In the first few weeks of this course (Reading Education 430), I have learned that it is crucial to equip students with reading strategies. These strategies will help them master reading with comprehension and fluency. I want to be able help students develop strategies that will help them approach unknown words with confidence.
While direct instruction is often necessary and effective, Allington and Allington write that students must "discover" reading strategies on their own so that students may access and implement those strageties independently. Teachers can construct Making Words activities to guide students towards developing reading strategies. Rather than telling students exactly how to combine smaller words to form longer, more complex words, teachers use this activity to help students realize the effectiveness of this strategy themselves.
Here is a great video documenting a Making Words lesson in action. This video really helped engrain in my mind, what a Making Words lesson entails. I loved seeing the excitement of the faces of the children when they discover the secret word (or the long word made up of all of the letters).
As the video conveys, a Making Words activity involves the teacher picking out a long word in which multiple smaller words can be constructed with letters from that long word. Students explore possible words by manipulating the order of the individual cut-up letters they recieve. At the end of the activity, the secret word, or the long word, is revealed to the students through their construction of smaller words. I love that this activity emphasizes word patterns, word combinations, and requires students to utilize strategy to determine the secret word.
Can you think of any other guided discovery activities that could help teach reading strategy?
Also, how might a teacher ensure that the strong readers in the class will be patient enough to wait for others students to complete the activity? We don't want these stronger readers blurting out the secret word! It must be kept secret until all students are able to adequately explore the letters and practice word construction.
Love the video. It really helps us understand the activity. Thanks for sharing. We'll have some more hands-on experience with making words next week.
ReplyDeleteThe video was a great depiction of the book's explanation of the "Secret word" game. I think a good way to do this activity if there is a clear distinction between who is a strong/weak reader would be to break the class into smaller groups. The groups could be a mix of both strong and weak readers, so the stronger readers could help the others out. If this method doesn't work, then the children on similar levels should be grouped together, and the teacher could work with each table individually.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the video. Taking a large word and breaking it down into smaller, more familiar words can make tackling those big words seem like not such a scary task to emergent readers. Word patters and combinations are an important concept when trying to understand and learn English because so many words are created using pieces of smaller, more frequently used words.
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