. Decoding
4. Fluent comprehending
5. Expert
An Emerging reader is what was described in chapter 4 (and in my previous blog) that is when kids are exposed to reading by a loved one and it a warm and precious experience.
A Novice reader is where some really cool things happen and decoding of simple sentences begins. Kids discover that words like cat (her example) consists of three sounds: /k/ + /a/ + /t/. They learn things like 'ch' makes a totally different sound than a /c/ and /h/ do individually and all the other crazy idiosyncrasies of the English language that make it both beautiful and a pain in the ass to learn (I do believe that pain in the ass was one of her technical terms). Kids learn that often times words can have one, two, three or even more separate meanings depending on context. Her example was the word 'Bug'; it is an insect, can spy on someone, is an automobile, is a computer glitch...are there any others? Oh yes, can be a pain in the a-- (ok...hopefully that is the time I use that joke...). Kids begin to learn new words based on the content of a story. Etc...Essentially, all the stuff that we think about when we imagine a kid learning to read. Slow sentences, sounding out words, gradual comprehension. Ms. Wolf says that the key to getting to the next phase is TONS of practice and that some kids get quite stuck in this phase...necessitating intensive reading intervention.
A Decoding reader is beginning to become much more fluent. In this stage people (notice I didn't say kids?...AhHa...) start to read in chunks. Like: Be-head-ed. And recognize the differences in words like bear and dear. They also start to master suffixes like Sing, sing-er, sing-ing etc...
Fluent readers have mastered all of the above and one essential new tool: "comprehension monitoring", which is...just what it sounds, a reader monitors her/his own comprehension to make sure that she/he really understands or is just glossing her/his eyes over the words for the last ten pages or so...that's happened to me...I don't mind it when I'm reading, but don't really like it when I'm driving...but that's probably a topic for another blog at an entirely different time.
Ms. Wolf really didn't get into Expert reading. I assume that will be next chapter. She did include a few interesting/fun things though that I will include below:
1. A neat way to help kids learn Phonologically (which she contends is an uber-important step in learning to read well) is by doing those clapping hands for each syllable of a word games. Like SAM (one clap for one syllable) or volks-wag-en (three claps for three syllables). I remember doing those when I was a kid and always had fun with them; my wife and I are doing the same thing for our five year old and he gets a kick out of it too. C'mon good reader!!
2. A poem about the pain in the ass-ness (oooh, there's that joke again) of the english language:
I take it you already know
Of touch and bough and cough an dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
And dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to read it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
Good night.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
read to your kids...early
Maybe this will be a short blog for once…let me set the scene. I’m sitting on the speckled, red berber carpeting at the foot of my bed. My boys are crashed out and so are my parents. My wife is keeping me company, staying up much later than either of us planned. We’re all in a hotel together, recovering from our long but fun day of enjoying summer break.
Earlier I was reflecting about how lucky our boys are because my wife is a bookworm. I don’t know how many of you all read my introduction but she is a lover of literature and one of her many book related passions is children’s stories. I think she was amassing her collection all those fifteen years ago before we even met. The horde has grown over time as she’s scoured book stands at the flea market and eagerly attended library sales (I’ve never met someone get so excited over a dusty $0.50 set of cardboard pieces surrounding crunchy pages). I like the pictures, she loves the stories…it is starting to wear off on me, but it’s really impacting the boys.
Our oldest started his affair early. I think his one of his favorite stories at the beginning was good night gorilla. It is a story about a sleepy zookeeper and a precocious gorilla who releases each and every successive animal from their enclosure that the zookeeper says “good night” to. It is a sweet story and perfect for bedtime because not more than once, do the characters in the story go to sleep.
The text in the story was simple; “Good night gorilla” “Good night giraffe” “Good night lion” (I think that is the actual order in which the animals are put to bed; I’ve read that story too many times). Our son would love to say the animal’s names at each successive page; he loved to make the “boop, boop, boop…” sound effects as all the animals marched behind the zookeeper to go to sleep at his house. Then he would crack up when the wife’s eyes sprang open after all the animals said good night and she had to walk them back to their cages. That was his favorite for a very long time; our younger son likes it too, but it is funny that he responds to different parts in a completely different way.
According to Ms. Wolf our son was preparing to read every single time we opened that book together. In fact he has been preparing to read from the very moment he opened his first book as a baby. Chapter six of Proust and the Giant Squid by Maryanne Wolf is all about the young reader’s brain and the biological components that prepare a child to learn to read. Apparently the very act of sitting in the lap of a loved one and listening to a beloved story being read sets the scene for children to become successful readers themselves; the simple act of sitting in someone’s lap creates a love memory that endures in the subconscious that we all respond to when we curl up with a good book.
In chapter six, Ms. Wolf seems to list countless positives for a child to be exposed to reading at a very early age. In an effort to be concise, I will list some of them here. As I type these points, please keep in mind that when I say a child is reading, it most always means “when the child is listening to an adult read to them”. Thanks for that little side note.
