Introduction
Hi, my name is Tim Rasinski. I’d like to share with you through this video some strategies that we’ve identified that have an impact on developing readers, developing not only readers who know how to read, but readers who like to read. We think it’s important to not only touch the head, but also to touch the heart and I think we’ve identified some strategies that you’ll find not only enjoyable for yourself and your kids, but also ones that will have that impact that help kids become better readers.
I’d like to give you a little bit of background about myself. I come to you as a teacher. I teach at KentStateUniversity right now, but prior to that, I was a teacher. I taught elementary school in Nebraska, classroom, Title I, struggling readers. In fact, it’s been my interest in struggling readers that led me to my doctorate which focused on kids having difficulty. At KentState, I run a reading clinic where we work with kids who have difficulty, in fact, that’s where we tried out a lot of these strategies that we present for you today. About a year ago, I was identified with some heart problems and that resulted in my having heart surgery. I had my surgery about a year ago and I was out of action for several months. As soon as I could, I went back to schools that I had been visiting and I was really touched when I entered one of my favorite classrooms and the teachers had taught the kids to sing a song.
When we put these strategies together, some people said why don’t you call it “Tim’s Favorite Strategies for Teaching Reading” and that might be a good way of describing them, but there’s more to them than just Tim’s favorite strategies.
These strategies that you’re going to see have been documented to actually work. Scientific research by myself, my colleagues, and others in the field have shown that these strategies do have an impact on kids developing as readers. So, if you’re working with all readers, especially those who are having trouble, be assured that these strategies do work.
We’ve organized them around the work of the National Reading Panel. And many of you know the National Reading Panel, this is a group of experts that Congress put together several years ago and they were given the task of identifying factors associated with high achievement or factors associated with success in learning to read.
Words and Songs
You know, since we did The Pledge of Allegiance, I’d like to do The Pledge of Allegiance in song and I one of my favorite songs is about the flag and it’s called, The Grand Old Flag. Do you guys know, The Grand Old Flag? Do you? Do you sing it? Okay. Well, then I want you to join. Let’s warm up those voices everyone. Ready?
(Singing)
You’re a grand old flag
You’re a high flying flag
And forever in peace may you wave
Da, Da, Da, Dum, Dum
Should old acquaintance be forgot
Keep your eye on that grand old flag.
Good class, Ms. Drew, this is fantastic. They are fantastic. Nice job! You sang it better than the adults sing it most of the time when I work with adults. I’d like you to take a look a look at the lyrics up here though. I was so glad that you were watching the words. Well, here’s what I’d like for you guys to do. Take a look at those words there. Do you see any interesting words? Any interesting words that you might like to learn? Words that we don’t necessarily use all the time? I’m going to write them up here on the board.
Yes, what’s your name? Tina. Emblem. Oh, that’s a fantastic word. I’m going to write that up there. How do you spell it, Tina? Okay. Emblem. That is a good word. Now, let’s talk about it for just a second. What is an emblem, does anybody know? Our flag is a sign for what? Our country. It stands for our country.
What are other signs that you might know, whether for our country or maybe when you go downtown Chicago or something on a trip, what are some other signs? You had your hand up a long time, Elizabeth? Can you think of a sign?
Car emblems, like what? Oh, like who makes it, like a Chevrolet or a Ford or a Toyota, you know, they have those symbols. Yeah. That’s a sign. Those are emblems, right? What’s another one? That’s a great emblem.
A statue is an emblem, sure, it stands for something else.
How about places where we eat? Can you think of any famous places where we eat that have an emblem? I don’t know. Laura? McDonald’s. The golden arches.
Word Families
One of the best ways of teaching phonics is through word families. Some people call word families rhymes, R-I-M-E-S, other people call them phonograms. They’re they part of a syllable that begins with a vowel and contains any subsequent consonants, like, A-T, I-G-H-T, A-C-K. They’re chunks of letters that have a very consistent sound to them.
Lenae Aerie*, Pat Cunningham, Marilyn Adams and many of the wonderful experts in our field who have looked at phonics say that word families or phonograms is one of the best ways of approaching word study with kids or phonics. Now, we certainly find that to be true. One of the questions that is often raised, though, are the first and best word families to teach kids?
