Ellin writes near the end of chapter one that it takes some struggle and a little intellectual discomfort to really learn. With that in mind, I ask you to consider the following:
I just heard Dick Allington at Michigan Reading Association on Saturday, March 15. It was very interesting. He spoke of the misunderstanding that kids have to struggle with text to understand, but adults won't. The example he gave was this. If we have a typical adult text with 300 words per page. Thinking it is an independent level of 99 percent, the reader would not know 3 words a page. Most adults would not read the book. Adults expect to know 99.99999999999999999 percent of the words. So why do we as teachers think it is ok to give kids books at an instructional level of 97 percent let alone 99 percent? We need to be very careful with our teaching decisions. He had a ton more for us to think about. Students have to read lots of words to catch up with their peers. We know that good and superior readers read lots of books. Our struggling readers do not read. Look in their desks. Can they read what is in their desks? Science books? Social studies? Math? What about the books the child self selected? What about the reading books? It was very interesting thinking about the issue of intellectual discomfort AND EASY enough to build comfort to build a word bank. My mind is spinning of how to balance the two. _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
