About the teaching of Reading...

I've learned today and many days leading up to today...that there's so much confusion on what reading instruction really is. Thanks to Hollins for sharing this video with me today. SO... Do we KNOW how to teach reading? It is so abstract... but yet needs to be done so explicitly. We know that many students learn to read by reading. (I think of Carole's famous quote... "some just learn in spite of us!") We know there are some students that don't learn to read without intensive interventions and lots of phonemic work. Decoding, fluency, prosody, comprehension... There's so much talk about reading instruction and so much jargon. Instructional levels vs Independent levels? Running records... PALS! And ultimately let's not forget the Balanced Literacy Diet. The cohesive collections of daily work that we must do with children... the writing for a purpose and connecting our work with authors' text. Learning and sharing with others around us and from literature that we are reading. Building meaning... building schema. Being a Writer, yet another program in ACPS, offers a fabulous structure for writing instruction for even the most reluctant and struggling teachers of writing. My GOODNESS what a strong writing teacher can do with the scaffolding and texts offered by Being a Writer! Then we have the Daily Five... which is a structure that can support reading instruction... but it is NOT a reading program. Do we all understand this? As I said... there is so many misunderstandings about how to teach reading. How long should our literacy block be and how can we dedicate an hour to Being a Writer... and OH! I hate this word study stuff!! Sit UP! This video will give you something to think about!! Enjoy. pssst... it will require 10 minutes of reading... and some schema!