Sharing Rambling, Resources and Recipes for Learning in Life

Sharing Rambling, Resources and Recipes for Learning in Life

Category: Resources

EducationRamblingsResourcesScience of Reading

Fluency, Everything is Coming Together!

By AudreaLeave a comment

As I dive more and more into the Science of Reading, I am actually surprised that fluency remains one of the pillars for reading. Before you jump to conclusions that I’ve lost my mind or any understanding of what reading has to accomplish to be successful, let me explain.

First, I would like to say how grateful I am for the chance to write these posts. What started as a way to help readers, specifically my sister, understand more about reading as they work to help children learn to read, has become a way for me to understand reading better and organize my thoughts more about it. Writing these has helped bring more clarity to each piece of reading and the way they fit together and I am SO grateful. Having that clarity gives me more focus and the combination of the two will help me to do a better job of helping my daughters and my students traverse the sometimes rocky terrain of reading.

Back to fluency and explaining my thoughts on why it seems odd as a pillar of reading. First, why I think it remains a pillar. To be sure you must be a fluent reader to comprehend well. Fluency is also what takes reading from a lesson or a chore to a pleasure and an adventure. And these facts are, I’m sure, the reason it IS one of the five pillars of reading. The reason I say I am surprised that it is left as a pillar is that the more I read and learn about the Science of Reading, the more I realize that fluency is a byproduct of accuracy and automaticity of the foundational skills of reading.

To kind of paint a picture of this, I find it helpful to think of Scarborough’s Reading Rope which is based on the Simple View of Reading. The Simple View of Reading says that reading is made up of two parts: decoding and language comprehension. Decoding is a blend of Phonemic and Phonological Awareness. As a learner becomes accurate and automatic in both of these skills, they become a quick and efficient Orthographic Mapper. Once they become an efficient orthographic mapper, they build a larger and larger sight vocabulary and reading becomes more and more effortless. This then adds the third element of decoding which is sight recognition. This would reach by many definitions or assessments fluent reading. Strength in these three areas alone would give students a high score on tests like DIBELS ORF, it would aid them in the timely completion of STAR and MAP tests. But, without the other half of the simple view of reading, all of these abilities come to naught. That is because if all the learner has is decoding fluency then they cannot understand or remember or apply anything they read. Reading has become almost rote memorization. To me this drains reading of all of it’s color, drama and interest. It truly just becomes the job that so many struggling readers see it as. Interestingly enough, most struggling readers see it as a dreary chore, not because of a strength in decoding alone, but rather a deficit in decoding even if they have a strength in Comprehension. This leads us to the other half of the Simple View of Reading.

The second part of the Simple View of Reading is Language Comprehension. Now, like was discussed in my post on comprehension, comprehension is truly the understanding of BOTH what one reads AND what one hears. That is why it is called language comprehension in this view and not reading comprehension. According to Scarborough’s Rope, Language Comprehension is made up of background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. As you can see very little of this comprehension is actually based on reading. Rather it is based on talking. That is why when a teacher is trying to help students grow in comprehension their lessons must include lots of conversations. It is also why we need to facilitate conversations with our students, with our children at home, with our nieces and nephews and grandchildren. The more they talk and the more words they are exposed to in conversation, the greater their reading comprehension will become. This is because they then already have a foundation of strong knowledge of word meanings. Then as that Comprehension or knowledge of meanings is mixed with their decoding skills of Phonemic and Phonological Awareness and Orthographic Mapping then a reader is truly FLUENT. They are able to read accurately, with a natural rate of speed AND with the appropriate expression based on their understanding (comprehension) of the text.

Here’s a recap. Fluency remains a pillar of reading because without it reading doesn’t work. However, it is a pillar that, even more than the others, CANNOT stand alone because it is gained only through the development and success of the other pillars. Therefore, fluency rarely if ever needs to be targeted for remediation or intervention. It will naturally occur as you strengthen the other skills necessary for reading. It stands as a good example and important reminder that NONE of these pillars are meant to be alone. There are five pillars because the institution of reading cannot be held up by any one of them. If a learner is only strong in one, then that part of their reading will stand tall, but it will always be skewed as the other parts fall and slide and slant every which way. Fluency sets the example and the is the final marker of how reading is the coming together of five key parts to create one whole and balanced reader!

