Real Life Inquiry

         For my real life inquiry I decided to work with my friend's niece to see what she knew about concepts of print. Maddie is three and a half years old and is very bright for her age. She cannot read yet, but I was shocked at how much knowledge she has already attained about books and reading! I read an article by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher titled Identifying Instructional Moves During Guided Learning. This article helped me prepare for the questions I was planning on asking Maddie as we read a few books together. The article mentions starting with a question, and then depending on the answer, probing with more questions until the student reaches the answer on their own. During mine and Maddie's time together we read three books. I used the procedure of guided reading and read-alouds we have learned about in class. I also reread the article on the IRA's position statement about the stages of development. This article related to my real life inquiry about emergent literacy and how exposure to concepts about print lead to better reading knowledge and success.
        Working with a three and a half year old I was not expecting her to know many of my questions regarding emergent literacy. I used the checklist we received in class as a guideline for my inquiry. Before we read a book I asked Maddie to show me the front of the book, back of the book, title, title page, where we start reading, which way we turn the page, and about return sweep. To my surprise she knew every answer except what a title page was (which is not surprising because that is the least interesting page of the book to a child!). Maddie obviously has had much experience with books already, and even wanted to "read" to me when we were done. She told me a silly story while she turned the pages of the book. She pretty much just described the illustrations she was looking at, but that is a great first step to reading! I noticed she picked up on my voice inflections, and even tried to prompt me for questions like I did to her. It was really fun and quite humorous working with her. I was pretty impressed at how much a young child knows about books and reading. I asked Maddie what part of the book was telling the story and she pointed to the words! I was shocked! She clearly understands that adults read the words to her when they are reading a book. I think Maddie is eager to learn to read, and by my short time I spent with her I would say she is going to be quite successful!
       This real life inquiry taught me that no matter how young the child is they are already aware of books and concepts of print. I also noticed how much they copy adults, and that reinforced how important it is to model good reading behaviors. As a teacher I will definitely make sure to incorporate read-alouds and guided readings in to my everyday instruction. It is so important for students and children to be exposed to good reading behaviors and get them excited about books! The picture below is not of Maddie (I did not take any pictures of us reading) but it is a good example of children and their  knowledge of print and how they model good reading!

Assessment

The first article I read was Readability versus leveling by Edward Fry. This article made several good comparisons between readability and leveling. The main difference I gathered from the article is that leveling procedures include a number of judgment factors such as format, content, length, illustrations, repetition of words, etc. Readability relies mainly on sentence length and vocabulary. I personally think both of these procedures used together would be the best way to find the appropriate reading level for students. I like that leveling is more subjective and cannot be done by a computer like readability. A major factor of leveling that I really like is judgment, and by judgment it means 'are the readers' background and experience appropriate to understand the text?' I think this is a very important question to consider when trying to find an appropriate reading range. The picture below is an example of leveled books.


The second article I read was by Mary Lose about Response to Intervention. I agree that in order to help a child's' literacy achievement they must be identified as needing an intervention at the very first indication of difficulty. It is so important to identify struggling students early so teachers can work individually with them and develop their skills. A quote that really stuck out to me in this article was "evidence supports the notion that children come by different paths to common outcomes in literacy. This means that no one child learns how to read in the same way. Skilled teachers understand that they need to tailor reading and writing instruction to each individual in order to get the must success out of each student.