Week 8 - Widzinski

In thinking about how I developed as a reader after reading this week texts, I thought about the different stages I went through. While reading Tompkins, I realized that even today, I still do the five steps of the reading process when reading texts for school (books for pleasure, I definitely don't use all five steps!). In thinking back to my time in elementary school, I did a lot of independent reading. There were times when guided, shared, or reading aloud was used, but I realized we rarely did buddy reading. Being in the education program, in TE 301, I learned a lot of the types of strategies and skills to help readers become successful (Tompkins p. 50), but in my kindergarten placement, I am rarely seeing any of these strategies used. Because I am in kindergarten, the steps Tompkins presents in the writing process are not being used. My students are still learning to write. These are the writing steps that have been engrained in my mind throughout my schooling; I am very familiar with all of these steps. When it comes to comprehension of the text, what I am seeing in my placement is a book being read, and a small large group activity done with the text. For example, we read about how things are different from "then and now" (past to present), the book had things like riding in a horse and buggy to school, compared to driving cars to school. The after reading activity to check for comprehension was for the students to come up with things that are different from in the past to now. A lot of the students just retold details from the book. I agree with Julia, in Applegate's text, I think I was more of the politician in school because of the reason Julia pointed out- wanting to say what the teacher wanted to hear. I found Applegate's text extremely helpful in the fact that each type of reader was described, along with interventions. This is extremely helpful in getting to know each different kind of reader in your class. Gregory and Cahill's article was helpful for me because I am in a kindergarten class. My MT does not do anything to foster comprehension like what was presented in the article. I think my students would really benefit from doing "mind movies" and surprisingly, that is very similar to what I will be doing with my students after my lesson on Tuesday!