Happy reading! Let me know of any examples you have of seeing fluency grow, not from explicit fluency instruction, but from a learner growing either in a deficit pillar skill or in all of them simultaneously. I look forward to hearing your success stories, both to learn from you and to celebrate your victories!

EducationRamblingsResourcesScience of Reading

Comprehension, the Last Building Block!

By Audrea1 Comment

Comprehension is the last bit of knowledge and ability to be or become a strong reader. It is last because if a learner does not have an accurate AND automatic foundation in both Phonemic Awareness and Phonics or Phonological Awareness then they will not be able to read fast enough to remember what they have read. Or if they are able to read fast enough, but the majority of their brain power is going to figure out what the letters on the page are actually saying, they will not have the mental energy to put into discovering the meaning of what they are reading. It is still one of the main building blocks of reading because it is vital for reading success. After all if you can read anything and read it quickly, but then can remember or tell nothing about what you read, what good is it!?! Simply put, comprehension is the ability to recall and understand something. In our case the ability to remember and understand something we have read.

This pillar of reading is the one I feel the least knowledgable about. It’s the one I feel the least competent to help students with. However, I am developing a greater knowledge of it as I learn more about the other pillars of reading and as I teach more students how to read. I also think that one of the reasons it is so hard to help my middle school students with it is because, for them, reading has become this completely compartmentalized thing. The phonemic awareness and phonological parts have been so hard for them for so long that they have spent all of their energy just trying to read/figure out the words on the page and they have never even really tried to understand those words. Also, some of how we teach and assess their reading has lent itself to this idea. Students develop a way of thinking that says you can read just to get the words off the page, but not to learn anything. But, if a child never reads just to get words out, like on a DIBLES test. Or if that is never the only kind of reading they do AND their reading often or always includes questioning or discussion of what was read, then they automatically have a habit of comprehension. And they realize that it is an expected part of reading.

I know that comprehension can be broken down into sub-skills like main idea, comparing and contrasting, summarizing, and more. And I honestly think, from my experience as a teacher, that this breaking apart of comprehension is what makes the overall skill of comprehending so muddy and hard to, well, comprehend. If a person can read a book and tell you all about it, if they can tell you what the author’s point in writing it was, some of the key parts and share their personal take aways from it, then they comprehended it. They may not answer one specific question about the book accurately, but still be able to do all of the aforementioned things. And, so again, even though their answer to that one question was incorrect, I would still say they were successful in comprehending what they read. But, if we break all of the questions down and label each one with a specific sub-skill of comprehension then all of a sudden because of one missed question there is a problem with their comprehension. All of a sudden, because of one missed question, this person can’t summarize or infer or whatever the sub-skill attached to the question was.

Partly because of this and partly because of my experiences with children, I feel like it is better to teach and work on comprehension as a whole. Then yes, if over time and looking at several different kinds of writings (articles, books, passages, essays, excerpts, poems, advertisements) you see a pattern emerging that shows that a learner is struggling in one area of comprehension, then you may want to focus on working only on that one sub-skill. However, if we are in the habit of teaching comprehension as a whole then we will be exposing learners to all the sub-skills of comprehension in a myriad AND multitude of ways. And that, the repetition and different types of exposure and practice, will be the best thing to get them to proficiency in comprehension as a whole.

I feel like we in education work hard to break every overarching skill we deem necessary down into as tiny of parts as possible. And I totally understand the thought process behind this. If all we know is that a learner struggles with comprehension, how are we supposed to fix it? Because maybe they can answer any question about the reading that was explicitly mentioned in the text, but anything that they have to figure out on their own is a complete mystery. Well, like we discussed in the above paragraph, we don’t want to unfairly say they can’t comprehend when really they just can’t infer. So, there are very valuable things that can be gained when we break big skills into smaller ones. Unfortunately, what I see happening is that we are not just breaking big skills into tiny skills to understand where a learner has gone astray, but we are also breaking big skills into tiny skills when we are teaching students. The result is that we now have 10 lessons to teach instead of one on a skill. Before we could have read a novel to the class and talked about main idea and perspective, about summarizing and inferencing and all the other things that go into comprehension as we read. Now, the teacher rarely has time to read a full novel to their class AND have rich discussion about what they are reading. And it’s this rich discussion that generates learning in all of these sub-skills! They don’t have time because they have to teach a myriad of mini-lessons on each sub-skill of comprehension. They may have to teach a main idea lesson with these 10 excerpt paragraphs. After that they need to teach inferencing with a Brain Pop video. They will also need to teach basic comprehension with recall questions on the Science article they just read. Then they will use summary to talk about the article they read next week. They’ll be waiting to summarize until next week because there are four more main idea lessons with excerpts that have to be taught this week, and we can’t confuse the students with too many skills at one time. The thing is that none of these sub-skills were ever meant to be a stand alone ability. They are just part of strong comprehension ability.