Well, Edward Frye, another great scholar in reading has identified about 30+ word families and, according to his analysis, those 30-some word families, simply by tacking on a beginning letter to them, will give students the ability to spell and decode 654 one syllable words. That’s a pretty good batting average if you ask me, so that’s a good starting place. And what we’d like to share with you are some ways of teaching these word families. I think a lot of teachers teach word families simply by identifying a word family and brainstorming words that belong to that word family.
So, you might see A-T on a sheet of chart paper and underneath A-T, after the kids learn the sound associated with A-T (pat, rat, sat, fat, and all of the other words that rhyme with it or contain that word family).
But for a lot of kids, that’s not enough. They need to go beyond that. We find that a lot of our students are able to recognize the word on the word list, but they can’t see it in context. It’s like they’ve never seen it before. And so, one was of approaching this with kids that we’ve found is to bring in passages that contain those word families with some degree of frequency. What kind of passages would those be? Well, rhymes, poetry.
Word Ladders
But let’s try another one, one more way of building words. I call them word ladders. Some people call them letter ladders. Again, Pat Cunningham talks about this as well, but I really got into this big time. Here’s what I’d like for you guys to do. I’d like for you to number from 1-7, okay, 1-7. Okay. Everybody got it? Now, next to number one, I want you to write this word, TRICK. You better not play a trick on me. How do you spell it, everyone? T-R-I-C-K, trick, okay, tricky word. Okay. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make six more words and each word is going to come off of the previous word. So, you ready?
Number Two: Change one letter in TRICK and, number two, make a word that describes a sport, a springtime sport in which boys and girls run around a big circle. Anybody know what that word might be? I don’t know. Lilianna? Lileena, I’m sorry. TRACK. Yeah. Go from TRICK to TRACK. Change one letter. What letter would that have to be? The vowel, very good. Okay. TRICK to TRACK and TRACK has other meanings, too. Something that trains ride on is a track. Okay.
Number Three: Now, you’ve got to listen closely, this is a hard one. Change one letter in TRACK and, number three, make a word that describes when you take a sheet of a paper that you can see through and you put it on top of a picture and you draw that picture. What’s that called? Yes? TRACE. Go from TRACK to TRACE, change one letter. What letter do you think you have to change? The K, okay. Okay. Everybody get it? Okay. TRACE. What happened to ‘K’ sound? That E made it go away. What else did the E do to that word? What else did it change? Not only the ‘K’ sound, but what did it do to the A? Yeah, it went from the ä sound to the À sound. All right.
Interpretive and Meaningful Reading
You know another part of fluency is the notion of reading in phrases or syntactically appropriate chunks, if you will. We have kids out there who, when they read, they read the words correctly, but they read like robots. I have friends who call it robot reading. They read like word-by-word. That’s not the natural unit of reading I would argue. The natural unit is the phrase -- the noun phrase, the verb phrase, the prepositional phrase. And phrasing is usually marked by expression. When your voice goes up and down, that’s often an indication that that’s where a phrase foundry is. We need to help kids develop this sensitivity to phrase foundries. How do you do that? How do you do this? You don’t have to have a million worksheets to do this. I’d like to suggest a couple of things:
High frequency words. Do you teach high frequency words? I certainly think there’s a place for those. Words that you see over and over again, whether it’s the dolce list, Ed Frye’s high frequency word list -- he calls them instant words -- or whatever list you might use.
I think most teachers put those on word walls and flashcards, word banks, and those are terrific. Please don’t stop. But how about also if you teach them in phrases, if you teach five of those words per week or 10 words per week, keep them on the word wall, but teach them in short phrases, too. My little sister. Your older brother. Near the woods. Under the moon. Prepositional phrases, noun phrases, verb phrases. Teach them that way, also. And you’ll get more than you bargained for. Students will be learning the high frequency words just through the repeated exposure, but they’ll also be learning to read those words not individually, but in the context of a phrase.
Comprehension
Well, you know, the goal of reading is comprehension. We could have kids who are good decoders, have great vocabularies, they can read with terrific fluency, but they still may not comprehend well. And what we know from the work of the National Reading Panel is that good teaching of reading involves instruction and comprehension. What are some of the strategies that work for comprehension?
Well, number one, kids have to have a strong background. They have to know something about what it is that they’re reading. What that means is we need to nurture that background knowledge in students. Many kids simply come to school and they haven’t had a lot of experience with life, they haven’t gone to the zoo or the ballgame, they haven’t gone on summer vacations, and so, when they read about those topics, they may not be able to relate it to their own experience, their own background. So, one of the things for sure is to build students backgrounds and that’s not always easy to do in school because, of course, we can’t take kids on summer vacation or to the ballgame or downtown or whatever. But there’s another way of taking kids on these experiences or providing these experiences for students and that’s, of course, to read to students. I think one of the very best ways of developing background knowledge is to read to students.
