Week of March 28th

I learned a lot from reading Tompkins chapter 9 about facilitating student’s comprehension. What students know and do during reading and a huge impact on how well they comprehend the reading. One thing that I learned from this text was that while students are reading for comprehension it involves more than just reader factors. One main idea from this chapter is the idea of text factors. These include genres, text structures and text features. I was also excited while reading this chapter because it mentioned the story book “Flotsam” and that is what I did my literacy lesson on. It was mentioned in the section about formats of stories, since this book has no words just pictures it might be appropriate for younger students to read this type of book. Although I think it might be interesting to see how different kindergartners interpret a book with just pictures versus a 4th or 5th grade classroom. I was also really interested in Tompkins chapter 7 about how students learn vocabulary. I am in a kindergarten classroom for placement and I think at this age and grade it is very important for students to expand their vocabulary. “Students learn the meanings of words by being immersed in an environment that’s rich with words, through lots of daily independent reading and interactive read-alouds (Tompkins, 225).” My CT exposes her students to a lot of different vocabulary through read alouds, silent reading, and daily instruction in class. My CT is very good at explaining and bringing out new words that the students may not know that they can add to their vocabulary. I think this is a very important part of being a teacher and is especially important in young grades so students can build a strong vocabulary at a young age.