abstract
| - Helping kids become proficient in the skills and strategies of reading and develop as lifetime readers. We aim to nurture not only the student’s minds but also to have fun and stimulate interests in travel, cultures, fitness and high-level sports participation. The problem is that most of the textbook programs, computer programs and homework assignments that purport to meet goals over the last two or three decades simply do not work. In that regard, Anne Lewis, national expert on education policy, in a recent Phi Delta Kappan article, pointed out that, “The pundits are now admitting that the law has done little to improve real achievement…(instead) it fosters curriculum and instructional decisions that run completely counter to higher-end learning or research-based knowledge about what stimulates students at all levels of ability to want to work hard.” But until schools become wiser, parents can make significant contributions that enable their children to become thoughtful and strategic learners by doing collaborative research-proven activities. Here is a camp that values such activities grounded in current cognitive learning theory: READING AND LEARNING ABOUT WORDS TOGETHER
* Do Sustained Silent Reading, Reading Aloud and Sharing Together.
* Spend up to 30-minutes a few times a week when everyone reads silently something they have chosen. Then have students share or read aloud something that stood out for them.
* Do Guided Reading Together. Set up regular times of 45 minutes or so two or three times a week. Choose sites and books that children can read with some fluency. Avoid frustrating books. Engage children in conversation that focus attention on the title and the illustrations.
* Read aloud so that they hear the intonations of speech rather than having them begin by reading word by word.
* Echo reading (Captain reads a line and the student echoes).
* Choral reading (couples and small groups read the lines together.)
* At various points in the story have the students talk about the characters and actions and predict what will happen next.
* When finished share responses to “What stood out for you?” “Do grammar” together through sentence and word combining investigations by arranging and rearranging words and their grammatical forms. Take words from the story and show how to combine and recombine them into as many sentences as they can. The student writes each of the sentences correctly capitalized and punctuated. For example, if you wrote the following words and some of their forms on individual cards and played the game have “How many sentences can you make?” you could make many sentences. This activity provides practice in choosing Standard English grammatical form and word order, punctuation, capitalization and spelling.
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