Week 2 Assignment 3

Teaching reading is a huge responsibilty, and I'm always on the lookout to strengthen my skills in teaching reading and writing. "Reading Rockets" is a treasure trove for teachers seeking to strengthen their skills. The website offers mini video clips on reading basics such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and comprehension.

Here are some key ideas I learned from the videos:

• Teachers and parents can begin to teach children reading basics at a very young age. This can be accomplished by introducing them to print awareness, namely, helping them understand that letters represent sounds.
• Children can distiguish between different sounds in their native language. It's therefore important for parents to engage their children in conversation and read to them at a very young age.
• The videos gave me a clear understanding of the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics. Phonemic awareness is when students work with individual sounds in words, while phonics is the understanding that letters represent sounds.
• Children who understand that sounds work together to create words, possess phonemic awareness. I especially enjoyed watching Neil's parents help her work on phonemic awareness by playing a rhyming game that helped her pick out distinct sounds in a word. I'd definitely love to play this game with my own students during whole-class or small-group instruction.
• Teachers should move through letter-sound connections in a sensible order when teaching phonics. Teaching sounds in alphabetical order is not effective.
• Fluency is important not only because fluent reading sounds natural, but also because it is the bridge between word recognition and comprehension. Helping children read fluently is one way to help them work on their comprehension skills. While watching the video on fluency, I learned a lot about using a word web. Word webs help students learn to decode, read fluently, and comprehend multiple meanings.
• I'm especially interested in learning about methods of teaching vocabulary and was therefore excited to learn about semantic gradients. Using semantic gradients helps students think about relationships among similar words so that they can become stronger readers and writers. I also loved watching the teacher in the video link the new strategy to a previous reading; it doesn't have to be an independent lesson. This vocabulary strategy includes collaborative work as well, a great way to cater to all students' learning needs. 
• When I learned to spell, teachers taught us the spelling rules, and we had to memorize them. Now, we help students understand the rules on their own. I like learning about the method of showing words to the students and having them see the spelling rule on their own.
• I learned a lot about teaching comprehension while watching the Jigsaw method in action. Students read grade-level appropriate texts in home groups. Each student reads about one subtopic. Next, they scatter into expert groups and discuss their subtopics with other "experts"; they ask questions and pull out facts. Students organize information they've chosen to report back to their home groups. They teach the members of their home groups about what they've learned, and they then share what they've learned from their friends. The Jigsaw method helps students work on their reading comprehension and build a learning community.