Yolanda U. Trapp
A) Cooperative Integrated Reading and Comprehension.
It is an approach for grades 2-6 that emphasizes cooperative partner and group activities among students. It includes teacher-directed instruction. (Reading aloud, practicing difficult words and retelling stories from Basal readers.) Students are required to read a book of their choice each day and report it every two weeks. (CIRC) It is also available in a Spanish version.
B) Direct Instruction.
Designed for elementary schools. Instruction given in fast pace, with rhythm and group and individual responses. Also to accelerate the learning of students at risk. They are assessed frequently in skills the teacher observes they need to master. (DI)
C) Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction. (ECRI)
This is a program designed for all grades, and intends to implement and strengthen the curriculum, using a variety of techniques such as word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension, spelling and including writing in the process. The classroom reading period is longer, around two hours. The teacher models and instructs new skills (demonstrates book and print concepts, extends concepts and vocabulary, provides shared class experiences for "Talk Around the Text.") After a period of practice, teachers hold individual conferences, and re-teach skills as necessary to small groups.
D) Junior Great Books (JGB)
For all grades, designed to expose students to rich and challenging literature developing critical thinking skills. Selecting texts according to their age-level, they also write expressing their point of view.
E) Multicultural Reading and Thinking.
This program intends to help students read for context and literal understanding developing critical-reasoning skills of analysis, comparison, inference, interpretation and evaluation when reading multicultural themes, and, literature in general. Each lesson involves inquiry, sustained discussion, and student's reasoning. It is a supplementary program for grades 3-8. In this unit I am including grades K, 1, 2 and 4th. (Please see Lesson Plans.)
F) Open Court Collections for Young Scholars (OC)
This is a reading and writing program for grades K-6 and intends to use a balanced approach to reading instruction, by introducing grade-appropriate decodable texts, and a variety of classic and contemporary children's literature. It includes independent tests demonstrating its effectiveness.
G) Success For All (SFA)
This program, supported by Title I funds, after a research-based reading curriculum includes phonics, children's literature, extended reading groups, cooperative learning, assessments to identify needs of students, one-on-one tutoring for students with reading problems. (This is one of the programs I use in my multi-age, multi-disable classroom.) The whole program is named "Seven Promising Reading and English Language Arts Programs" and is available through the AFT order department. Copies are free.
The Reading Process
Why did I decide to choose levels of elementary students separately? Because learning and development are so individualized that it is not possible or desirable to establish a uniform curriculum.
Reading begins in the crib.1
"By the age of sixteen weeks, infants laugh out loud, vocalize, and babble." They start crying and sneeze and recognize sounds made by humans and hear human speech sounds. They start to recognize the message in the mother's voice of affection and love. This is the base upon which future success and attitudes toward reading are built. As children approach to school age, the family and themselves expect to learn to read and write. Readiness for reading comes from a base of the beginning experience they had with that caring voice they listened in the crib. In kindergarten, children begin to more carefully examine print, looking for patterns, detecting similarities and differences in letters, words, and sounds. Later in first and second grade, children are beginning to utilize the conventional rule systems that govern written language to function as effective readers and writers. In third and fourth grades, verbal language ability becomes more refined and elaborated when incorporating a literature-based program that includes other cultures and languages. The cycle of learning repeats itself as children's concepts and skills become more elaborate. The ability to recognize letters is one important predictor of successful reading, but adults often erroneously assume that direct instruction in letter recognition will achieve this end. Like the development of other knowledge, the ability to recognize letters begins in awareness and exploration. Three and four-year-olds should have many opportunities to become aware of letters in meaningful contexts by being read to and seeing environmental print. Some four-year-olds and most fives will explore letters in many contexts and learn to recognize those that are most meaningful first. Some five and most six-year-olds examine letters more closely, adjust their personal perceptions to the conventional uses of letters and are able to utilize the ability to recognize letters in a variety of contexts.
Reading Traditional Stories from Different Cultures
I learned to read when I was around three and a half to four years old. My grandmother used to read to me in German, so German became my mother's language. Suddenly, I began to know the meaning of the words and I discovered the power of reading by myself and living all the adventures of the characters or protagonists of the stories. I lived in a wonderland. Surrounded with castles, princes and princesses, pirates, poor girls/boys, without family. I remember especially one book: "Heimathlos", (without home) where the protagonist had no family and finally she married the man of her dreams and they lived happily ever after . . . Does it sound familiar? Isn't it like all the happy end stories of the soap operas people watch today on t.v., or like Cinderella who met her prince and became a princess? I am giving these examples because in some way they are eternal and with little variations written in all different cultures. They are universal. They could be of German origin or Chinese, or Latin. Human beings love these kinds of stories. They reflect our dreams, and human beings are equal regarding the color of their skin or the features of their eyes.
We have to introduce children to these different cultures, it will give them a sense that the more they know about other people, the more they know about themselves as human beings.
