Lumos Learning Podcast

Iris: good day and Welcome to our Lumos learning podcast on how to improve and teach reading effectively I am Iris Medina customers relations manager for Lumos learning today I am here with Bonnie McRae a retired educator, Bonnie tell us a little bit about your background in education
Bonnie: Thank you so much Iris for asking me to join your podcast my name is Bonnie McRae and I’ve had over 45 years experience in both public-private charter school and University level education I have taught everything from kindergarten through college, in the beginning of my career I taught kindergarten and first grade for over 14 years before I moved up two different administrative positions as well. what I found out is that reading is the basis for all learning.
I’m so glad that I’ve had my experiences and happy to share what I know with you.
Iris: thank you it is apparent that you have been in education both teaching and supervising for some time in regard to your blog on reading what are some of the well-known research-based reading programs used in the United States
Bonnie: in the United States there are several programs that are used but the primary ones are either the phonetics linguistic approach or the sight word whole language approach and then the patterning rhyming word approach those are the three main basic reading programs that are used in the United States
Iris: can you tell us a little bit about each of these programs
Bonnie: in a phonetic or Linguistics approach students are generally started in pretty Kinder Kinder and first grade how to sound out the letters and sounds and then the teacher start to teach the children how to blend these letters and sounds together however the fallacy and errors occur when a teacher has not been taught proper phonetic Downs for example too many teachers just use the letter b and say that the sounds when in essence the letter B says it’s much softer I know that they’re trying to get the students to understand however teachers need to be taught first the true linguistic sound voiced and unvoiced sounds as well then once the teacher has taught these sounds in isolation so they can start to sound and words together and sound and blend generally speaking countenance or top first then your short vowel sounds and then founding and blended with a consonant the end the next step would be to go on to have the consonant sounds and long vowel sounds and keep repeating the sound and blend so the teacher is the model for the students
they and they would add the diagraph some just phone and the more difficult sounds that are hard to understand in the English language and the sight words and whole language approach which is very popular in the 90s that whole language approach where teachers label everything in the classroom with the exact words when students learn new words they usually are associated with that word and a picture and action everything is labeled they see and say the words they’re shown then they put the words together with our actions through modeling and making into sentences these words sometimes don’t always follow that phonetic or linguistic backgrounds very important for students to learn as well some students learn oozing by phonics and some students learn better by site loads so in summing Campbell Jr combination of those two programs the third program is the patterning program this basically as teaching a small word two or three letters such as the word Caps or back and then changing the first consonant to a different letter and having the students repeat those this is especially helpful for any student who is at a lower level or students coming into the United States with no English background or limited English that, we also keep in mind that there are long list of words that students need to learn it as a grade level we call these most basic one known in the u.s. is called the Doge site or list and this comes with every great grade level so those are the three basic programs used in the United States to help students get that basic Foundation of learning to read
Iris: thank you Bonnie does the use of these programs guarantee Student Success in reading comprehension
Bonnie: Yeah unfortunately I was it does not too often we have what we call roach readers where students are just repeating words that they have learned but they don’t understand the vocabulary and they don’t understand true fluency. Fluency is a major bases in total reading comprehension
Iris: thank you, can you explain fluency and more details for us
Bonnie: certainly when we’re talking about fluency and reading you have to talk about out the most aspect of oral reading and this includes the ability to read selected passages quickly but few are no errors read with expression and understand what it is they’re reading Most states do have standardized fluency within their components of curriculum so when student is reading orally and their fluid and flowing at a rate expression is going on they begin to understand what is being read to them for what they’re reading out loud themselves you’re struggling reader has difficulty because they don’t have the slow to make that connection from the test and their comprehension skills are not as high in order to become a fluent reader we have to understand that there will be decoding going on for phonics and sight words and examples and modeling given promotionally in other words the student can’t just automatically going to be a fluid reader because they know the words they need to hear the written was read out loud in the sixties and seventies oral reading was very prominent in all classrooms and throughout the United States some models included those of what we call the reading machine for the student set up desk and the teacher showed across