Module Four: Activity One

What an inspirational video! It brought tears to my eyes and chills running up and down my spine as I sat and watch Robin begin his reading journey. As teachers, we are faced with students in our class who struggle with reading and often feel like a failures. It’s our job to encourage and motivate students to work through their insecurities and teach them what Robin has learned, If you believe…you can read.

While watching Robin’s journey to read I noticed many important strategies he utilized to help him with his reading. One strategy I notice him using was context clues to help find meaning in a sentence that wasn’t making sense to him as he read it. He was able to recognize “I’ll gave you” didn’t not sound grammatically correct in the sentence. He was able to reread to correct the sentence to “I’ll give you”.  This was an excellent strategy he was able to use to help him in his reading. Robin also used “chunking” to help him with words that were unfamiliar in the text. He looked for smaller parts of the words that were familiar to help identify the unknown word. This is a great strategy to use when reading. It was amazing to see Robin being able to identify the word “congratulations” just by know the word “rat” and con”.

Robin’s story is very inspirational, and inspire me to be the best reading teacher to “all” my students. In the words of Robin, “don’t forget about these kids, they are really, really worth saving.”