NEISD Reading Academy News

Per House Bill 3 , passed by the 86th Texas Legislature in June of 2019, all kindergarten through third grade teachers and principals must complete a Texas Reading Academy by the end of the 2022-2023 school year. The goal of the Texas Reading Academies is to equip educators with the knowledge and skills needed to implement evidence-based literacy instruction, assess student progress, and use data to inform instruction so that all Texas children develop a strong foundation in reading and writing.

Meet Melanie Griffin

First Grade

Bulverde Creek Elementary

Meet Amy Newton

Kindergarten

Castle Hills

When I first heard about Reading Academies, I was excited about learning new techniques to enhance my teaching. On the other hand, I was nervous to add another task to my already full plate. I was relieved to hear that NEISD would allow us to attend the courses during the school day, and I was lucky enough to be a part of Cohort 19. The Cohort Leader, Emily Payton, immediately eased my worries with her optimistic attitude and reassurance. Her confidence in Cohort 19 was contagious, and I began to look forward to our learning sessions. Emily's delivery of the content made it easy for me to put what I was learning into practice in my classroom. I enjoyed how Emily would observe and support me in implementing the content into my kindergarten lessons. Completing the course with Emily’s support was a breeze, and I wish I hadn’t wasted any time worrying! My advice to teachers that will start Reading Academies in the future is to relax and enjoy the new skills that you are going to acquire! I am grateful to have had the opportunity to enhance my teaching skills with Emily and Cohort 19! Thank you, NEISD!

The purpose of this module is to ensure that participants have the knowledge and skills to implement explicit and systematic comprehension instruction so that students develop strong comprehension processes. In order to support understanding, this module provides information about critical factors that contribute to comprehension development, vocabulary development, and literacy knowledge. This module also provides tools and instructional routines that support comprehension development and application across a variety of texts, genres, and content-areas.

One of the NASOT elements that closely parallels the content of Reading Academies Module 10 is Element 21: Elaborating on Information. Just as Module 10 touched on the importance of using literal, inferential, and evaluative questions to deepen students' understanding of a text, Element 21 encourages teachers to use the practice of questioning sequences. In questioning sequences, teachers ask a progression of questions that increase in complexity. The process begins with detail questions, which can be answered using information directly found in the text. From there, teachers ask category questions that guide students to define the characteristics of broader categories. At the elementary level, this could pertain to the general elements of the text, such as themes, types of characters, types of text, etc. Then, teachers ask students elaboration questions that encourage students to make a claim, and evidence questions that guide students to provide details that support the claim. While the NASOT progression of questions is not identical to the questioning categories described in Module 10, the end result is the same - a deeper understanding of the text. As you review a text that you plan to share with your students in the coming weeks, consider identifying questions that progress from literal, to inferential, to evaluative. By asking students to respond to these questions, either verbally or in writing, students will begin to internalize the process of thinking more deeply each time they pick up a text.

According to research, unless students learn to read by the end of first grade, they are highly likely to remain poor readers and suffer academic difficulties across all subject areas. However, we now know how students learn to read, what goes wrong if they struggle, and what can be done to help students of all abilities improve their reading skills. Texas Reading Academy will provide you with the tools needed to ensure the literacy growth of all your students. Without a doubt, informed teachers are the best assurance against reading failure. To help support teacher development of literacy instruction, this section of the newsletter will provide resources for teachers to blend their Reading Academy learning with NEISD resources!

• Use strategy instruction only as long as needed. There is no evidence that teachers should continue teaching strategies over the entire school year nor over the lifetime of a reader. Once students build proficiency in a strategy, they no longer need explicit instruction.
• Do not teach strategies in texts that students can fully comprehend without instruction. If students can read and understand a text, they are already using whatever strategies are needed. Strategy instruction helps students understand challenging texts—texts they aren’t able to understand on their own.

