Week 3 readings

This weeks reading was a true eye opener. We have such a great responsibility is teaching our students to read. In chapter 3 of the Tompkins book it said that the goal was to get all children to read fluently by 3rd grade. That is quite a task! When students have this fluency in reading they will be able to understand what they read better and read things faster. This is why it is so important to get children reading at the 1st and 2nd grade levels. If they fall behind here than it is so hard for them to catch back up.

The chapters in the Scaffolding Language book also provide some good information for teaching fluency. This fluency was in speaking rather than writing. Gibbons was saying that ELL need to be able to express their thought in spoken words before they put it down on paper.

I was interested in the many activities that were shown to encourage group and individual talk. One game that was interesting was the Find the Difference game. There were two different pictures and two groups. The one group had to ask things about the other groups picture to find out what was different between the two. This was a great way to exchange dialoged between the two groups.