Nathan Tamborello

QUIZ: WEEK 3

1. Prediction questions - promoting comprehension of a story by previewing, eliciting

predictions, and asking questions. This provides support for the child to help them fill in
out mental outlie of the story before they even read it all the way through to aid in
comprehension.
The word bank - having a collection of known words culled from stories that the child
has read. The word bank increases over time and is tested as a flash card to accumulate
vocabulary and test for progress.
Independent writing - includes the three phases of the writing process. Allows students to
activate prior knowledge and write about something that excites them; allows them to
assess and re-asses their story outlies, and provides brainstorming for essay building and
organisation.

2. Word families are short-vowel rhyming words that provide an easy entry into word
analysis. By knowing one word, the child can decode similar words with rhyming
endings. Using this in a tutoring task is ideal because children find this task very doable
and they slowly develop a sight vocabulary as well as decoding skill. This helps them
with their sight vocabulary and sounding out words they don’t already know.

3. Partner writing is generally used with preprimer-level readers who can spell phonetically
but lack either the fluency or stamina to write stories independently.

4. Morris suggests a teacher have a variety of reading materials in their toolbox for young
readers. For struggling novice readers, Morris suggests books in levels 1 & 2 - books that
have predictable or repeating sentence patterns that provide needed support. The books
contain a good percentage of high-frequency words but also can contain lower-frequent
words that are most often accompanied by a picture. I agree with this type of book - the
repetition works to enforce learning and the pictures aid in the child’s willingness and
eagerness to continue the story.

5. The thread that runs through comprehension is prediction. Most children understand how
stories work, yet they don’t always draw on their knowledge of story structure when they
read. The teacher can guide that understanding by asking the child to make predictions
and confirm or modify the prediction based on the text.

6. The tried-and-true method of guiding reading is by using the DRTA approach. I have
used an adopted method of this approach - one that doesn’t stop throughout the story -
and it has aided in comprehension. The child must infer based on clues in either the title
or the beginning paragraph, and test whether those predictions come true or measure how
they were proven wrong. It works and is fun for the kids to create what they believe will
happen.

7. The time-honoured-way to build reading fluency is to do an ample amount of reading in

“easy” materials. This increases fluency and speed by the experience of comfortable,
Nathan Tamborello

error-free readings of interesting texts.

8. Have students practice assigned texts such as stories, poems, speeches, and plays in
preparation for a later “performance” in front of the class. The repeated reading method
could also be used in the classroom by training pairs of students to time and graph the
results of 2-minute reading trials.

9. 1. Use test scores & teacher comments from the previous grade to screen for low level
readers. Next, administer a spelling test to the entire class in a levelling order. (If fourth
grade, administer years one - three before at level). Scoring the tests for accuracy will
provide the teacher an estimate of the students’ knowledge. Then, after identifying the
low-level children, administer graded oral reading passages to each child, starting two
grade levels below the current grade. The goal is to find the highest level at which the
child can read before hitting a frustration level. Finally, based on the oral reading and
spelling results, place students in instructional-level groups and plan instruction based on
their groupings.

10. Morris suggest that a reading specialist teaches writing by helping the older student
become more independent as a writer. The student should write on a self-chosen topic,
moving through the three phases of the writing process (normally I go one stage further
and add practical application through a publishing stage). The teacher should respond
openly and honestly about the student’s work and the content of the student’s writing -
this will create a sense of autonomy that is regularly denied in the classroom.