• Focus first on the MEANING of the text and then on the strategies that will help students understand that meaning more deeply. After all, understanding the text is the goal for using the strategies. -TEA

According to TEA, one way to encourage students to respond to a text is to provide students the opportunity to act out new learning. Dramatic play allows children to deepen their understanding of content as they apply recently learned vocabulary during play. A dramatic play center can incorporate books, signs, menus, and other print materials that can help children develop their literacy skills, such as reading, writing, and comprehension.

Station Ideas:

• THL Kinder Outside My Door, Unit 5: Writing Station - Students pretend they are James Monroe writing a letter to Thomas Jefferson asking for the United States to purchase the Louisiana Territory. Consider providing crumbled paper soaked in tea leaves to give it an aged look. Students can roll the letter into a scroll, tie it with a ribbon, and drop it in a bag to be carried by ship across the Atlantic sea to the President.
• THL Kinder Outside My Door, Unit 5: Reuse Art Studio Station - Have a few reuse art project options ready for students to choose to do. Some suggestions include: coffee can planters, egg carton organizers, yogurt cup or plastic bottle shakers, milk carton bird houses, cereal box placemats, glass bottle picture frames, and shoebox treasure chests.
• THL 1st Making History, Unit 4: Create a Recycling Station (or ask students to make one out of blocks) where students bring different items. The "employees" at the recycling plant collect the various items and sort them into recyclable/non-recyclable items and explain to the customer which items will be accepted and why.

Here are four easy steps to guarantee students remember new vocabulary:

1. Introduce the word. Consider the word's syllables, phonemes, and morphemes.

2. Provide a student friendly definition of the word.

3. Illustrate the word with examples and non-examples.

4. Check for understanding by asking students to use the word in a sentence to guarantee students demonstrate an understanding of the word. For example: "The workers are constructing a .. because..."

Once a word's meaning is understood, it is stored in the brain's mental lexicon, a mental dictionary of all the words we know. The mental lexicon organizes words based on their meaning, grammatical category, and relationships with other words.

In Mrs. White's third grade classroom, students use semantic mapping, such as the one shown below, as a visual strategy for organizing and categorizing concepts and ideas based on their relationships to one another. It is a useful tool for students to visually see the relationships between concepts and how they fit together, making it easier to learn and remember new information. It can also be used as a pre-writing activity to help organize ideas for a written assignment.

Comprehension begins at the sentence level; therefore, investing instructional time to explicitly teach how words, phrases, and clauses can be sequenced, will positively impact students' comprehension. Research shows that sentence anagrams (making sentences from word cards or phrase cards) can build syntactic awareness (Weaver, 1979).

Sentence anagrams are easy to create and can connect to any content area. Simply write a sentence on a sentence strip, cut apart the words, scramble the words, then ask students to use their knowledge of sentence building to reconstruct the sentence.

If you are interested in a deep-dive into comprehension instruction, The Reading Comprehension Blueprint is an excellent read. Hennessy's work addresses the challenges of teaching reading comprehension in a structured way that supports both meaning making and literacy skill knowledge. Her recommendations are grounded in research, and each chapter includes practical examples of classroom activities that support a specific facet of reading comprehension. Even if you don't have time to read the text in full, reviewing her blueprint in Chapter 3 and the unit planning tools in the appendix are valuable guides for planning content-driven instruction that is focused on building student knowledge by supporting readers' understanding of vocabulary, language structure, text structure, and local and global inferences. Readers are bound to step away from the book with new ideas and a deeper awareness of how to support the complex process of reading comprehension.

-Brigit

Article from ASCD Blog

Looking to Research for Literacy Success highlights the important role of background knowledge and vocabulary in reading comprehension. The article offers 10 ways educators can support literacy development, including safeguarding science and social studies. This article is just the first in a four part series that explores each of the recommendations in greater depth. Click the link to access the full article and discover additional strategies to boost reading comprehension.

Angelica Hix, Camelot

Angelica Benavides, Montgomery

Alison Lee, Northwood

Website: tinyurl.com/neisdliteracy

Twitter: @ReadingNEISD

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