-Kids learn to experience and practice different emotions by reading and empathizing with the characters they read about.
-Kids learn different kinds of language skill types, like “for no light ever touched his skin”…no one really talks that way…that is her point; even though no one actually does talk that way, kids still learn to not only understand it, but associate it with the magic of the imaginary world.
-There are some others, but mainly, it seems like common sense…reading at an early age is good…
But reading at too early of an age is bad. Have you seen those commercials on kids cartoon stations? They say that you too can teach your baby to read!!! Well, I know I’ve been tempted by them. Though I tend to be skeptical of tv commercials in general, it is real tempting, I mean, who wouldn’t want their kids to learn to read early right? Well, apparently most everyone should NOT want their baby to read early. Apparently it may actually compromise future comprehension. So unless a child shows that she or he WANTS to learn early, it is a bad idea to push them to do so…
So, I’m getting pretty tired. I need to post this blog.
I will leave with two thoughts:
1. It takes children roughly 2,000 days to learn to read, whereas it took human culture roughly 2,000 YEARS to develop reading as we know it.
2. Rhyming helps kids to learn to read more efficiently. It has something to do with identify like sounds and thereby identify the components of words and thereby recognize that components of sounds link to make individual words…
Good night everyone.
And....joyous randomness:
Earlier I was reflecting about how lucky our boys are because my wife is a bookworm. I don’t know how many of you all read my introduction but she is a lover of literature and one of her many book related passions is children’s stories. I think she was amassing her collection all those fifteen years ago before we even met. The horde has grown over time as she’s scoured book stands at the flea market and eagerly attended library sales (I’ve never met someone get so excited over a dusty $0.50 set of cardboard pieces surrounding crunchy pages). I like the pictures, she loves the stories…it is starting to wear off on me, but it’s really impacting the boys.
Our oldest started his affair early. I think his one of his favorite stories at the beginning was good night gorilla. It is a story about a sleepy zookeeper and a precocious gorilla who releases each and every successive animal from their enclosure that the zookeeper says “good night” to. It is a sweet story and perfect for bedtime because not more than once, do the characters in the story go to sleep.
The text in the story was simple; “Good night gorilla” “Good night giraffe” “Good night lion” (I think that is the actual order in which the animals are put to bed; I’ve read that story too many times). Our son would love to say the animal’s names at each successive page; he loved to make the “boop, boop, boop…” sound effects as all the animals marched behind the zookeeper to go to sleep at his house. Then he would crack up when the wife’s eyes sprang open after all the animals said good night and she had to walk them back to their cages. That was his favorite for a very long time; our younger son likes it too, but it is funny that he responds to different parts in a completely different way.
According to Ms. Wolf our son was preparing to read every single time we opened that book together. In fact he has been preparing to read from the very moment he opened his first book as a baby. Chapter six of Proust and the Giant Squid by Maryanne Wolf is all about the young reader’s brain and the biological components that prepare a child to learn to read. Apparently the very act of sitting in the lap of a loved one and listening to a beloved story being read sets the scene for children to become successful readers themselves; the simple act of sitting in someone’s lap creates a love memory that endures in the subconscious that we all respond to when we curl up with a good book.
In chapter six, Ms. Wolf seems to list countless positives for a child to be exposed to reading at a very early age. In an effort to be concise, I will list some of them here. As I type these points, please keep in mind that when I say a child is reading, it most always means “when the child is listening to an adult read to them”. Thanks for that little side note.
-Kids learn to experience and practice different emotions by reading and empathizing with the characters they read about.
-Kids learn different kinds of language skill types, like “for no light ever touched his skin”…no one really talks that way…that is her point; even though no one actually does talk that way, kids still learn to not only understand it, but associate it with the magic of the imaginary world.
-There are some others, but mainly, it seems like common sense…reading at an early age is good…
But reading at too early of an age is bad. Have you seen those commercials on kids cartoon stations? They say that you too can teach your baby to read!!! Well, I know I’ve been tempted by them. Though I tend to be skeptical of tv commercials in general, it is real tempting, I mean, who wouldn’t want their kids to learn to read early right? Well, apparently most everyone should NOT want their baby to read early. Apparently it may actually compromise future comprehension. So unless a child shows that she or he WANTS to learn early, it is a bad idea to push them to do so…
So, I’m getting pretty tired. I need to post this blog.
I will leave with two thoughts:
1. It takes children roughly 2,000 days to learn to read, whereas it took human culture roughly 2,000 YEARS to develop reading as we know it.
2. Rhyming helps kids to learn to read more efficiently. It has something to do with identify like sounds and thereby identify the components of words and thereby recognize that components of sounds link to make individual words…
Good night everyone.
And....joyous randomness:
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