Blog 6: Jessica Amsler’s Routman Chapter 8: Teach Comprehension

As I read Chapter 8 I thought about what I’ve taught my students about comprehension this year and what I’ve taught my students about comprehension in the past.  I also reflected a lot on teaching SRA.  I can see how SRA can be beneficial to a small group of students but as a whole group I did not know what all of my students were capable of.  I know that when I used SRA my students were able to word call and go back and find a few details about the story but they were not able to dig deep into a story and make any meaning out of the stories.

In the past we used SRA as our reading instruction and some students were great at word calling and had really good grades while others did not do so well on the timed fluency checkouts and daily worksheets.  I felt that the stories were not great to discuss or make inferences with.  There was not much in the story so it was hard to make connections or inferences with them.  My students were not learning skills that good readers need.  They were not learning the strategies that they needed for their future.  Now we use balanced literacy and the students are exposed to strategies that help them comprehend, read accurately, read fluently, and expand their vocabulary on a daily basis.  I can see that SRA could still be beneficial to a small group of my students but my students this year seem to be on higher reading levels than students in years past.  I am not trying to bash SRA but I am interested to see how this group of students do in the future compared to past students who were not exposed to “Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding Vocabulary” during balanced literacy every day.

I really like that Routman talked about how important it is to for the teacher to model how he/she reads.  I think we can show many strategies but we need to show our students what we do as well.  I try to talk to them about strategies that I use when I read new books and even how I pick out books.  After reading this chapter, I showed them this book and where I have sticky notes, where I’ve highlighted, and where I wrote in the margins.  I stressed that we do not do this unless the books belongs to us but I wanted them to see what good readers do and that I would be able to answer comprehension questions about what I read.  I showed them how this would help me use what I read and how it helped me become a better reader.  Another thing that really stood out to me was on page 118, Routman said “You can’t start teaching comprehension in grade 3.  You start teaching it the day kids enter preschool or kindergarten.”  I think this is so important and it helps our kids so much! As our school year comes closer to the end, I hope my students will take these skills with them and use them in the future