Real Life Inquiry Project

For my real life inquiry project I spent time reading with a little girl who is 5 and about to start Kindergarten. She knows her letter really well and can read some words but not many. I wanted to see how well she read a book that she had had and enjoyed for some time versus a book that I brought to her that she had never read before. In the first book we read she did very good because it was a book that she and her mother had read many times. She new exactly what each page said and if she didn't, she relied on the pictures to spark her memory. If I hadn't known that she had read this book many times, I would have thought she was reading at a very high level for her age. I brought her another book that was on the same level of reading difficulty and we read it together. She knew only a few words and she knew them from their similarities to words in the other book or by looking at the pictures. She also knew the sounds that letters made because they started with the same letter as her name or her mom's name. She would also correlate a certain letter with another word that started with that letter. This being said though, she could not "read" the second book near as well as she did the first that she had memorized. The way in which she read related to the article by Bell and Jarvis that states that children can learn to read by correlating what they know, like the letters in her first name and her mothers that she sees often, to things that they don't know and making sense out of them. The students in the article, "Letting go of 'letter of the week'" did this too with common things like McDonald's bags and the letter of the first name of the kids in their class. After seeing the little girl "read" so much of what we have learned in class came to light. She relied heavily on the pictures and the first letter of each word to try and sound out the rest of the word. She hasn't been in school yet though, so unless she has memorized the word, she doesn't read it really well. I think this shows the importance of first letter sounds and how much kids really do relate certain concepts that they know to new concepts. Like in the article, I will definitely be implementing a word wall with pictures on my wall if I teach young students. By providing them with this scaffolding you are providing them with independence and a better opportunity to learn which letters make which sounds. I think it's so important to remember things like this because it provides us with tool to help struggling readers. Also, in my time spent with the little girl I realized how, as we have talked about in class, so much of a child's reading is memorization at that age. I got to thinking on it after I left and I thought, maybe it isn't such a good idea to expose kids to the same book over and over. I thought it might limit the words that they know as well as prompt them to memorize, not actually learn to read. But after thinking on it a little longer I thought about how the little girl used her knowledge from the book she memorized and applied it to the brand new book I brought her. Although it may seem counterproductive, memorization is also a really good tool for young readers to learn. After my time spent reading with the little girl I have learned that there are many things as teachers we must consider when teaching a child to read. Memorization and letter correspondence are both very important tools to keep in mind.