the screen words being read to the students or the students reading the words or the teacher modeling for them this was supposed to help them become fluent readers and also to help us speed reading. Another type that was used in the early days in the 60s and 70s was where the teacher would read part of the paragraph and then call on particular students to lose allowed cause neither of these programs work successfully because the student didn’t have the understanding or they had a low self-esteem or could not read rapidly off of a reading machine and were embarrassed to read out loud in class so basically oral reading was dropped out of the classroom there for reading comprehension scores and have suffered tremendously especially with your low socio-economic students and those students who do not have the background at home that is needed to keep up the intensity and vocabulary
Iris: so that’s really very insightful, what best practices do you feel help to increase fluency
Bonnie: the practice of repetitive reading choral reading at a rate that these children can keep off but yet also understand when sentences started stock punctuation inflection of a teacher’s voice while they are reading with their students paid reading is excellent to use especially with those students who do not feel secure in their reading they are given the opportunity to read along with someone else’s voice and then try it on their own and then tape it so that the teacher can see where the student might be struggling it might be that the student is not struggling with the words at all it may be that the literally struggling what sentence structure it may be that they don’t understand him flexion and they’re not reading this expression errors that are loaded with in paper or reading included mission of words would substitution hesitating best practices and shown that curriculum-based measurement are commonly known to be in are using multiple reading fluency test throughout the year help a student to improve and it can also monitor the students progress in fact many of you Federal programs require this client of reading test at the beginning middle and end of the year during the Tate reading the teacher can find out through guidelines who basic rubric the reading levels whether the student is below or an emergent leader whether they’re actually reading on their own instructional level or whether they’re an independent at reader and what we hope to gain from our students is that they become independent readers students should always be taught their instructional level which means they may have about six to ten errors in about every hundred words that leaders repetitive reading research has also shown that students who read the same passage multiple times become more fluent and more understanding with this route some teachers use what we call peer assistance reading which is to take a student who is a good reader or an excellent leader and paired them with a struggling reader in using this type of classroom strategy it’s so important that that good reader is also an empathetic person and that their understanding and trying to help the struggling reader so that’s one that the teacher means to be careful how they pair with Ray’s reading hop for the teacher or students read part of the center and then others finish the other part of the Senate the teacher could start the sentence and then the student completes a sentence one of the things I used to love to do if I was teaching first grade was called Senate strip reading students would come to my classroom having no background in Reading multiple of it but they knew they were in first grade so they wanted so badly to be able to read that very first day of school which is very difficult with some students so what I did was placed on a large table with all kinds of pictures that would interest 6 or 7 year olds whether it be parked animals playing sport whatever sceneries might be available and then I would also have another table spread out with various bright colors of tan board paper and each student would have a sentence trip with blank nothing on it on their desk I would allow the students to go to their own pictures and their own colored paper and glue them down together and then I would visit privately with each student and say tell me something about your picture what is this and they might reply to me this is the dog I would take the sentence that then right wrist is a dog in collection Explorer and then I would point to each word with the student and rube this is a dog and then I would have the students read it back to me with this is a dog and I would clap my hands and say look you’re a reader and every student was so excited so things of that nature to make the students not only feel successful but my self-esteem fluency is based on raising self-esteem and those best practices of oral intake reading modeling especially multiple modeling examples and giving the students in opportunity to speak for themselves because in essence we think we speak we write we read that true comprehension
Iris: well Bonnie that was awesome I wish I was one of your students
Bonnie: thank you so much Iris
Iris: thank you so much Bonnie you have given us a better insight to the understanding of an effective reading program instead strategies teachers can Implement in their classrooms to incur to help increase fluency and raise comprehension Bonnie thank you again for being a guest today and sharing with us your experiences and the knowledge that you have with with all your years of being in the education field
Bonnie: thank you Iris and I appreciate the opportunity to be able to share with Lumas learning have a great day
Iris: you as well thank you very much bye bye
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