Comprehension

At the beginning of the year, I had not seen a lot of comprehension taught in my classroom. I saw more of our CT teaching decoding skills and stressing more of learning what the text actually says. However, lately our CT has been really stressing comprehension. The last couple of weeks in class there has been a passage read out loud to the class where the students have to then look at the big ideas and practice their note taking skills or they have a venn diagram type of assignment. I have seen them do a lot of QAR type of readings and currently this is actually one of their centers. They have different levels of cards they have to read a passage from and then answer questions based on the passage. I think that reading together as a group and then discussing the passage and what the big ideas are is more effective than the reading and answering they do on worksheets in their centers. We have a lot of literalists in our classroom who look for the exact words in the passage that were in the question to find their answer. I feel that this is not helping them comprehend the reading, it is more like a word search and they are not getting much out of it. However, when they work together as a whole group to discuss a story, I feel like the students get really into it and what to participate and help our CT find the big ideas. I think the students actually learn more from this and I wish I saw more of it in our class.

We do a lot of work in centers in our class, which I feel is good most of the time because it is allowing the class to work in small groups. However, when they read and answer in their one center they tend to get more off task because the teacher is not supervising and guiding them. Therefore, I think it is a good idea in our classroom to use small groups for skill work and independent reading, but I have seen the students get more out of large group for comprehension. When I work independently with students on comprehension I feel like the student really gets a lot out of it, but it is very difficult to have time to work with each student one on one all the time.

I remember in class this week we talked about how in the younger grades the students can often be left fielders. Well, we have a lot of those in our class in second grade as well. Sometimes they pull stuff from the most random places. I also feel like we have a lot of minimalists in our class. they will give and answer to the question but won't extend on their answer. A lot of the more confident readers are literalists they look at what the text says and that's the answer. I feel like a lot of them are still pretty young to find deeper meaning on their own, but I am excited to see more comprehension strategies being taught in our classroom.