(Reading Excerpt)
I told her about my mama leaving and I listed out the 10 things that I knew about her. And then I explained here, and Naomi, I missed mama more than I ever had and wanly. I told her about the preacher being like a turtle, hiding all the time inside his shell. And I told her about finding Winn Dixie in the produce department and how, because of him, I became friends with Ms. Frannie Flock. And I got a job working…
Not only when you’re reading to students are you modeling fluent reading for them, but you’re providing them with that information that, when they read on their own about a similar topic, they’ll be able to relate it to their own background knowledge that they’ve developed through that experience with books that you’ve provided them.
Compare and Contrast
It’s not enough for students to be able to have a strong background, they need strategies for connecting what they’re reading to that background knowledge. And now, we’re not just talking about background, but we’re actually talking about strategies for comprehending the text to connecting between the new information in the text and what you already know, how to connect the two. And that’s where we actually get into some specific strategies for helping kids that we teach kids. Three, in particular, that I think are critical and that I use a lot, not only in my teaching, but as a reader are these: Compare and contrast, mental imagery, and prediction.
Now, compare and contrast is simply that idea that to understand something, we often have to connect it or contrast it to something you already know. How is something that you’re learning like or unlike something you already know? What’s the best way to learn about rugby? Perhaps if you’re in the states, the most common explanation is to compare rugby to football. How are they alike? How are they unlike? And through that analysis, we come to a deeper understanding of what rugby is, like, connecting, creating an analogy, if you will.
We need to help kids do that comparing and contrasting. So, whenever we, you know, in more common terms, we often use the term text-to-text or text-to-life connections. I’m sure you’ve heard that, but the reason why those are so important because they do require, they nurture in students that compare and contrast, but we don’t have to necessarily use compare and contrast.
When we ask kids how is this character like you? How is this story or this event or this episode, like something that’s happened in another story we’ve read about? We’re juxtaposing the new information with something they already know.
“She could make just about any body laugh. Do you know anyone like her? Can you? Yeah, George, I agree. You can make just about anybody laugh.”
Mental Imagery
Have you ever read something and then you’ve gone to see, say, the movie that’s based upon the book or the story? It’s very likely that the movie is never as satisfying as the book that you’ve read. And have you ever wondered why that’s the case? Well, I think I know the answer. The answer is because you’ve already seen the movie -- in your head. We, as adult good readers, we have almost this natural, it seems, ability to create mental images as we read. We see the movie as we read, particularly narratives. And that’s why when you go see the movie, you’re seeing somebody else’s interpretation. When you’ve read the book, the movie is just the way you think it should be. When you see the movie, you’re seeing somebody else’s and it can never be as good as your own movie.
Well, it is a strategy, this idea of mental imagery or visualization. A lot of scholars have identified this as a key comprehension strategy. The problem is you see that a lot of students don’t have this ability or they don’t have it developed as well as it should be. You know, we live in an age where we don’t have to. We don’t have to create images. We have TV and movies, even the iPods nowadays have images built into them, so you don’t have to work at creating those mental images. If you don’t work at it, you don’t develop it. And if you don’t develop it, you’re going to be at a loss or at least a disadvantage when it comes to reading those materials that lend themselves to imagery.
One way of doing that, of course, is simply to ask kids what do you see? What do you see in your mind’s eye when you read this story? Or have kids sketch out a picture of what it is they’ve read about and then share it, compare it with their classmates’ pictures. Talk about this. Just bring it to the level of conversation.
Prediction
You know, one of my favorite strategies for teaching comprehension is prediction or I call it prediction. Some people might call it anticipation, perhaps. Scientists call it hypothesis.
When you make a prediction about something, what are you doing? You’re using the information that you’ve gotten from the text up to that point, right, but you’re also using your background knowledge to make that prediction, that inference. Do you guys think you predict much when you read? I guarantee that you do. I guarantee that you do. You do it all the time. Again, it’s one of those things that we’re so good at, we’re not even aware. But here’s proof. Maybe I shared this with you before. I apologize. But proof is this. Have you ever read something and you come to the end of the chapter or the end of the book and you happen to be surprised? Okay. That’s evidence that you made a prediction.