Introducing myself to selfish blogging
Ah hah- My first blogging experience that won't always include mention of family or seemingly inconsequential events that are relevant only to me. Well, that last bit might happen quite often. I actually hope it does. It recently came to my attention that blogging need not be with an audience-of-others in mind. This, I hope, will liberate me from my conditioned approach towards writing, which requires each word, each sentence, each idea to be well thought out, reviewed, edited, and transformed before sharing it with an"other". To achieve this, however, I believe it's in my best interest to set up a few personal blogging rules. These rules are intended to encourage the disentanglement of years of self-imposed perfection. What shall they be? I think the first rule must be that I will not edit for audience-in-mind reasons. The second shall be that I am writing for me and me only. The third shall be that the focus of my blogs will be centered on what I find relevant and interesting, which will likely dissuade others from visiting my site. (I am currently fighting off the desire to go back an reread what I've written but because I am a rule follower, I won't.)
Today, I think I'd like to write about a research paper I just reread. I reread it because it reveals how reading and writing skills are intrinsically entwined and dependent on antecedent skills that are developed through implicit experiences and explicit events that take place at home and within school. Forgive me for typing out the citation- it's a must: Morris, D., Boodgood, J., Lomax, R., Perney, J. (2003), Developmental steps in learning to read: A longitudinal study in kindergarten and first grade., Reading Research Quarterly, 38 (3), 302-328.
One must realize that learning to read is not a 'natural' event. We don't have an area in our brain that is wired to read. We have one for speech, for sight, for movement, for emotions... we, teachers that is- myself included, often assume that there is a place in our brain that is specifically designed for reading. Now, some of you say might say that you were not 'taught' to read but, instead, learned to read naturally-without instruction or difficulties. Really, you were just lucky because you were blessed with a hardwired brain that allowed multiple processes to reconfigure and connect. To learn to read, children must have multiple experiences early on with text and be exposed to learning opportunities that require children to attend to the phonology (sound) of language and to our representation of sounds/language (text) so as to rewire our brain's natural system to behave, for lack of a better term, unnaturally. Without these two types of experiences, children will not learn to read. In other words, learning to read requires areas of your brain intended for other functions to work together to achieve an alternative, less natural, task: to see a semantic significance in text.
The development or sequence of events associated with formal reading have been established through years and years of research. This particular paper explored the relationship between phoneme segmentation and Concept of Word - whether one skill preceded the other or whether they developed in tandem. A phoneme refers to the individual sound units of our language. It's the phoneme that we represent with our alphabet. For example, cup is made up of three phonemes: /k/, /u/, and /p/. Initially, children attend to language for meaning. They have difficulty 'hearing' the individual sounds that make up a word. This is difficult because sounds are "fused" or "blended" together. It isn't until children can recognize individual phonemes in words (phoneme awareness) that they can transcribe the sounds they hear into writing or translate writing into sounds. Concept of Word refers to a child's ability to recognize a word for what it is, a group of letters representing sounds that represent an idea. I like how the authors refer to Henderson's reference to CoW as when the printed word begins to "stand still" for a child.
Using a model based on previous findings from alternative studies, these authors sought to determine the level to which identified events associated with literacy development influence a child's eventual ability to read. Their findings supported the notion that to learn to read well and along a continuum commensurate with their cognitive capabilities when children explore print through authentic writing tasks, participate in guided reading experiences, and experience explicit literacy events that bridge language and writing in school.
That's it for now. This is just the beginning... How nice.
Today, I think I'd like to write about a research paper I just reread. I reread it because it reveals how reading and writing skills are intrinsically entwined and dependent on antecedent skills that are developed through implicit experiences and explicit events that take place at home and within school. Forgive me for typing out the citation- it's a must: Morris, D., Boodgood, J., Lomax, R., Perney, J. (2003), Developmental steps in learning to read: A longitudinal study in kindergarten and first grade., Reading Research Quarterly, 38 (3), 302-328.
One must realize that learning to read is not a 'natural' event. We don't have an area in our brain that is wired to read. We have one for speech, for sight, for movement, for emotions... we, teachers that is- myself included, often assume that there is a place in our brain that is specifically designed for reading. Now, some of you say might say that you were not 'taught' to read but, instead, learned to read naturally-without instruction or difficulties. Really, you were just lucky because you were blessed with a hardwired brain that allowed multiple processes to reconfigure and connect. To learn to read, children must have multiple experiences early on with text and be exposed to learning opportunities that require children to attend to the phonology (sound) of language and to our representation of sounds/language (text) so as to rewire our brain's natural system to behave, for lack of a better term, unnaturally. Without these two types of experiences, children will not learn to read. In other words, learning to read requires areas of your brain intended for other functions to work together to achieve an alternative, less natural, task: to see a semantic significance in text.
The development or sequence of events associated with formal reading have been established through years and years of research. This particular paper explored the relationship between phoneme segmentation and Concept of Word - whether one skill preceded the other or whether they developed in tandem. A phoneme refers to the individual sound units of our language. It's the phoneme that we represent with our alphabet. For example, cup is made up of three phonemes: /k/, /u/, and /p/. Initially, children attend to language for meaning. They have difficulty 'hearing' the individual sounds that make up a word. This is difficult because sounds are "fused" or "blended" together. It isn't until children can recognize individual phonemes in words (phoneme awareness) that they can transcribe the sounds they hear into writing or translate writing into sounds. Concept of Word refers to a child's ability to recognize a word for what it is, a group of letters representing sounds that represent an idea. I like how the authors refer to Henderson's reference to CoW as when the printed word begins to "stand still" for a child.
Using a model based on previous findings from alternative studies, these authors sought to determine the level to which identified events associated with literacy development influence a child's eventual ability to read. Their findings supported the notion that to learn to read well and along a continuum commensurate with their cognitive capabilities when children explore print through authentic writing tasks, participate in guided reading experiences, and experience explicit literacy events that bridge language and writing in school.
That's it for now. This is just the beginning... How nice.
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