Using Boxes all the Time!

Recently, I attended the National Reading Recovery and K-6 Classroom Literacy Conference in Columbus, OH.  I attended many great sessions and heard some awesome featured speakers, including Gay Su Pinnell, Katie Wood Ray, and children's author Jack Gantos (who was awesome & hilarious, by the way). 

While at the conference, I got some great reminders that smacked me in the face and made me remember what good teaching is all about!  Its just that, good teaching!!!  I don't need a program to tell me what to do, or a test prep manual to tell me how to prepare kids for "the test".  I need to follow the kids and teach them what they need to be readers and thinkers.  I need to use great books and teach them in authentic ways.  Now that I got that out, I can tell a little bit about a session that reminded me how great, using sound boxes are, and how I can use them here, there, and everywhere.

As a Reading Recovery teacher, I used sound & letter boxes every day during the writing portion of my lesson.  Sometimes I would put a word in boxes that the child was stuck on while reading to help them blend through the word left to right, if they were really good in boxes.  If you don't know what I'm talking about; sound boxes are a way for students to learn how to hear and record sounds in sequence, which is super important for beginning readers.  I've always known how powerful using sound boxes can be.  But I neglected to use them as much as I could have. They can help a kiddo say words slowly and learn to link what they hear to what they should expect to see.  They really help with getting the left to right visual processing under control.  I have noticed that kids really aren't checking with their eyes all the way through a word when they read.  Putting words in boxes is a great way to force them to LOOK.  What do I mean by all of this?? Well, here are some places in your literacy instruction where boxes can be used;

• During interactive writing (practice page)-choose words that you can clearly hear all the sounds. 
• During guided writing, small group writing- I work with a small group of first grade students and we always write about the book afterwards.  This is a great way for students to learn how to say words slowly and learn how to write unknown words. I wouldn't take words to boxes that are high frequency words or words that you cannot hear most of the sounds, or long multi-syllabic words.
• During guided reading-you may put a word in boxes that the child is stuck on to show them how to blend left to right with their finger.  Then have them re-read the sentence once they successfully solved the word in boxes.  You could quickly do this on a whiteboard.
• Writing-while you are walking around conferencing with students, and they ask you how to spell something, you could draw boxes on their "try it" page. 

I use these strategies all the time and I have started to see kids being able to process left to right in a more efficient way.  If anyone wants the exact procedures of how to teach a child how to use boxes, I can post those as well.  I think they are useful in kindergarten and first grade for sure.  Some second graders may need them. 

STP-Stop,Think, & Paraphrase

I wanted to share about a strategy that my partners and I have been teaching to support our third graders during an acceleration block and guided reading.  We have noticed that many of our students who are struggling to comprehend the text are ones who read, but then have no idea what they have just read.  They struggle with answering questions about the text and discussing the main idea.  They also have trouble with determining importance.

So before we began working with our new groups, we looked for some strategies that we could explicitly teach the kiddos.  These students were in need of some direct strategy instruction and needed some comprehension instruction to help them monitor their own thinking while reading.

We wanted to be able to address these things within the context of real reading instead of just "teaching to the test". We looked in the book Next Steps in Guided Reading, by Jan Richardson.  This book has a lot of great suggestions for teaching comprehension in your guided reading lessons.  Richardson talks about a particular strategy in the transitional levels (starting around J), called STP (stop, think, paraphrase).  Basically, you have students read a small section of their text from a passage, article, or book,  and then they cover the text with their hand and think about what they've read.  Then they tell what they learned or read in their own words.  This takes a lot of modeling by the teacher first. 

We began by modeling how to read a paragraph, stop and think, and then retell the most important facts or details.  We talked with the students about what was really important about the section and what was just extra information.  We also talked about putting the information we read into our own words.
My partners and talked how we would scaffold this strategy by modeling it for several lessons and letting the students try it out with us.  Then, we would have them try it on their own while we listened in.  Next, we would expect them to do as they read the entire article. 
We also followed up with the same strategy during guided reading.  After our introduction and students begin to read the text on their own while we listen in and take a running record, we had them do the STP strategy while they read.

A next step, was to have them write notes in the white space next to the text if it was a passage or article.  Whatever the students paraphrased, we modeled how they could write down a few key words or phrases related to that, so they could use it as a reference during our discussion and written responses.

So far, we have been seeing some success with this strategy.  Some of the students began taking on the strategy while independently reading.  The students' responses to our discussion are getting more clear and are more thoughtful.  I have seen small shifts in my group with their ability to understand their reading and monitor their thinking as they read.  We still have a long way to go. We have been working with the STP strategy for about 5 lessons now.  I know I will continue with this until I see more of a shift with their ability to re-tell and discuss the important facts and details.  This group of students in particular don't have trouble at the word level, they have just needed some very explicit comprehension instruction.

One thing that has made a big difference is text selection.  We have been using short non-fiction articles from the Comprehension Tool Kit. They are short enough to be read in one lesson and the topics are engaging.  The students also LOVE the article from the Scholastic Scope Magazine and Action magazines.  I highly recommend these article because they are awesome topics that the kids can relate to and have great opportunities to teach text features. 

I will update everyone on the group's progress and the next strategy that we take on!
Happy Teaching,
Brooke