Sheryl Hilton Blog Post 7- Routman's Chapter 8

Routman’s Chapter 8: Teach Comprehension

The chapter started with some very powerful statements about teaching words without teaching how text works. We do place a great deal of emphasis on learning basic sight words but we also balance it out with book talks in kindergarten. This time allows us to think out loud as we read and reread a text. Each time we read the text we pull out something different. Students often tell me we have already read the story, but as this chapter emphasizes rereading is a useful strategy for comprehension. I tried a lesson on taking notes and writing important things to remember. This was difficult for my students but I feel modeling this process will help my students with pulling out the important details in the reading. I have found while pulling leveled text from our literacy closet that some of the levels are deceiving and make comprehension difficult for students. They are spending too much time on unknown words which makes me question how these texts are leveled. Some seem on target while others are way off. Many of our books are good but so many are dated. I would say this is the most challenging for me. Finding text on my student’s level that lend itself both to interest and comprehension is difficult especially with limited resources for young readers in the literacy closet. We are adding to classroom libraries which is huge but we also need sets of leveled text that will help us as we teach these important comprehension skills to our young readers.