Ditch it! 3 Literacy Practices that Need to Go
POPCORN or ROUND ROBIN READING: I think most of us grew up and/or taught reading aloud in a group. Round Robin is when each student in a circle reads aloud by themselves. Popcorn reading is if you were randomly chosen to read aloud. If you were a good reader, you probably liked it. But do you also remember that classmate who stumbled, mumbled and bumbled through the reading? Did you cringe for them, waiting for it to be over? Or were you that little kid anxiously waiting for their turn and dreading it? New research has found that this is a bad practice. It interrupts fluency, decreases comprehension and worst of all causes stress in young readers.
What to do instead: Choral reading, echo reading, and partner reading.
Choral Reading: The teacher models how to read the story with fluency and expression. Then, she reads it together with the students. This gives students the opportunity to practice without judgment. They can read sight words they may not be able to read on their own and develop fluency.
Echo Reading: The teacher reads a passage aloud. The student or students repeat the passage, pointing to the words as they read.
Partner Reading: One student reads a paragraph or sentence and then their partner reads the next. Students are sometimes paired up so that a stronger reader can model for a struggling reader.
SILENT READING: Aww the old SSR, sustained silent reading and DEAR, drop everything and read. It just conjures up so many lovely images doesn’t it? Cozying up to a book in the corner of the classroom, maybe on a beanbag chair or pillow. The reality: many children are not reading. They are looking at pictures, they are talking, moving around and wasting time.
What to do instead: Silent reading does not have to be abandoned, but it does have to be highly monitored. Teachers need to guide students to appropriate books, observe whether the students are actually reading and then interact with students afterwards about what they have read. A great alternative for students who are not yet decoding independently is “ear reading.” If you think about traditional reading, it is “eye reading.” It’s visual. Ear reading is listening and that could be audiobooks or software that sends text to speech. For students that can understand more complex text, it is often more engaging than beginning decodables.
ROTE SPELLING ASSIGNMENTS SUCH AS RAINBOW WRITING: Say it ain’t so! I love rainbow writing! How fun it is to write the word over and over with aquamarine blue, emerald green, sunshine yellow! Actually it’s not the rainbow writing itself that needs to go. It’s the fact that kids are focusing on the letters and not the sounds. Chair, chair, chair is focusing on: c h a i r. The student should be thinking first: /ch/ /ai/ /r/ and blending the sounds together. THEN they should be matching letters to the sounds.
What to do instead: Ideally your spelling lists/tests should align with the phonics skill you are teaching. Spelling words that are “theme” oriented such as: Halloween words, transportation words, and words from a story are not advised because the spelling patterns are (usually) different for each word. Best practices for spelling lists are common phonics elements. For instance, if you were teaching the digraph SH: the spelling words could be: ship, wish, cash, shop, bush, and shag.
Spelling instruction should begin with dictation. The first step is for the teacher to model how to spell the words. For example: “How many sounds are in ship?” /sh/, /(short) i/ and , /p/. There are three sounds in ship. How do I write the first sound, /sh/ in letters? You use the letters sh to write /sh/. How do I write the sound /i/ in letters? It’s the letter i. How do I write the last sound /p/ in letters? That’s p. So let’s spell it: sh i p. Ship.”
Follow up with word work such as word sorts and games. You can also benefit by using technology. There are a myriad of spelling apps that can help differentiate for reading abilities.
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