Therefore, I think that comprehension should be broken down into it’s sub-skills when assessing a student who is struggling with comprehension. BUT, I think that all of the sub-skills should be taught together in as organic (naturally occurring) of opportunities as possible.

The other big take away that I KEEP getting with each of these pillars of reading from the Science of Reading is the importance of spoken or verbal language in ALL of the pillars. It is no less important with comprehension. Before a student can comprehend what they read they have to be able to comprehend what they hear. I have encountered a very few students who have a much higher comprehension ability with what they read than with what they hear. BUT, this is rare and an exception rather than the rule. If you look at dyslexic students for example, who often struggle with and are behind in reading, their oral comprehension abilities are generally excellent and often far above their age or grade level. This means that although, they may have a terrible time reading a book and telling you anything about what they read (even a very short passage), if they listen to an audio book they can often tell you all about it, even if that book is above their grade level. This is also why young children can retell chapter books when they can barely sound out cvc (consonant, vowel, consonant) words like cat.

Remember, we develop our oral language before we read. AND we repurpose some of those language areas of our brain for the task of reading. That is why children should always be exposed to texts that are above their current reading and even learning levels. They need this exposure to scaffold their oral language development. And the more developed their oral language is, the stronger their foundation for learning to read and read well.

My current main take aways about comprehension are as follows. First, if a child struggles with oral comprehension they are likely to struggle with reading comprehension. Second, we must teach comprehension as a whole including conversations about things read by the students AND to the students that ask them to summarize, infer, compare and contrast and all of the other comprehension tasks. Third, as with all reading skills, oral language needs to be a large part of learners instruction in comprehension. We need to talk about what we read to them, they need to talk about what they read to themselves, and they need to read out loud. Fourth, without an adequate oral vocabulary, students will struggle with reading comprehension. And lastly, if students have not developed accuracy AND automaticity in Phonemic and Phonological Awareness they will not be able to read fluently enough to support their reading comprehension.

EducationRamblingsResourcesScience of Reading

Vocabulary, What It Is and What It Isn’t.

By Audrea2 Comments

Vocabulary is what most of us would think it is. It is the knowledge of the meaning of words. The difference from what I thought of as vocabulary and what I have come to think of it is how much oral language contributes to it. When I think of vocabulary I think of the vocab tests I took in school and that I have given to my students. However, I have come to understand that those types of vocabulary lessons and tests will have a limited impact on students’ vocabulary skills. However, a students’ oral vocabulary can have a big impact on their learning and vocabulary skills.

Just like the phonemic awareness skills that I have talked about in another post, vocabulary can be learned orally. As children learn to speak and they have conversations with their families and the people around them, they are developing their strongest vocabulary skills. If there is not enough conversation or the people they talk to have limited vocabularies, then their vocabularies will be limited too. This is why it is imperative that we force children to put their devices down and have conversations. They need to talk to each other and to their families and to their teachers. They need to research things they love and talk about them. They need to do book talks and describe the meaning of unknown words that they learn in their reading. This is because their oral vocabulary is the biggest indicator of their vocabulary skills. If a student has accurate and automatic Phonemic Awareness, accurate and automatic Phonological (phonics) Awareness and a limited oral vocabulary they will still struggle to map words efficiently. Because words are mapped by meaning, students who can decode words, but don’t know what they mean will struggle to map them quickly. They can still map them based on their knowledge of the meaning of the letter sounds and the reasons for the letters making those sounds. This knowledge and meaning will not be as useful as the meaning of the words themselves, though. However, if a student has that accurate and automatic foundation in phonemic and phonological awareness AND a strong oral vocabulary then they will grow their sight vocabulary much faster. This means that they will increase their fluency in reading much faster and efficiently.

