Tompkins ch. 5

I want to start by talking about the 300 High Frequency Words. I thought it was very important to mention the high-frequency words, as they are the words that our students use and need to learn how to spell the most. I think that it is vital to have students learn words they use frequenctly so that they can learn the importance of spelling. If children do not take an interest to this at an early age they will begin to think it is not important for them to learn to spell words correctly. I thought the section that talked about sight words was a good example of words that students do need to learn and I am glad they addressed the fact that they are harder for students to sound out. I believe this could make students frustrated, but it is important to explain that not all words are like this. However, the English language is a tricky one.

A second part of the text that really intrigued me was the root words section. While it is important for students to learn how to decode words, I think this is an interesting concept to bring up in a elementary classroom. At first when I read this I thought that it was a little much to try to show students the Latin or Greek concext, as well as the meaning in that language. As I thought about this topic more I realized that I had seen this in my classroom, to some extent. In my third grade classroom we had talked about the prefix "re". We talked about words that start with "re" and then went on to find a common meaning (to do again). We also discussed words that started with "re" that did not fall into this same category, words such as recognize and recorder. It made me realize that even though we did not talk about where the word can from, we did discuss meaning and words that worked with it and words that did not.

Tompkins Chapter 5

I like how much this chapter pays attention to literacy physically being a central focus around the classroom with things like word walls and literacy centers. I sincerely wish that I could witness more use of centers in my class actually, I have only seen them done once or twice and they seem to be very beneficial to the students. Such a variety of activities keeps things exciting for the students and allows the teacher to work with a small group of students quite exclusively without the rest of the class losing focus on their own tasks at hand. Centers seem like a flawless activity as long as they are executed well, I just wish I could experience them firsthand a little more in order to better assess them for myself. Something else I always feel like I should see more of is these word walls. Now that I hear about them in our teaching classes, I actually remember having words up around my classrooms when I was a young student myself. However, I feel like a rarely see them in the classrooms that I’m actually placed in. My current third grade class has a tiny word wall on the wall in the corner of the classroom, but it is not at all extensive and only has a few words on in. I wonder how much these are actually used in general ed. classrooms.

Tompkins Chap. 3 Response

I’m realizing more and more just how important it is to assess our students’ level of knowledge quite frequently in order to keep them progressing to the best of their ability while still providing a slight challenge for them. Teaching to a student’s current stage of literacy is imperative, or they will either become bored of too easy of tasks, or frustrated at tasks that are much too hard. I sincerely hope there is adequate time for keeping track of this in my future classroom. The book suggests setting aside time for small group reading time; one group goes with the teacher. I assume this would be a good time for these kind of up-to-date assessments to occur.

I’m also really starting to love this idea of “mini-lessons” and am wondering how it is that I’ve reached this point in my pre-teaching educational career and I JUST learned what these are and what they consist of this morning in TE. These are phenomenal little boosters or reminders of topics and main ideas and concepts that are being discussed in the classroom in big lessons, but can take place in a matter of just a few minutes. What a great idea! I want to discuss these much more in regards to both math and literacy.

Tompkins 3

I really enjoyed how the “Predictable books” section was broken down, although I think this is an all to common procedure. I think that students do so much with predicting that they can basically write the books themselves. My big lesson plan had a lot to do with predicting what was going to happen in the story we read and my students nailed the story before even reading it. Students have many techniques to predicting too, including looking at the pictures, looking for sight words, thinking about the title and using their prior knowledge. This section stood out to me so much because of how often it is used in reading stories.


A major part of the chapter that I enjoyed was the teaching letters section. I often wonder if I was ever placed in a lower elementary classroom, how I would address students learning. I would not even know where to start with teaching letters, sounds, addition, or what else there even is to teach. Once this section came to me I found so many ideas of how to teach letters. For example, Letter Sorts, where students take different objects and pictures and place them into a corresponding letter bin based on the first letter of what the object is. I thought this was really cool and could work well for individuals or for group work. Little techniques like this seem to keep my head above the water when it comes to lower elementary.

Tompkins Chapter 3

It's important to note that "literacy is a process that begins well before the elementary grades and continues into adulthood, if not throughout life." Children in fact show signs of literacy well before elementary school. I really liked how this chapter focused on young children's literacy development and more specifically how it fits into a balanced literacy program. I especially liked the chart that shows and briefly explains how each element of literacy fits into the students learning process. For example reading gives the description of "teachers read aloud to children and use shared reading, guided reading, and the language experience approach to teach reading."
The other part I liked about this chapter was the concepts about print. Not only did the chapter outline concepts of print and words, but gave examples of how children learn through these concepts and give tips to foster these concepts. One of these tips talked about capitalizing on children's interests. Teachers should provide letter activities that children enjoy (when talking about concepts about the alphabet) and talk about letters when children are interested in talking about them. Another tip was talking about how letters represent sounds and how letters combine to spell words. All of this information seems straightforward but is sometimes overlooked.

Kyle Williams

Tompkins Chap. 7 + Watsons

I actually really enjoyed this chapter dealing with comprehension strategies and how exposing students to them all the time is such an important thing to do. Learning comprehension strategies can be somewhat difficult as a younger student, but over time I feel like these strategies get really pounded into our minds as we are reminded of them every year by our new teachers; at least I hope this is the case for students. Working towards this goal is going to be very important as a teacher because this is something that we're not only doing for our students, but for all students that will ever have us as a teacher, as well as every teacher any of our students will have. Making these strategies become second nature while reading takes several years of practice and determination and it requires teachers to work together to teach students how to use them well and to remind them often to use them in everything that they read.

Although I'm only nearing the halfway mark in my book-club book, The Watsons Go To Birmingham, I have already noticed myself using many comprehension strategies that I have picked up through the years. Making predictions is always a fun one to do, and the book is absolutely activating my prior knowledge of this time period and the treatment of African Americans in our country at that time. Reading texts also always causes me to create mental images of the characters and what they're doing in the story. So, at this point in my educational career, it has become second nature to me to use these comprehension strategies. However, I know that it has taken me years and years to start using these skills on my own without having to be reminded. I think this will cause me to be even more aware of how important it is to teach these strategies when I have a class of my own in the future.

Ch 10- Tompkins

I found the chart on page 350 of the Tompkins book to be very informative. I find that interns and teachers speak a lot on literacy centers, but I have never actually seen them implemented. I had heard of how they work and what happens but I have never known the extent of what they do. This chart showed me various options of how to teach many different corresponding parts of literacy. No matter what it was that one would want their students to learn, this chart showed an example for it. In every example I can see how students would become active in the activity. I found that puppets could be very fun for students to help reenact the plots of stories or books they’ve read. I feel that some of these activities would need to be monitored or else they could create disruptions of learning (for example: dramatic play, puppets), however some would be great for students to work silently on their own (for example: word sorts, listening).
With these literacy centers I can really imagine how they would work and how students would react in them. Depending on your classroom and the students in them, I can imagine that some would work better than others. In the classroom I am currently in I would envision that they would master the listening, yet fail miserably with the puppets. My students are not yet mature enough to play with puppets while being productive. Students would need scaffolding and monitoring to work up to puppets.