By: Katy Hribar
For Walden University

In pursuit of my master’s degree in Reading and Language Arts from Walden University, I have compiled a presentation for my present class. The course, The Beginning Reader, introduced a myriad of concepts and ideas, and then provided me with the opportunity to apply them in a classroom setting with young readers. I found the course and its research-based strategies both informative and encouraging, and therefore wanted to share the information of the class with you. Please enjoy my presentation, and if you have any questions, contact me at
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Thanks!
Katy Hribar

Cognitive
Assessments
Affective
Assessments
Knowing your students
I believe it is important for teachers to know their students. This can be accomplished through cognitive assessments, both formal and informal.
Examples would may include word lists, fluency assessments, observations, writing samples, or passages with questions (Laureate Education, Inc.,
2010b) . In addition, teachers should use affective assessments to learn about a child’s interests, loves, and motivations. Teachers should ask questions, conduct inventories, and create activities that allow students to share their ideas. Examples might include a “favorites inventory” , or a bag activity where students bring in materials that are important to them
(Laureate Education, Inc., 2010a).

These research-based strategies helped me to create a literate environment while working with my small group of beginning readers. I began my interactions with the students by conducting a questionnaire about their favorites and dislikes. It opened my eyes to the students’ interests, fears, and motivations and therefore allowed me to create lessons and activities to enhance their literacy experience. It allowed me to select texts and create journal topics that were of inters to the children. It also increased the level of comfort and trust, and encouraged the students to take risks in the classroom.
 Examples of questions:
 Name your favorite…. food, animal, activity, holiday
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Something I fear:
Something I am good at:
Something I am looking forward to this year:

To help me create the best environment, I used a research-based fluency assessment for my cognitive screening. Using this assessment allowed me to work one-on-one with the students, further increasing their comfort level. Again, this increases a child’s security level and encourages them to take risks in the classroom.
Additionally, I questioned the students’ understanding of the passage through questions and discussion. These interactions and observations helped to illustrate student strengths and weaknesses
(Laureate Education, Inc., 2010b). Not only did I have the students’ reading rate, but I could also monitor their ability to decode words and use expression while reading. This helped me craft lessons, interventions, and future plans for success for the students.

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A students’ first grade reading ability can predict how they will read in
11 th grade? important!
(Laureate Education, Inc., 2010d). Early literacy is extremely
The more children are exposed to books the more background
knowledge and success they will have with reading.
(Laureate
Education, Inc., 2010d). Get your child reading with these easy ideas and strategies provided by the U.S. Department of Education: Reading tips for parents!
Students only spend an average of 3.2 minutes reading informational text!
Be sure to encourage children to read a variety of genres that apply to the real world.
(Laureate Education, Inc., 2010d). Spend time discussing these informational books with children. These books are often accompanied by charts and diagrams. Children should be able to interpret these nonlinguistic representations and understand their purpose.

Children should read a balance of genres. In addition to consideration of genre, books structure should also be considered. Is the book primarily words? Or do pictures/icons/charts dominate the text ? Another consideration is does the text fit the child’s literacy needs in terms of difficulty? Sound complicated? Use the literacy matrix below to map a child’s books so that you can monitor the texts they are reading and help meet their goals (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010d). .
Linguistic
Difficult
Informational Text Narrative Text
Easy
Semiotic

Additional considerations when selecting books:
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Sentence length
Number of syllables in words
Length of text
New words students may not know
Size of print
Pictures
Text structure

The ideas discussed in the previous slides allowed me to create a literate environment for my group of students. First, instead of selecting a random story for us to read, I considered the variety of factors that affect a text’s readability. In addition, I used the literacy matrix to find a variety of texts that fell in different areas on the spectrum. This way, students would have a taste of different books, genres, and structures. I chose an informational text and used it to discuss non-fiction text structures. In addition, I selected a fictional story that played into the students’ interests and background knowledge. Each books was important to my students’ need for phonics and fluency work. In addition, using the matrix allowed me to find three pieces of text that would challenge the students, but not frustrate them. The ideas truly helped me reflect on a piece of my teaching that I had not considered before and provided pieces of literature that were appropriate for my students and their success.

We must first know the children we are working with or teaching. After this phase, comes the question what do we do with them and the texts we have selected? There are three perspectives to teaching literacy and each helped me create a literate environment for my students through a variety of activities aligned to each perspective (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010e). A brief description of each perspective:
1.
2.
3.
Interactive perspective: Teaching children how to read using fluency, comprehension skills, and reading strategies and be processors.
Critical perspective: Teaching children how to critically examine text
(Who created the text? Why? What are the real world connections?)
Response perspective: Allowing children to experience the text they are reading through responses and feelings (journals/writing prompts, art, or performances)

The interactive perspective is the most basic perspective, and largely deals with teaching students how to read. We want our students to be capable of reading independently and be able to navigate text without an adult’s help (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010f). In other words, we should teach children to be metacognitive. This should be done by teaching children how to use appropriate reading strategies, setting purposes for reading, visualizing, reflecting on material that is read, and encouraging independent navigation after explicit teaching and modeling (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010f). In addition, there are a variety of activities that can aid in the development of language and literacy such as read alouds to students, small group work, providing a variety of texts, encouraging literacy across subject areas, and extending vocabulary.
On the next slide you will observe pieces of an interactive lesson that I created for a small group of students. I believe this accurately depicts an interactive literacy environment that challenges students and promotes metacognition. The lesson successfully allowed me to monitor my students reading skills and strategies.
Additionally, it allowed me to plan for future lessons.

