Readings 3/21

As I have made it clear before I have the least amount of knowledge in the teaching of lower elementary especially kindergarten. I was then instantly drawn to the Cahill article on Kindergarten Comprehension. Learning things such as the fact that “young students have the inability to construct personal narratives” and that full-length stories demand too much cognitive attention” helped me to learn about the concerns of younger elementary as well as start to make connections with what I know and see in my upper elementary classroom. When Mrs. Hope makes the connection that her students need to categorize the connections they make I found this I something that is true in upper elementary as well. In literacy I find that categorizing thoughts is something that students have a hard time with starting in kindergarten and continuing into 5^th grade. Even though the level of comprehension is different throughout the grades it still is a common problem. When I did test comprehension on first grade students in 301 when they would read a book they would read the words and lack the punctuation and fluency they needed to be able to understand the story. When analyzing this I realized I saw the teacher test their comprehension and make conclusions about them but I never really saw any teaching of comprehension given I was only there four hours a week. When comparing it to my fifth grade classroom the students understand what they are reading but lack understanding detail either writing detail or picking the details out a story. The biggest difference I saw was that comprehension is taught in fifth grade. I begin to wonder if they start at lower levels of comprehension because it was not taught early on. The article talks about great things kindergarten students can do to help with comprehension such as putting C’s up when they make a connection in a story. In my classroom they take pictures of them reading and post them so what I thought of is as a project students can take pictures of them doing something in their everyday lives that connects to a scene/plot/setting/character that they have read in the story thus far, helping them to make connections and look at the details. I really enjoyed this article because it helped me to learn about ways to teach comprehension in early grades and how these actually can be used and adapted to other grade levels in helping them understand comprehension.