What is the importance of visualization to students?
Visualization plays an important role when helping
students read and comprehend. Throughout Summer
school I learned that visualization helps students to predict,
helps them understand what is taking place in a text, and
serves as a clue to what is taking place. We had students to
draw a picture at the end of each story of an idea that they
found to be important. This was an activity that helped me
assess their level of comprehension as well as it helping
students use visualization to summarize and comprehend.
Visualization helps readers to understand what is taking
place in a story. As I learned in the text, it is important for
teachers to model how to properly visualize in order to
benefit their students.
As educators, it is important to let students express what they are reading. As I stated
above, my co-teachrs and I had students draw a picture after the reading a story. Having
students draw about what they read helps them to experience reading without actually
reading words.
How do kids finally grasp the concept of reading?
Throughout my three weeks teaching summer school, I witnessed the same age students being on different
reading levels. This let me know that students of the same age can and will be on different levels of reading
because people go through stages at different times. Because students were on different levels, our
supervising teachers broke students into groups based on their reading levels. This helped us to give
students the proper scaffolding and level of help that they each needed.
Reading occurs in many stages, and some students go through
different stages at different ages. The stages of reading
determine what students are grasping when reading, therefore
students learn to read when they are developmentally ready.
They build upon stages until they reach the level of full literacy.
It is important that teachers know what reading level each of their students are on.
With that, teachers need to scaffold and use appropriate leveled texts to help the
needs of each individual student. Modeling and scaffolding appropriately will help
students to move on to higher levels of reading and develop better literacy skills in
order to accomplish the task of reading successfully.
How do I satisfy the needs of students with learning disabilities?
In the summer school setting we were fortunate enough to have a resource teacher
to work with children who had learning disabilities when it related to reading. I did
have a few students who had difficulty with comprehending the important ideas of
the text, and I modeled how to effectively comprehend in order for them to learn.
The teacher must first identify the strategies that the struggling child is
using, and then help the student find a strategy that best benefits the
child's learning. When a student is benefitting from a learning strategy
they will feel more confident and accomplish more.
The teacher needs to begin the process by first assessing the student in order to
identify the child's level of competence in reading. Once the level is tar geed, the
teacher is to help the child individually and scaffold and model to show the struggling
student how to properly perform the task of reading.