This does NOT mean that there is no place for vocabulary tests, roots lessons and learning new words during Read Alouds, Book Studies, Science and Social Studies lessons. It does mean that we cannot rely on them for the building of students’ vocabularies. We need to build students’ vocabularies through class discussions, debate and life experiences and activities. We need to share with our students the value of face-to-face conversations. We need to draw them in by using big words and calling things like sounds by their actual names like phonemes. We need to call digraphs digraphs instead of just letter teams or pairs. Every opportunity you have to expose children to new words and meanings we must take.

The main takeaways are that vocabulary comes mainly through oral language and that we should do our best to provide our children and students with a rich oral vocabulary environment. When children or students have a limited oral vocabulary we can help them by providing these rich oral environments. We can still use vocabulary tests and roots lessons to build on what they know, but we need to remember that there is no substitute for having conversations! That is why we feel like we know that students or children have learned or mastered words when they start to use them when they talk. Vocabulary should be a never ending adventure in learning, there is always more to learn! Let me know some of the strategies that you have used successfully to help children grow their vocabularies!

Also, if you enjoyed this post you may enjoy these posts on the other pillars of reading:

Phonemic Awareness, What Is it and Why Does It Matter?

Orthographic Mapping

The Difference Between Phonemic and Phonological Awareness

EducationRamblingsResourcesScience of Reading

Orthographic Mapping

By Audrea2 Comments

In this post I am going to try to explain orthographic mapping. I will not be able to fully explain it because I am still adding to my understanding of it. When you read texts, books or publications from the experts in the Science of Reading, you may hear about a person’s orthographic lexicon and their sight word vocabulary. Understanding what is meant by those two terms will help you understand orthographic mapping a bit more.

First up, orthographic lexicon. This is simply an individual’s lexicon, which means a vocabulary (dictionaries are sometimes referred to as lexicons) of words that they recognize and can read on sight. They no longer have to sound them out, they recognize that string of letters as a word instantaneously EVERY time they see it. It is called an ORTHOGRAPHIC lexicon because ortho means right, correct or straight and the person reads these words correctly every time they see them. Graph means to write or draw, so again the person reads these words correctly every time they see them written. The suffix -ic simply means having to do with reminding us that the lexicon/vocabulary has to do with correctly read written words. So an Orthographic Lexicon is a person’s VOCABULARY or collection of words that they read CORRECTLY every time they see them WRITTEN down.

Secondly, we will cover what is meant by sight word vocabulary in the Science of Reading. If you have been teaching for any length of time you have likely heard of sight words. You may even remember learning “sight words” when you were in school. In these contexts “sight words” are actually just high frequency words. This means they are words that appear often in our language and if you can read these words you will be able to read the majority of texts you have to read. However, within the context of the Science of Reading sight word vocabulary refers only to a person’s orthographic lexicon, those words that an individual can read correctly and instantaneously on sight, regardless of context or font.

The process of getting a word from being a random string of letters to a word within a person’s orthographic lexicon is called orthographic mapping. The most enlightening thing about orthographic mapping, in my opinion, is that it is NOT based on sight. Unlike letter names and sounds that are learned by sight, we map words based on meaning. This is where that repurposing of language centers within the brain comes into play. When children or people are learning new words and orthographically mapping them (committing them to memory) they use the portions of the brains where the meanings and definitions of words are stored, not the sight parts of the brain. This explains why you may see someone familiar in the hallway, but not remember their name even though you can tell by sight that you know them. But, if you’ve orthographically mapped the word brown, you will automatically and correctly read it every time you see it. You won’t know it one day and forget it the next.

This understanding of the fact that we use meaning to get to words to “stick” instead of repetitions or visual/sight practice is the biggest game changer for me in understanding orthographic mapping. It means that if a child sounds out a word repeatedly, but has no understanding of the meaning of the word it will take longer to map the word. The meaning can be based on why the letters make the sounds they make in the word. For example, you may teach a student why circle has the /s/ sound for the first c (because it is followed by an i), but it has the /k/ sound for the second c )because it is followed by the consonant l). Or it can be based on the actual meaning of the word circle (that it is a round shape with no corners or sides).

