Miriam Lescaille

Module 3- Supporting Emergent Readers

Blog 3

Case Study: Orlando’s Case Study

Student: Orlando

Age: 7yrs.

Grade: 1^st

Focus: Comprehension

Possible Strategies: Graphic Organizers; Repeated Reading; Comprehension Strategies

            Orlando is a 7 years old boy in 1^st grade.  Orlando is having difficulty recalling and remembering simple facts from stories as well as answering questions pertaining to the characters, setting, main idea, sequencing, and predicting, etc. Despite his over all eagerness and happy disposition he is struggling when it comes to comprehension especially when he reads independently.

           

The Following 3 Strategies Should Aid Orlando and Help Him Achieve Better Comprehension:

1. Comprehension Strategies:

Comprehension is the understanding of what has been read.  Comprehension strategies are the techniques a proficient reader uses to gain meaning from a text (The IRIS Center- Orlando Case Study). Some of the best Comprehension Strategies include: Predicting, Summarizing, Retelling, Rereading, and Questioning.

• Predicting: refers to guesses a student makes even before they start to read the story such as looking at the pictures on the cover, title, or just an educated guess.  This strategy will support Orlando by allowing him to get an idea of what the story is about by just looking at the pictures on the cover or making a guess about what he thinks the story is about and then see if his guess or predictions were correct.  We search for and use the visual information that represents the language of the text, for children that means following and understanding the story and also getting information from pictures (Pinnell & Fountas).
  
•       Summarizing: helps the student identify the main idea of a story. This strategy will support Orlando by helping him to read small sections at a time from the story or one paragraph at a time and come up with the main idea of what he has just read in one sentence.  Students are asked to name the “who” or “what” of the story, decide what the most important thing is about the “who” or the “what,” and finally, say it in one sentence (The IRIS Center- Orlando Case Study).
  
•       Retelling: allows the student to retell the story right after he has heard it or read it. This strategy of “Retelling” will support Orlando by helping him for example with the main idea, characters, main events, and setting which are some of the skills that he is struggling with according to his teacher.
  
•       Rereading: this helps the student to go back and reread a part of the story in order to look for the answer or clarify something they are not sure of.  This strategy will support Orlando because he would be able to go back into the story what is called a “look back” to allow him to get more clarity or find the answer.  Rereading and revisiting texts is very beneficial it expands vocabulary, helps them understand sentence structure, and it increases their background knowledge (Pinnell & Fountas). 
  
•       Questioning: This strategy allows the student to answer the following questions from the reading: who, what, when, when, where, and how.  This strategy will benefit Orlando because by him being able to answer the questions of who, what when, where, and how from the story he will acquire more understanding and comprehension of the text he has just read and be able to answer simple comprehension questions.
  

            The above Comprehension Strategies and their components take time for the students to begin to use on their own or with the help of the teacher, however over a period of time they will benefit the student with the over all comprehension.

2.  Graphic Organizers:

Graphic Organizers are simple diagrams used to assist students at any grade level in organizing and recalling elements from stories they have listened to or read (The IRIS Center- Orlando Case Study).

Some examples of Graphic Organizers are: Story Mapping, Literary Webs, and Venn Diagrams.  Using the strategy of Graphic Organizers can help Orlando with his comprehension skills.  The purpose of teaching students to use graphic organizers is to provide students with metacognitive tools that they can (eventually) use on their own (Swanson & De La Paz, 1998).

·      Story Mapping: This Graphic Organizing skill can be used for example, to help Orlando remember parts of the story like “who, what and where” as well as having a visual representation.

·      Venn Diagram: This Graphic Organizing skill helps students see what stories have in common, how they are alike and what they share, as well as what they are different in.  This type of Graphic Organizer skill would help Orlando by helping him compare and contrast some of the things the stories read have in common as well as what they differ in and this will help him in his comprehension and comparison between stories.

·      Story Mapping: Sequencing: This Graphic Organizing skill helps students to organize a story in order of events.  They can draw pictures to represent the order things happened in the story.  This type of Graphic Organizer skill would help Orlando by having either a visual representation or writing words to help him with his comprehension and recall of the story and the order/sequencing in which the events of the story took place.

