The reading process involves a series of stages during which readers comprehend the text. There are five main stages of the reading process. And there are complex essential components of reading:
- Phonemic Awareness and Phonics: students manipulate sounds and phonome-grapheme correspondences and phonics rules as they read.
- Word Identification: Students recognize words that are used commonly, and use phonics to decode unfamiliar words.
- Fluency: Students become faster readers as they recognize more words automatically. Beginning readers use most energy to decode words, fluent readers spend more energy towards cognitive comprehension.
- Vocabulary: students think about word meanings, figurative uses, and relating them to background knowledge.
- Comprehension: students use a combination of reader and text factors to understand what they’re reading. To create meaning, they predict, connect, monitor, repair, and use other comprehension strategies as well as knowledge.
Five Stages of Reading:
- Pre-Reading: this occurs before readers even open a book. Here we activate our background knowledge and vocabulary. Background knowledge consists of literary knowledge including information about reading, genres, and text structures. This is when we think about the title of the book, examine the book cover and illustrations inside and read the first paragraph. We set purposes for the book and make predictions on the text.
- Reading: This is the stage we actually read the book during. We use different types of ways to read though; interactive read aloud: where we read the book to students and have them engage in activities during reading. Shared reading: think big books and teachers trying to show phonics and rhyming. Guided reading: teachers work with small groups of 4-5 students and let the students read books that are within their range. There is also partner and independent reading.
- Responding: students respond in multiple ways about what they just read. Through reading logs, learning logs, discussions, and other activities.
- Exploring: This stage is more teacher directed as students dive back into the book they just read to look at it more analytically. Some re-read parts of the book, some ask text-based questions, they may develop storyboards. When focusing on words and sentences a word wall can be used to write out words of importance while reading. Also word sorts categorize words that have similar features or meaning. Mini-lessons on the text are a common way to explore as well.
- Applying: To show their comprehension, students get to create projects, posters, readers theatre performances (re-enacting parts of the story out with students playing different characters or even just reading the dialogue). Sometimes these are done as an individual and some as a group project. (Application projects pg 48)
The Writing Process also has five stages that require students to think about and do as they write.
- Pre-writing: this is the getting ready to write stage. It’s the I have an idea and I’m going to run with it stage using brainstorming, reading, writing and anything they can to help them develop the purpose and organization of what they will be writing. eg. choosing a topic, considering purpose and genre, gathering and organizing ideas.
- Drafting: Here students began writing their ideas down on paper. This is generally quite messy and will have cross-outs, lines, add-ins, arrows directing to better ideas. When writing a rough draft students should skip every other line to give room for revisions. They should also label it “Rough Draft.”
- Revising: During this stage writers refine wording and reread the rough draft. Revision means “seeing again”. Sometimes it is good to walk away from the paper for a few days to regroup and see it from a different perspective. Students make four types of revisions here, additions, substitutions, deletions, and moves. (add words, delete sentences, delete paragraphs, substitute, move phrases around etc.)
- Editing: (my least favorite stage… aka call the hubby who is way better with grammar than I am.. haha) spelling, punctuation, homophones, capitalization, sentence structures. Lots of Proofreading takes place here. (hence again, the hubby does this part for my papers.. I’m the writer, he’s the editor)
- Publishing: the final stage after your work has been edited for any errors, is to write your final copy and bring it in for the appropriate audience to read.
The writers Craft p.58-60
- Ideas
- Organization
- Voice – personally meaningful? adopting tone. my voice
- Word Choice – precise words
- Sentence Fluency – flow of the sentenc
- Conventions (spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar)
- Presentation
Reading Strategies:
- Decoding- using phonic and morphemic analysis to identify unfamiliar words
- Word – Learning: analyzing word parts to figure out meaning
- Comprehension: predicting, drawing inferences, and visualizing to understand what they are reading
- Study: taking notes and asking questions to learn information they are reading in content area textbooks.
Writing Strategies:
- Prewriting: organizing, brainstorming to develop ideas
- Drafting: narrowing down topics and providing answers to ideas on first draft
- Revising: detecting problems, elaborating ideas, combining sentences, communicate ideas more effectively
- Editing: yuck. proofreading, identify and correct spelling and other mechanical errors
- Publishing: designing the layout to prepare their final copies to share with the intended audience.
virginiawilson 