Personal Model of Reading Theory

Teachers have an important job, as we are educating our country’s youth.  Teaching reading is one of the most pertinent subjects that will be taught.  Reading is fundamental and essential in all aspects of life.  In order for one to be successful in life, you have to know how to read. 

All teachers have a slightly different approach when it comes to teaching their students how to read.  When I was growing up I use to hate reading.  I liked it when other people read to me, but if I had to read aloud, I was so embarrassed.  I was taught to read by a whole language approach, which is a method of teaching children to read by recognizing words as whole pieces of language.   I did not have much exposure to phonics and decoding word.  Learning this way was extremely difficult for me.  I remember looking at words in books totally puzzled and having no clue as to where to even start.  I was supposed to use the surrounding text to help me figure out the word.  I remember being placed in one of the lowest reading groups, while friends of mine were in higher groups.  I was not supposed to know that I was in the lower reading group, but let’s face it, you know.  I believe if I would have been introduced to reading by a different approach I would have been more successful.  I did not start to really enjoy reading until I was a senior high school and I was introduced to stories that I grew to love.

            Now as a pre-k teacher, I am able to teach young minds and give them their first step into the world of reading.  I start very basic, recognizing letters in both uppercase and lowercase and at the same time learning the phonics sounds.  I think phonics is the most important literacy skill a pre-k student will learn.  I love to teach phonics with music and movements, as it a fun approach and I feel the students remember it better.  As the students are learning to recognize letters and phonics, I also have them practice tracking words in sentences on language experience charts or pocket stories with pointers.  The children point to each word as they say it.  I feel that reading and writing go hand in hand, so I like to encourage my students to practice writing words by providing journals and posting words throughout the classroom.  I also teach phonological awareness skills in a scaffolding order of listening, rhyming, alliterations, counting syllables, and phoneme awareness.  By the second half of the year I begin teaching my class sight words and along with consonant blends.  I use the pre-primer Dolch words as a guide for sight words, but will add others as they appear more frequently in our chart stories.  By the end of the school year, most students are able to read what I call weekly readers, which are in essence emergent readers that have repetitive phases and sight words. 
I believe it is important for students to receive this exposure in a whole group setting along with small group time.  I use a flexible way of grouping the students together.  Sometimes I group them by their strengths while other times I use a mixture of their abilities.  When I have them grouped together by their abilities, I am able to work on a skill they may need extra practice with.  With a mixture of abilities, students are able to learn from one another.  Students learn when they are helping their classmates as well as when they receive help from others.  I feel that when students see another child that may know more than them, it motivates them because they want to be just like their friend. 

In closing, a teacher’s job is to get his/her students excited about learning and to install the love of reading so they can carry it throughout their life.  I am anxious to learn new theories to practice throughout my career and engage students in learning.