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Examples from my lesson that encourage strategic processing:
The lesson will begin with the students being asked to close their eyes and visualize being on a field trip at a local stream.
 This will open discussion for talking about a variety of reptiles and amphibians they may experience while reading. Additionally, this will allow me to discuss the importance of visualizing with the students before they use the skill while reading.
Next, the students will use these ideas to transition into a KWL chart
 This activity utilizes the skill of background knowledge and connections to text. Students' schema, or what they already know about a topic is extremely critical to literacy development. The organizer also asks what the students want to know, and later what they have learned.
Students will complete a picture walk discussing what they observe and share their ideas.
 This encourages setting a purpose for reading and teaching an important skill to use before reading any text (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010f). The students also can identify the type of text and cross-curricular connection it may have.

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Additional examples from my lesson that encourage strategic processing:
First, I read to the students using the interactive read-aloud idea that allows my students to be active participants in the reading process.
 This allowed me to model think-alouds, so that students could recognize the importance of thinking about what is being read confirming previously held ideas, and making connections to their own lives.
Students then had the opportunity to practice think alouds and schema when they read with partners. This emphasized independent practice and student responsibility.
 During this time I could observe the students reading fluency, comprehension skills, and metacognition therefore allowing me to further plan interventions or extensions for their success.
Students used a Venn diagram to compare and contrast animals within the story.
 This is teaching and applying reading strategies that students can use while reading.
Students concluded the lesson by completing the KWL showing me their ability to comprehend the text.
 The students were utilizing the idea of schema and sharing things that they had learned and connected with other ideas in their minds.

These perspectives aim to hit the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and encourages students to think more deeply about text (Laureate Education,
Inc., 2010g). In addition, these perspectives teach students real world lessons such as analyzing ideas and making judgments, being open to new ideas, making connections, and acknowledging feelings about a topic.
Therefore, I believe these perspectives are crucial to not only literacy success, but for success in society.
The following slides depict a lesson that allowed me to create a literate environment using the interactive, critical, and responsive perspectives using reading and writing while promoting metacognitive skills.

The students and I used the popular text Frog and Toad, and we read the short chapter entitled Alone. This activity used a variety of reading strategies and skills from the interactive perspective such as:
 Using schema and making connections
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Using a graphic organizer to create a nonlinguistic representation of our thoughts
Completing a picture walk and making predictions using visualization
Reading the story as a large group and with partners to assess fluency and word attack skills
Discussing the story’s narrative elements and completing a story map about its parts
Answering questions about the story to assess students’ comprehension
However, the goal of this lesson was to encourage activities from the critical and responsive perspectives. These ideas follow on the next slide.

The research based practices that I learned from the course encouraged me to design pieces of the lesson that asked the students to think from other’s perspectives and consider their own feelings while reading (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010h). These activities allowed me to monitor my students’ critical thinking skills, and plan for future activitites. Therefore, I instructed the students to do the following using the critical and responsive perspectives:
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When working with vocabulary words, students will extend their knowledge of vocabulary words by drawing picture or making a real world connection to each word.
Prior to reading, students will be introduced to the story and its theme, by being asked to share how they feel about being alone.
During and after the reading, students will debate how the story might change if it were told from
Frog’s point of view. The teacher will model this idea, and then ask the students to think-pair-share their thoughts on the topic.
After reading, students will extend their ideas of being alone, by writing a paragraph about where they like to be alone, why they enjoy it, and their feelings. They will have the opportunity to share this with their classmates.

In closing, I learned a plethora of research-based strategies that allowed me to create a rich literate environment for students. Each piece of the presentation taught me more about literacy and provided me with ideas for students that will aid them in the classroom and in society. Creating a literate environment is comprised of a multitude of strategies and practices. It is an on-going project, and I hope that the presentation was informative and helpful for you to create your own literate environment. I encourage you to use the infromation in any way you can to better the readers in your life. Please feel free to contact me with questions or extensions of ideas.
Thank you!

Dalton, J. & Smith, D. (1986) Extending Children’s Special Abilities – Strategies for primary classrooms. p36-37.
Retrieved from http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/researchskills/dalton.htm
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010a). Getting to know your students[Webcast]. The Beginning
Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010b). Reading inventories. [Webcast]. The Beginning Reader,
PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010c). Analyzing and selecting texts.[Webcast].The Beginning
Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010d). Informational text in the early years [Webcast]. The
Beginning Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010e). Perspectives on literacy learning. [Webcast].The
Beginning Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010f). Interactive perspective: strategic
processing.[Webcast].The Beginning Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010g). Critical perspective. [Webcast].The Beginning Reader,
PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010h). Response perspective. [Webcast]. The Beginning
Reader, PreK-3. Baltimore, MD: Author.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Intergovernmental and Interagency Affairs (2003). Educational
Partnerships and Family Involvement Unit, Reading Tips for Parents, Washington, D.C.