Reading specialists
St. Joseph's School | 1st Grade | Reading resource work | Present: 1-3
students, reading specialist and myself | 3 hours field experience including
reflection time
Background
In order to experience and learn from focused reading instruction, I chose to spend time with a Reading Specialist at St. Joseph's school observing the various techniques and kits she uses in doing remediation reading work with K-2 graders.
Key observations and points of reflection
The reading specialist works with children on the very basic building blocks of reading including phonemic awareness, phonics work and so on. I am amazed by the idea that working on such separate, basic building blocks actually adds up to the skills of being a proficient reader. The reading specialist assured me that in two years all her struggling readers will be reading well. I wonder though what lies in their heart about their love for reading. Does reading become a chore for them, something they were not good at and need to work on or can it also be something they have an ease with and love?
Some of the activities I watched in use included Visual memory exercises to help the students recall pronounciation and letter-sound associations from memory, sound games that included dropping a sound in a word and still reading the word, finding the words in a song, looking for specific kinds of endings to words, reading sight words, recognizing and reading base words and reading nonsense words.
The exercise of reading nonsense words was intriguing. When I asked what it helped with, the specialist explained that there has been shown a high correlation between reading well and knowing what words are nonsense. I did not get a deeper explanation.
The children were all thrilled to be working with the specialist. This struck me as being surprising. I thought they would feel stigmatized or left out from their classmates in some way when they were pulled out of class to work separately with a specialist on something they were struggling with. On the contrary, the children felt relieved on receiving help. Further, they loved all the games and activities they did with the specialist and most importantly, seemed to feel very special getting such a high degree of individual attention.
I was thrilled and touched to see that the children did not seem to suffer from any obvious signs of lack of confidence in themselves because of their work with the specialist. They seemed to accept this separate, out-of-class work very factually. This was touching to me.
Overall, I was moved to see that such 1:1 attention is given to the children that need help with reading. I was thrilled to see that the children did not feel stigmatized by the process. I came away appreciation the work of the specialists but I question its effectiveness. I have come to appreciate reading as a highly personal endeavor, one that we do when we are ready and that lasts us a lifetime. I cannot imagine that something so basic can be broken down into parts that magically add up to a whole when administered separately. I sincerely want to believe it works out that way but I questions whether working on the basic reading blocks builds lovers of reading.