Guided Reading for Students with Autism

For this week, I focused my efforts on finding articles about using Guided Reading in the field of Special Education.  I came across an article titled "Using Guided Reading with Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders," which explained how Guided Reading groups could help students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) be exposed to a larger variety of reading materials and to take a more active role in learning to read.  In the article, students with ASD are placed into guided reading groups, based on their skill levels, which were determined through several forms of assessment.  By being in small groups, students receive more one-on-one instruction and teachers are able to tailor activities to each student's particular needs.  Lower achieving students can benefit from observing higher achieving students, and the higher achieving students solidify their skills by helping to explain concepts to the lower achieving students.  Overall, the article said that the students with ASD have the ability to achieve 6-24 months of growth in their reading levels over a one year period, which I thought was amazing.

http://journals.cec.sped.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1429&context=tecplus

Vocabulary

When I think of vocabulary, I automatically remember having to write out definitions to the vocabulary words within a textbook chapter in middle school.  I would literally spend a couple hours a week copying sentences from a textbook to a piece of notebook paper, and the only thing I cared about was that everything looked neat and tidy.  I now realize that our teachers thought that copying definitions would help build our vocabularies, but that activity probably didn't help us much at all.  From reading Blachowicz and Fisher's article "Vocabulary Lessons," I learned that there are many useful, yet entertaining, ways to help children build their vocabularies.  There are two key words that stick out to me when discussing vocabulary, and they are "fun" and "repetition."  One common theme in many areas of learning is that children learn better when the subject matter seems interesting and they are having fun, so it seems that playing games associated with building vocabulary is the perfect way to help children become interested in new words.  When I think back to middle school and how boring and monotonous vocabulary definitions were, I can't help but to think how my vocabulary knowledge might be different if we had actually enjoyed learning those new words.  The other word that comes to mind about vocabulary is "repetition," and this is based on information from the article, as well as personal experience.  When a child is exposed to something repeatedly, they are more likely to remember the information.  By reading to children and playing word games with them, they will be exposed to many more words and start to remember the definitions by simply coming into contact with the words.

The article by Pardo about reading comprehension verified some opinions I have had about comprehension for a long time.  One of which is the opinion that just because a child can read words doesn't mean they can comprehend what the words mean.  The elementary school I attended growing up was very traditional in how they taught reading comprehension......if a student was a good "reader," they must also be good at comprehension.   As a child, I suspected that that scenario was not completely accurate, because I was consistently one of the best readers for my age, but I never seemed to "get" what I was reading as well as the other kids.  I now realize that I struggled with comprehension, even though I was good at the mechanics of reading.
I am really happy that emphasis is now being put on several different aspects that aid in comprehension.  Students do need a certain amount of practice at decoding and memorization, but I think that other components to comprehension are equally, if not more so, important.  Two of these components are the teacher being able to present the material in interesting and exciting ways and helping the student relate the information to events or ideas that are specifically meaningful to that child.  I have always found that if information is interesting to me or relates to aspects in my life, I am able to understand what I read about that topic better than if I had no interest at all.

Expressive Writing

Cunningham and Cunningham's article really rang home for me this week.  I am finding that the articles we have been reading in class pertain to me in so many ways because I have two young children.  I think that when children experiment with invented spelling, they are definitely setting a foundation for learning to spell correctly and for reading.  I had never seen a Making Words activity before, but it sounds like it is a wonderful idea for bridging the gap between invented spelling and correct spelling.  My seven year old son would benefit from a Making Words activity.  He has always struggled with reading and spelling, and he's just now gotten to where he is reading on grade level.  What surprises me is that he still uses invented spelling when he writes for fun.  Although he is in second grade, I really feel that invented spelling allows him to write as a creative outlet without having to worry about being graded for accuracy.  At times, I start to feel bad for not correcting his spelling during these creative writing sessions, but I ultimately decide that he should have his time to develop his creative side without rules.
What do you think?  Should I let a child as old as seven write without concern for spelling or grammer?

Parts to a Whole

As a mother of a 7 year old and a 4 year old, I am very aware of how phonemic awareness aids children through the process of learning to read.  The Yopp and Yopp article about phonemic awareness mentioned the use of Dr.  Seuss to help beginning readers learn about the importance of how the slightest change of letters and sounds in a word can have a big impact on the meaning of a word.  Children who read books such as those by Dr. Seuss begin to learn that there are different parts to a word that give the word its meaning.  I used books by Dr. Seuss as a reading aid when my oldest son was learning to read, and I definitely plan on using them soon as my four year old starts to read.

In Clark's "Sound it Out" article, I really liked how she explained how teachers can coach beginning readers about words by asking them questions, rather than just telling them the answer.  In my opinion, children learn and remember significantly more information when they are encouraged to think about how they can come up with a solution to a problem on their own.  By asking students to recognize a word by piecing together sounds and combinations of letters they already know, the students learn how to figure out words by themselves, and they also know why the sounds are important to the meaning of the word.

Fluency Redefined

I honestly had never read anything before about reading fluency.    As I read the article about one-minute fluency measures, I began to realize how much we need to learn about assessing reading fluency in our students.  To me, I think that one-minute fluency measures fall short in assessing a student's real knowledge, just like many other standardized tests.  These tests only measure what the student knows at that particular moment and don't reveal much in depth information about the student's actual strengths and weaknesses.  I sincerely hope that by the time I am officially teaching in a classroom, fluency assessments will include more extensive components that measure the prosody and comprehension of a student's reading, not just the rate and speed.
I also agree that the speed at which a student reads is not nearly as important as comprehending what they are reading.  Even if a student reads at a high rate of speed, they may not be comprehending what they are reading.  THis lack of comprehension puts a student at risk for underperforming in other areas of education, so students need to be given countless opportunities to read at their own pace and to read what they find interesting, which will lead to a higher fluency level and a desire to read.

Young Readers need Change

As I read the assigned articles for this week, I kept making mental notes of the teaching methods used in the articles versus the ones currently used in schools.  I was left with the question, "How can there be so much documentation about the benefits of learning to read and write through real-life experience, but most schools are still stuck on the phonics method of teaching?" It seems logical to me that children would learn to read and write better when they possess confidence in what they're doing.  In fact, most of us, as adults, find it easier to complete tasks when we are confident in our abilities.  Therefore, instead of using a reading system that is rigid, such as learning phonics and practicing only in the context of a workbook, teachers should consider using systems similar to that in "Letting go of the Letter of the Week."  Every child has a unique background, so they should be able to use their past experiences to aid them in their journey to read and write.  As they learn the associate certain sounds to parts of words they already know, they become "readers," without ever learning the sounds of specific letters.  By using their new-found skills to complete real-world tasks, the students gain confidence and not only learn to read and write, but also learn critical life skills, such as writing letters, reading labels, etc.  I hope that in the near future, more school systems will take an open-minded approach to the way students learn to read and write.  To me, it is obvious that the research is there to support a change in the way children are taught to read and write.  What do you think children need in order to become lovers of reading/writing?