Real Life Reading Inquiry

For my real life reading inquiry project I chose to go back to home town and observe a third grade classroom.  Early on in the semester I had asked a friend of mine, Mrs. Penman, if I could come to her classroom for an hour or so and observe.  In this particular school they have recently departmentalized the third and fourth grades, and she is teaching third grade reading and language arts.  She gets three different groups of students for almost two hours each.  I was in her classroom during most of the time that her last class of the day was in there.

I had a very positive experience in the classroom during this observation.  Although I had planned out my observation in advance, most of the instruction that I witnessed that day was unfortunately more focused on Language Arts than it was on Reading.  Even though I did not get to see a specific reading lesson I was able to study the classroom environment while I was there and I was able to discuss a couple of reading topics with the teacher while there.

As far as the classroom environment was concerned it looked as though the teacher was doing many of the things that our readings have suggested.  The classroom was filled with different reading materials, and had several places that looked as though they would be good to set down and read a book at.  There was a nice reading nook that she had created by turning a bookcase on its side and creating a space separate from the classroom.  She had several other bookshelves with all kinds of books on them.  She had everything from picture books to medium-sized chapter books.  I saw this as a huge positive considering how often our readings have specifically stated how important it is to have a large selection of books available to students in the classroom.  I also noticed that the word wall that the teacher had created on an extra bulletin board on one side of the classroom.  She adds words and important concepts to it when the students come across a new word or a new concept that they are not familiar with.  While I was in the classroom she taught them about cause and effect and then put those words up onto the word wall.

Another thing I noticed during my visit was that many of the students were not confident enough in their reading to read things that they had written aloud.  Pryor to my arrival they had been working on madlibs and about the time I walked into the classroom the teacher started to go over them by having the students read them aloud.  Out of the seven or eight students that volunteered to share their madlib with the class only one of them wanted to read it themselves.  The rest of the students wanted the teacher to read it for them.  I suppose this is because they are in a phase where they have noticed that they their reading needs improvement.  I also wondered if having a stranger observing may have made some of them a little nervous about reading theirs aloud.  Either way it still reminded me of our discussions of the phases that young readers go through.

After my observation I was able to talk with the teacher about fluency and her use of fluency tests and other assessments with her students.  She uses fluency tests quite a bit to test her children, and relies on them to see if they are progressing in their reading.  From our readings about fluency I can see how this differs from some of the opinions and things that we have been taught.  We have learned that relying on fluency tests too much can be really bad because they do not really take comprehension into account.  Fortunately Mrs. Penman also uses other types of assessments with her students that do test for comprehension.  She puts a lot of emphasis on both fluency and comprehension, two important players in building a successful independent reader.

From my in class experience and subsequent discussion with the teacher, I feel as though I learned some things that I want to duplicate in my classroom.  I also saw a few things that I want to shy away from doing in my future classroom.  I want to make sure and create a classroom environment similar to this one that includes many books and a good place to read.  I also want to make sure and have a word wall that lists difficult words and concepts.  I want to be able to encourage my students to choose books and to read them alone.  I want to encourage the students to never be afraid to read in public, and that practice only improves their abilities.  I see a need for fluency tests, but I feel as though this teacher may be relying on them a little too much.  In my classroom I want to focus more on comprehension, and maybe not as much on fluency.  In my opinion there needs to be a better balance of both to get the most out of students.