There are several strategies that help readers map words more quickly. One is the use of sound boxes. This is particularly helpful for words that don’t sound like they are spelled like the word said. If you are using sound boxes with said you would need 3 boxes even though there are 4 letters. You only use one box for each sound regardless of how many letters it takes to spell it. The first box would be for the s that says /s/, the second box would be for ai that says /e/ and the third box would be for the d that says /d/. This strategy is actually to help students learn to spell words correctly. However, attaching the meaning of which sound is spelled with which letters can help the reader map the word more quickly. Stopping to discuss the meaning of a word that the reader does not know (how to read OR the meaning of) will also help with mapping. Thirdly, discussing the meaning of the whole sentence after figuring out a word that the reader could not read on their own, but knows the meaning of helps speed up orthographic mapping. A good reader needs 3-4 exposures to words to map them into their orthographic lexicon. Struggling readers need up to 20 or more. Studies have been done up to about 16 exposures, but then the difference in recognition starts to drop off so studies have not really been done on higher numbers of repetitions.

This is where and why having a strong verbal vocabulary is important to people as they are learning to read. As long as words remain simply strings of letter sounds with no real meaning to the reader, they will struggle to map the words and their reading rate (speed of reading) will remain slower. Another interesting thing to keep in mind before we leave this subject is that David Kilpatrick, one of the leaders in the study of the Science of Reading, says that we can work with young children to help them map words, but that mapping doesn’t really pick up until third and fourth grade. This is a tricky and possibly reassuring thought for some of our struggling readers in 2nd grade. It is vital that they have a strong and accurate knowledge of letter sounds and rules, but if they have a strong and complete phonics foundation and are still a slow reader it is likely that their orthographic mapping has just not picked up yet. This does NOT mean we should not be intervening for these students. It does mean that if speed is their only deficit, they may not be behind. Interventions should focus on phonics and phonemic skills to make sure that they are BOTH accurate AND automatic with all of those skills AND on building their verbal vocabulary through read alouds, class discussions and conversations. Their speed should be increasing. If it isn’t or if they are lacking in either ACCURACY or AUTOMATICITY in phonics or phonemic skills they need continued intervention on those things.

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Letter Name and Sound Recognition (where reading starts)

By Audrea2 Comments

As children are developing their Phonemic Awareness they will also start to develop their knowledge of letter names and sounds. Phonemic Awareness starts to develop as children become aware of spoken language and continues to and through 2nd grade at the most complex levels. If anyone (child or adult) does not develop all the necessary Phonemic Awareness skills, they can still and always be learned and this will strengthen that individual’s reading fluency.

Letter names and sounds are the foundation of learning to read, which again is NOT a natural thing for our brains to learn. The brain repurposes part of its language centers for learning to read written language. Letter names and sounds is the one part of reading that is visual in learning and remembering. Word recognition is based on meaning, but letter recognition is based on sight.

This means that letter recognition takes hundreds, if not thousands, of exposures to the letters. It is also important to expose your child or student to multiple fonts and cursive and print versions of the letters and to work on both upper and lower case letters as they are learning the letter names and sounds. There are various ideas of whether students should learn letter names or sounds first. This is because children need the sounds to read, but they only need the names for spelling. And spelling is a later skill than reading.

One idea is that they should learn them simultaneously and that they should learn all the sounds for each letter at the same time. This is the one that makes the most sense to me. I like this idea because several letter sounds are an alliteration to their names. This means that the beginning of the letter sound is the same as the beginning sound of the letter name like /d/and d, /t/ and t, /b/ and b. So, learning both together strengthens sound recognition for several letters. Some that are confusing based on alliteration are c and g, but if you are teaching both soft and hard sounds from the beginning it becomes easier. The letter c has the hard sound /k/ which is not an alliteration, but it also has the soft sound /s/ which is an alliteration. *The letter g is the same way, it says it’s hard sound /g/ when it comes before an a, o, u, or any consonant and it says it’s soft sound /j/ when it comes before an e, i, or y (that is the same rules as the letter c). And although the letter g’s hard sound is not an alliteration with it’s name, it’s soft sound is. *There are some exceptions to the spelling rule mentioned above, but the better you know the rules of English the fewer exceptions there are.

