Silent Signals: Cups

As a literacy teacher, I work really hard to teach my students that when their reading does not make sense – when the meaning breaks down -- they cannot just keep going. They have to stop and repair the meaning, which means going back to where the reading last made sense and starting from there, using strategies to ‘fix the meaning’ as they move forward.

One difficulty reading teachers face on a daily basis is finding the time to assess students’ thinking and understanding. We do not know what students are thinking unless they tell us – so we don’t always know when the meaning has broken down for students -- and many students will not verbalize their confusion or lack of understanding. The older students get, the less likely they are to help us know when they are confused and need support. In fact, many students would rather appear belligerent than appear confused . . . which often leads to behavior problems. Students act out as a strategy to mask their difficulty grasping academic content.

One resolution to this dilemma is providing students with silent signals they can use to communicate that they need help. Just as many of you already do with behavior management, using silent signals is a fabulously effective strategy to use with literacy! Silent signals allow you to monitor many students at once. They also provide a safe and non-threatening way for students to communicate with you without the risk of drawing too much unwanted attention from their peers.

Silent signals also help students be more engaged in their reading and teach them to use metacognitive skills (thinking about their thinking) more effectively.

One silent signal you can use effectively with literacy is to provide each student, table, or group with a set of red, yellow, and green cups. Students move the cups to indicate their understanding of the passage being read.
 

Green = I understand this well.
Yellow = I’m starting to get confused. Can we talk about this?
Red = I’m totally lost and I need help. Can we stop and back up?

 

Providing students with silent signals helps them assess their own thinking and understanding and it helps you assess several students at once so you have a better understanding of when to keep going and when to stop and provide your students with help and support!
 

 

Happy Reading!

Use Audiobooks to Build Fluency and Comprehension

Have you discovered audiobooks? Are you using them regularly with your child(ren) and your students? Audiobooks, or recorded books, have exploded in popularity since the days of clunky cassettes and scratchy CDs. Today, you can download audiobooks for your classroom computer, iPod, iPad, Kindle, Nook, or Smartphone . . . meaning almost everyone has an audiobook player in her pocket! 

 

With engaging narration, background music, and even sound effects, audiobooks have become a staple of “digital entertainment” . . . which is fabulous news for teachers for two reasons:

1 – Audiobooks can hook reluctant readers, helping them fall in love with an author, a series, or a genre! Students who have the misperception that they hate reading quickly change their attitudes when they discover audiobooks! Teachers can harness the power of audiobooks to help students increase their interest and engagement with captivating stories, then use the printed book and the audiobook simultaneously to get students reading! When students are really engaged in a story and they cannot access the audiobook for any length of time, it’s amazing how quickly they want to grab the printed book to pick up where the audio recording left off!

Use audiobooks to help struggling, reluctant, or second-language readers discover books they love, and then give them a hard copy of the book to read while they listen. Soon, your reluctant readers will become motivated readers!

2 – Audiobooks help students build fluency! Fluency is not about being able to read a lot of words accurately and quickly. It is about using our voice to give meaning and feeling to the words. We do this by pausing appropriately at punctuation and –most importantly – making the words on the page come alive!

Fluency is a difficult skill to teach and nearly impossible to teach without modeling, modeling, modeling . . . of course, the problem is teachers do not have time to model every day for each student at his or her reading level and with books (s)he is specifically interested in . . . that is exactly what audiobooks do! They model fluency in a way that teachers just do not have time to do every single day!

If you are working on fluency with your child or your students, audiobooks can be your best friend! However, they must be used in a unique way to build this skill:

Have the student listen to an audiobook they are really interested in while reading the printed book at the same time.

Periodically, have the student rewind the recording and read a section of the book aloud while listening to it. Prompt the student to make his voice match the voice on the audio recording.

Students must be listening to the audiobook, looking at a hard copy of the book, and reading the book aloud all at the same time. Fluency is modeled and students are practicing with a better understanding of what their voices should sound like when they are reading fluently. Ideally, struggling readers will practice fluency skills this way every day. Start with a minute of reading aloud and gradually increase their time to five minutes a day. Students will listen to audiobooks much longer, of course – these few minutes are strictly their time to focus on and practice fluency skills.

Additional Bonuses:

Audiobooks can help students hear the correct pronunciation of words or phrases that are difficult to decode, often providing students with an “a-ha moment!”

Students are absorbing the printed text with a variety of senses and modalities, dramatically increasing their understanding of the text, as well as their ability to remember details of the text for a longer period of time.

Audiobooks can help readers understand and appreciate texts that are above their independent reading level – this is vitally important if you are working with older readers reading at beginner levels.

As fluency and decoding skills increase, comprehension skills naturally increase!

Audiobooks allow teachers to differentiate instruction for several students a day in a way that secondary teachers usually do not have time for.

The use of audiobooks in primary and intermediate grades may be common; unfortunately, it is nearly non-existent in middle school and high school. If you’re not using audiobooks as one tool to help struggling, reluctant, and second-language readers, give them a try . . . they can be one of your most powerful tools in helping adolescent readers become better readers!

 

Happy Listening!