Teaching Children to Read By Giving Them Something Worth Reading

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“It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imagination—something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.” – Katherine Patterson
Reading is known as a complicated process of understanding written text. For this reason, reading cannot be developed through one simple strategy or component. In fact, reading is developed through six components. Those six components are comprehension, oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary. These six components work together and simultaneously to help create fluent readers. Through these six components, readers learn that there is meaning in written test. If readers do not understand the meaning of what they are reading, then reading might as well be meaningless.
According to Tierney, R.J. (1990), “Comprehension is a creative, multifaceted thinking process in which students engage with the text” (p. 253). Comprehension is the most important goal of reading. This is the main reason people read, because they want to know the meaning of a story, a meaning of a sentence, or the text that they are reading. Teachers may use multiple strategies for students to comprehend when students are reading. For instance, teachers may activate background knowledge, connect readers with text, determine importance, etc (Harvey, S. & Goudvis, A. 2007). These strategies help readers comprehend what they are reading. For example, the more background knowledge and prior experiences readers have about a topic, the more likely they are to comprehend what they’re reading (Harvery, S. & Goudvis, A. 2007)...

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...s the word with their prior knowledge of phonics. The morphemic analysis strategy is when the student uses their knowledge of rood words and affixes to read or write an unfamiliar word. All of these strategies will help children with automaticity. Activities like choral reading, readers’ theatre, listening centers, and partner readings are great for reading speed. Activities for prosody could be for students to read orally and to have students think-aloud as they read. Teachers can also model for students to show expression, phrasing, volume, smoothness, and pace (Rasinki, T. V., & Padak, N. D., 2008). Fluency is important because it allows readers to identify words automatically while utilizing word-identification strategies to decode the unfamiliar words. This allows the reader to spend less time identifying words and more time reading and comprehending the text.

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