Reading Strategies

Today, we devoted most of the morning to our first reading of our second story in the Open Court book. This story is called "Angel Child, Dragon Child." It tells the tale of a Vietnamese refugee girl and her struggle to adapt to life, particularly school life, in the United State. She is taunted by her classmates when she shows up to school wearing traditional Vietnamese clothing, and she is teased for her inability to speak English. As the story develops, we learn that the girl's mother remained behind in Vietnam because there was not enough money for the entire family to emigrate. The story concludes on a happier note when the children, not sensitive to cultural differences, hold a fair and raise enough money to buy a plane ticket for mother to come and be united with the family.

This story, nearly 20 pages long, is not easy reading for children who only recently were second-graders. But it does offer them a lot of opportunities to develop thinking skills that easier material, such as the first story in the book, does not. To help develop these critical thinking skills, the Open Court authors identify several key "strategies" that good readers use. We try to model and practice these strategies on our first reading of any story.

One strategy is "Predicting." Experienced adult readers predict as they read unconsciously, but most children, and all struggling readers, have difficulty with this. So, as I began reading the story with the children today, I asked them for "clues." In Open Court talk, clues are predictions based on some kind of evidence, typically an illustration or a title. Requiring the students to tell WHY they think something will happen in the story make the guessing much more thoughtful and precise.

Another strategy is "Making Connections." This requires the reader to try to think of a time when he or she faced a similar situation to one faced by a character in the story, or else to think of a time when they had a similar kind of feeling. So today, for example, I asked if anyone wanted to share a time when they were separated from a parent and how they felt about that. Several children told about being lost or having a parent have to go somewhere on a long trip. Hearing these kinds of experiences helped the students to more completely understand the problem faced by the lead character in the story.

In weeks to come, I will share more strategies with you and also discuss some of the key reading SKILLS we teach our children.

In music today, students had a changed their focus from beat to rhythm. We used a simple jump rope rhyme to see how a beat can be split into two subbeats, each with a word or a syllable. This is a preparation for understanding quarter and eighth notes. We also began introducing a modified version of the "Kodaly" speech syllables for these notes.

Homework: Students should have finished ALL of the first math assignment sheet by this time and should have at least started to take the test over standards NS 1.1, 1.3, and 1.5. Those who have taken it so far have done quite well. Everyone should be working on the second assignment sheet now which should be completed by Tuesday. It only has four assignments. Check the gradebook for any missing work.