·      Literary Webs:  This Graphic Organizing skill helps students to dissect the story and take it apart and go from the whole to smaller parts in order to get a better understanding of the story.  Literary webs help students understand a story in terms of both the whole and its parts (The IRIS Center- Orlando Case Study). This type of Graphic Organizing skill would help Orlando by being able to start with the entire story and then braking it up into smaller parts to improve his comprehension and understanding of all the components of the story.

Orlando would benefit from all the different types of Graphic Organizers because they will help him enhance his comprehension and retelling and recalling of the stories read independently or as a group for him to be able to remember the characters, setting, sequencing, common threads within stories, as well as remembering details and creating a visual and mental representation.  Orlando would also benefit from the teacher modeling how to complete each Graphic Organizer or Story Map over a period of time and then eventually having him work on it independently or in small groups.  In conclusion, overall research and the readings I have done demonstrate that Graphic Organizers help and improve students’ reading comprehension.

3.  Repeated Reading:

Repeated Reading refers to reading a familiar book or story over several times.  Repeated reading has been shown to assist students reading below grade level to make gains in fluency and reading comprehension skills (Bos & Vaughn, 1998).  This strategy will help Orlando by giving him more of an opportunity to understand and recall more of the details and have better reading comprehension.  Moreover, children who had repeated exposure to a story elaborated on and engaged in more interpretations of text than children who did not (Doyle & Bramwell p.555). Repeated Reading can be used with “Partner Reading” or in a “Group Repeated Reading set up.

• Partner Reading: refers to when you pair two students and the student that is the more skilled reader reads first to the student that has less reading skills to help model for the student that needs the extra help.  Morrow and Smith (1990) found that children read to in small groups demonstrated better story comprehension than children read to in whole-class settings.  Orlando would benefit from partner reading because he would have more of an opportunity to ask questions for better comprehension, and feel more comfortable, and achieve better understanding and comprehension of what is being heard.
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•        Group Repeated Reading:  refers to when the teacher first reads a line from a book first to show her students and then her students follow along in their book, then the students repeat what the teacher has read, and finally the students and the teacher repeat the line from the book together. Orlando would benefit from repeated reading because he would become more comfortable with the material, gain more comprehension, and build vocabulary. 
  

With the above Repeated Reading Strategies one can also use “word walls, flashcards, and Reader’s Theater”.  I feel that Orlando would benefit the most from Reader’s Theater that consists of acting out the story, sequencing the story and remembering the important characters.  This would enable Orlando to have a better understanding and internalize what he has read and in turn have better comprehension of the characters, main idea, setting, and order of how things happened in the story visually and mentally. Children will be eager to look at and perhaps retell or “reenact” books that you have read or reread to them.  This highly beneficial activity helps them internalize the structure of stories, notice features of informational books, and practice the language of books (Pinnell & Fountas).

“Literacy ought to be one of the most joyful undertakings ever in a young child’s life.”

By Don Holdaway

Work Cited

References

Doyle, B. G., & Bramwell, W. (2006). Promoting Emergent Literacy and Social-Emotional Learning Through Dialogic Reading. The Reading Teacher, 59(6), 554-564.

Pinnell, G. S., & Fountas, I. C. (2011). Literacy beginnings: A prekindergarten handbook. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Welcome to the IRIS Center. (n.d.). Retrieved February 22, 2016, from http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/

     

Children’s Story- “The Little Red Hen”

            The children’s story that I selected to develop a Graphic Organizer to be used with the story to help Orlando identify the story’s main components is the story “The Little Red Hen.”

              The Graphic Organizer that I want to create for Orlando for the story “The Little Red Hen” will help Orlando answer the questions about setting (where), characters (who), events (beginning, middle, end)/sequence of events (first, next, last) and lesson learned. As well as use pictures/images/catchy phrases that relate to the story, “The Little Red Hen” as part of my Graphic Organizer.