Out in Left Field

My CT does a lot of think-alouds and modeling for the students in order to encourage comprehension. In addition, as she reads stories, she often makes connections to other parts of the texts or even other texts so that students can begin seeing and understanding the kind of thinking necessary for comprehension. Throughout different texts, she is always asking questions and encouraging students to become engaged in the story we are reading. My CT does not necessarily tell the students that these ways of thinking improve comprehension (at least she has never said anything about it while we are there) but I have seen some of the kids pick up on it and a few are able to make text to self and text to text connections.

Since I am in a first grade classroom and most of my students are struggling readers, I feel that the students do better with comprehension when it is a text that is either 1) read together or 2) read to the students. This way they can focus more on meaning of the text rather than on the phonological processes necessary to decode the text. However, even in our group read-alouds I was able to identify many of the different profiles that Applegate (2006) discusses in her article. Reading her article and having the discussion in class kind of brought me to an “aha” moment as I began to think about the students in my own classroom. I also found it very helpful that Applegate did not just present the different profiles but also ways to help those different students with their comprehension skills.

For the most part, I would say many of my students are left-fielders and so listening to some of the comments my classmates made about how their CT’s deal with this (i.e. making sure before you allow a student to speak that their comment/question is on topic and also giving students time right after lunch to share whatever story they want) was really helpful. I know I have always struggled with wanting to let the children share but also recognizing that their stories, while important to them, were very off-topic and were probably confusing to their classmates. Hearing ideas both from the Applegate article and from my classmates will definitely help me the next time I feel that I am struggling with keeping my students focused on the text at hand.