I also agree that it is good to teach students all of the sounds a letter can make from the beginning. This means teaching soft and hard c and g sounds, long and short vowel sounds. When I first read this, I felt that this would just be confusing and too much for young children. However, as I navigate reading with my daughters it is showing as a better and better idea. For my oldest who needs a LOT of repetition and is very literal, being taught all sounds and when to use them from the beginning would have strengthened her knowledge of all the sounds with the repetitions as she was learning to read. With my youngest who is able to read higher and harder texts than she’s been “taught” to read, having automaticity with the multiple sounds of letters would “unlock” those tricky words for her.

So, I advocate for teaching children both the letter names and sounds, individually, but at the same time. This means I would teach them their letter names with multiple fonts and as many repetitions as possible. And then I would also work with them on sounds with multiple fonts and as many repetitions. I would not teach them to read a card A says /a/ and do the letter name and sound simultaneously. It needs to be clear to the child that there is a difference between name and sound and you should ask them for one type of skill at a time. You can ask for the name of one letter when you show a card and then switch to ask for the sound of the next card after repeatedly practicing with both skills.

I also advocate for teaching children ALL of the sounds a letter can make and which is the most common from the very beginning. They should know that c USUALLY says /k/. But if the word you’re reading doesn’t make sense with /k/, it also says /s/ and you can try that sound. It just gives them more options as they are sounding things out and builds an unconscious knowledge of the rules for when it says what. The child may start to see that certain letters follow each sound. Then as you teach the rule they already have a frame of reference for it, or a word that comes to mind as a example of the rule.

I hope this information is helpful in understanding how our brains learn this information and the purposes it serves. Please let me now what you have experienced in helping children read and share any tips that you have found helpful! I am always eager to learn!

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Phonemic Awareness, What Is it and Why does it Matter?

By Audrea2 Comments

In a nutshell Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear the individual sounds in spoken words and manipulate them. You may manipulate them to form other words or break the word into parts or isolate and produce one sound or part from the word. It is tasks like changing the /c/ in cat to /b/ and recognizing that that makes the word bat. It also goes from something that simple or as simple as saying birthday without birth and knowing that makes day, to things as complex as knowing that saying picnic backwards gives you kinkip or knowing that animal without an is imal. Some of it is super easy, some of it is super hard. It seems even harder if you are learning to do it AFTER becoming a proficient reader because you automatically think of how words are spelled instead of just how they sound. So, when a proficient reader is asked to say cake backwards they often want to say ehcake instead of the correct cake. The e makes no sound going forward, so it can make no sound going backward. Fortunately, when you are working on these skills as a toddler through first grader you are more proficient at listening to language than at reading it making these tasks are simpler to learn.

Like all parts of reading and reading as a whole, there are children and people who will intuitively learn this sound and word manipulation. Also, like those other reading parts, there are many who need to be explicitly taught these skills. Which leads us to the “Why is it important?” part of the title. The simple answer is: Because it makes us better readers. The complex answer is: We don’t really know. What I mean by that is that there is a direct correlation between phonemic awareness and reading ability, but from what I have read no one knows exactly why that is the case. So, we know it matters that young children and older children, if they didn’t master it when they were young, need these skills in order to become proficient readers. What we don’t know is why.

The best news about phonemic awareness to me is that it is all aural. This means it all takes place with spoken words. The child or student doesn’t have to read anything to practice these skills. That means it is a welcome break for struggling readers and that it can be worked on with very young children. As I stated earlier, it starts very simple and gets rather complex. It has been rather fascinating to me as a reading teacher to see how some of the simplest parts of this like say birthday, now say birthday without day (which gives you birth) is NOT always an automatic and/or accurate thing for some struggling readers even if they are in the 6th, 7th or 8th grade. One of the best resources I know of to practice these skills is David Kilpatrick’s book, Equipped for Reading Success. In the book he explains more than I have here about Phonemic Awareness and also gives pages and pages of exercises and drills to use for the practice and mastery these skills.

Again the best part is that they feel like word games to most children and it can take less than a minute to practice for the day. This is the book I use with my own daughters (they are in kindergarten and second grade) to ensure they have mastered all the levels of Phonemic Awareness they need as well as with my students in Middle School.