Reading

As I read through the first couple chapters of Fox this afternoon, I was transported back to my job as a Title I reading para.  I flashed back to my reading groups and our work on phonemic awareness - practicing phoneme segmentation and blending the word.  I thought of my first graders practicing words on their whiteboards and "boxing the blend" or "underlining the digraph."  I really enjoy working with students at this stage in their literacy development as they're starting to make connections between letters and sounds and seeing word parts repeated in words.

As I read through Chapter 3, I was struck by the line "the pictures in storybooks are an avenue to meaning that does not call for phonemic awareness, understanding the alphabetic principle, recognizing specific words, remembering the letters, or knowing letter-sound associations" (p. 70).  I immediately thought of my September experience in my main placement.  I listened to a student read the book David Goes to School! by David Shannon.  She read the entire book by looking at the pictures and making up a story that made sense with it.  For instance, on the page with David staring out the window with the written text stating, "Pay Attention!", she read, "Stop looking out the window, David!"  She understood that the book is filled with instances of the teacher correcting David's behavior in some form or another, so her story had to match this premise.  While she was not reading the text, she was reading the pictures and filling in an appropriate story.

Food for thought:  How can I best assist this student in growing her literacy skills and helping her make the jump to looking at the text, in addition to the pictures?