Standard 2.4 Literacy Strategies: Candidates collaborate with classroom teachers to reinforce a wide variety of reading instructional strategies to ensure P-12 students are able to create meaning from text.

“Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”- Edmund Burke.  A crucial component of reading is making sense of what has been read. From an early age, students need to be taught how to think and read at the same time. For student to understand the strategies for reading comprehension, they need to read both print and digital forms. They need to practice comprehension strategies while reading material in both print and digital forms. Therefore it is essential that the school librarian be an active partner with other educators to collaborate and teach reading instructional strategies so that students can create meaning from text in order to develop metacognitive abilities.

During my school library program I did not create any specific lessons to promote reading instructional strategies. The majority of my assignments promoted reading for information and reading for pleasure. For my artifact, I selected a Dropin for third grade students. For this activity, students will read the assigned article and check for understanding by responding to comprehension questions. Right now, all my questions are literal. To encourage students to think critically about texts, I will include higher-level questions that require students to infer and make connections. To modify this lesson to reinforce reading instructional strategies I will add a section to the dropin for decoding and understanding new vocabulary related to the article. Collaborating with the reading teacher will ensure that the vocabulary I chose will reinforce strategies learned in the classroom. For example, if the classroom teacher is instructing on affixes and prefixes, I will choose words from the document with those components so that students could practice those strategies.

I also created a Web Link Bibliography for teachers to use as supplemental resources in the classroom. These web sites allow students to practice reading and writing skills. To promote certain areas of the Web Link Bibliography, I will collaborate with classroom teachers to ensure that the links support their instruction. For my next Web Link Bibliography, I will break it down by grade level. This will ensure that resources available support the reading instructional strategies of the students at various levels.  Sites such as Kids’ Poetry Page and MysteryNet’s Kids Mysteries allow students to create their own poems and scary stories.  One of my favorite sites on the bibliography is The Book Hive. Students are provided with an area to discuss and ask questions about books thus giving students a meaningful purpose for reading. Students are required to be metacognitive in order to ask questions and make connections to what they are reading. 

To promote metacognition in the school library, I will collaborate with classroom teachers to provide lesson ideas and resources to promote reading strategies. One of the professional books I want to encourage teachers to read is Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor. As a classroom teacher, I use lessons from this book to introduce students to the idea of megacognition. In this lesson I have the students make a “reading salad.” While reading, I have students put paper tomatoes into the bowl. When I stop reading and share my thinking, another student puts paper lettuce into the bowl. After I’m finished reading, it is quite apparent to my students that good readers are doing more thinking then just reading. These types of activities reinforce comprehension strategies for students. Promoting and sharing other professional literature with teachers will help me to reinforce instructional reading strategies to ensure students are able to create meaning from text.

Artifact

Elephant Dropin Activity
Web Link Bibliography

Professional literature such as Comprehension Connections is vital to reinforce reading instructional strategies with other educators.