developing readers

As shared in previous posts, the children are literary artists; developing foundational phonological skills and strategies for decoding and encoding text through their active engagement with their peers and learning environment. Our conversations, shares, and reflections provide opportunities for children to orally explain their thinking and connect. These experiences support the development of essential speech and language skills - supporting their growth as readers.

Reading workshop does not make a reader - a reader is engaged in an ongoing process of meaning making and discovery. The child as a reader engages with symbols in their environment, sings songs and explores the rhythm of language, makes signs for their classroom and draws pictures of their family. The child as a reader is a group of five and six year olds gathered on the rug, a big book in the middle. The child as a reader is a community of children excitedly circling all of the vowels in their morning message. The child as a reader is using their understanding of language to plan how to construct trap doors and space shuttles out of magna-tiles, working collaboratively with their peers.

The child is continuously growing as a reader.

 


One way we grow in our classroom, is through ongoing engagement and collaboration with peers; opportunities to talk, read, create, disagree, and play. In the below photographs, the Kindergarteners share a favorite book with a partner engaging in important book talk. While it is cause for celebration to see the children using reading strategies and hear partners helping and supporting one another, it is their conversations and rituals I am most intrigued by.

Conversations and Connections

On this particular day, I hear one partnership laugh over the pictures in their book about two dogs.

"Oh, look at this one - I think that's LuLu, yeah, that's LuLu - she is so cute!"
"I like LuLu best, my dog looks like that"
"Mine doesn't, she's yellow, well yellowish and goldish"

Rituals

Another partnership has finished sharing their books with one another, again, I hear laughter as they flip their books to the back cover. I watch as their pointer fingers move to the bottom of the back cover. Each child points to and reads the letters and numbers found in the ISBN. I ask them about it.

"When we are done reading together, for fun, we do this thing. We read the little letters and numbers on the back of our books. It's never the same!"
"Yeah, it's really fun. It's kind of like a game"

 

 

 

Taking Initiative

The children are growing - and feeling empowered - as readers through the exciting and important job of guiding the choral reading of our morning message.

As the children engage with more and more books, their library of words continues to grow. Taking initiative of their growing libraries, the children add words to a ring, highlighting and carefully printing their own sight words.

 

 

Rhyme Time

Our morning message work continues to support children in the development of phonological awareness skills, such as rhyming. On Tuesday morning the Kindergarteners took turns reading and building rhyming puzzles. We know that words can end the same or rhyme, but the challenge was recognizing a rhyming word when the ending looked different.

For example, when rhyming with the word shoe we talked about short and long vowels. The children noticed that statue and glue have a long vowel - a vowel sounding like its name - even though shoe sounds the same at the end, it doesn't have a u. There was a shared excitement and wonder about language during this experience. The act of putting the pieces of the puzzle together required important hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills.