Danielle, Adriana, and Rusty

Danielle, Adriana, and Rusty

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Module Four: Instructional Challenge


Based on the description of Marcus and his miscues it appears he is having difficulty in two areas of reading. It appears he doesn’t seem to know that reading should make sense, and he doesn’t seem to use prior knowledge and context to predict what’s coming next. According to Weaver,” this is an important reading strategy that makes even work identification easier” (Weaver, 2002). There are plenty of teaching strategies that will help Marcus overcome these areas of weakness in his reading. One strategy I feel Marcus will benefit from greatly is using Retrospective Miscue Analysis. This strategy will help Marcus hear his miscues and realize his word choice doesn’t make sense in context to the story. Once he realizes it doesn’t make sense, he will have the opportunity to reread with the teacher offer reading strategies as needed. This strategy will also help him to “think ahead” and learn to use prior knowledge to deal with problematic words in the text. Another strategy I fell Marcus would benefit from is relevant mini-lessons focusing on his areas of weakness. A teacher could create a cloze sentence and model how to determine the missing words by using the context of the sentence and prior knowledge all while modeling the thinking process that is used.  Other strategies that would be beneficial would include previewing the books prior to reading and making predictions on the stories, reading various books to the class with a thorough discussion, and providing plenty of time for sustained reading to practice the skills that were introduced in the daily mini-lesson.  

3 comments:

  1. I think your strategies are great! I actually didn't mention any of these in my post, so I think that just shows there are so many things we can do as teachers to help our struggling students. I agree with your ideas, and I think Marcus would learn a lot from each. I think the cloze strategy would be really beneficial in using syntactic and semantic cues to help determine missing words.

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  2. I agree with you! Marcus does not yet know that reading is supposed to make sense and he is not aware of what is coming next. But your ideas are great ones that will help him improve. I also mentioned using a lot of the same strategies as you including "think ahead" and retrospective miscue analysis. These will probably be best accomplished for Marcus in a small group that includes other reading strategies for him and his classmates. In addition, I really liked your idea of cloze practice. That is a strategy I had not thought of for Marcus, but that I think would work really well for him to improve his reading.

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  3. Great post! Marcus has not realized that reading should have meaning and make sense. Your ideas are great and would really benefit Marcus and improve his reading comprehension skills. I don't think I mentioned the cloze practice in my post, but that is a great idea! He needs a lot of opportunities to have positive reading experiences and your ideas will allow him to have those opportunities!

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