Week one - post 1

           I had the pleasure of speaking with one of our Title One teachers about teaching reading. She said that her philosophy is blended. For the most part, she believes that students should be exposed to authentic literature experiences to learn how to read. The school overall stays away from basal texts and has a rich resource room full of sets of real books at a wide variety of levels because of this view. However, she also teaches phonics and phonemic awareness jointly. If she is going to teach a "secret story" about the super hero vowels, then it will be followed by an authentic learning opportunity to find the vowels in the context of what the students are reading. She also supports the idea of teaching a guided reading group on a particular skill and then having the students immediately practice that skill through independent reading time. She believes that students need time to practice reading and that many of the problems our struggling children have around reading could be solved if there were someone in their lives who had time to curl up and read with them daily either in English or thier first language.