Reading Response #8

I can remember being a very small child looking through my collection of Disney videotapes and picking up our copy of "Aladdin". Pointing to the swirly-font logo that said "Disney", I said to my mom "That says 'Aladdin'." She corrected me gently. "No, that says 'Disney'. That's a D." I was very confused because I had never seen the letter D printed in such a strange way. I had assumed using context clues (the picture of Aladdin and the Genie on the video cover) that the word was the title of the movie.

My Alphabet Knowledge had not developed far enough yet for me to be able to distinguish letters across varying fonts. In Bear Ch 4, Figure 4.9 shows a number of letter B's, all with different fonts and styles.
Learning the visual features of all the letters of the alphabet and how they can vary depending on upper-case or lower-case, as well and their font or print style is one of the first important skills needed when children are in the emergent stage of learning how to read and learning about phonological awareness.

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When I worked with Reading Partners last spring, one of the things I noticed my tutees doing a lot was substitute words they did not know with similar ones they did know as they read aloud. As it says in DeVries, "children use their knowledge of the syntactic system as they read: They expect that the words they're reading have been strung together into sentences". One exercise I would do with the students was to have them read a short picture book aloud and I would time them. The goal was to have them get better and more confident over multiple readings of the same book. Knowing they were being timed, however, sometimes had a negative effect. I had one second grade boy who often could obviously grasp the meaning of a word but not the spoken pronunciation, so when being timed on his reading aloud, he would always substitute it for a synonym.
While engaged in Guided Reading, whenever he would substitute a word, I would gently correct him with the word that was printed. If he did it again on the next read-through, I would stop him and ask him to think about what word it was. By doing this, I was scaffolding to support him as he practiced reading.