One of my favorite things is getting into classrooms and seeing what is going on with literacy
Dear Parents
This week your child will have received order forms from the Scholastic Book Club. Ordering books in this way represents a great opportunity to build up your home libraries, and get your child excited about reading! There are 3 levels of books; Star (6yrs and below), Junior (6 and below) Wizard (7-12) and Ace (13 and above). Please return the order forms within 2 weeks (i.e. by the 29th September), and your books should arrive about 4 weeks later. Happy reading! Here is a message from Graham Grant, library manager at ISS:
Please take a look at the information from the Singapore Writers Festival below: May I take this opportunity to mention the LITTLE LIT!, the children's programme of the Singapore Writers Festival (Nov 1-9) Over two weekends, (1/2 & 8/9) there'll be four days packed with interesting acitivites for kids at the National Museum - lots of storytelling, drama workshops, art & craft sessions, meet the authors (local and international) - and it's all FREE! Are you interested in the developmental aspects of pencil grip? Ms Yvonne sent me this to share with parents on issliteracy. As an ex-Grade 1 teacher I am always interested in this subject; its so hard to change bad habits! Check out this article from OT MOM. One of our Grade 4 teachers gave me this great explanation about Skimming, Scanning, Speed reading, and Narrative reading:
There are four types of reading we do almost everyday for one reason or another. Each one takes you deeper into the meaning of a book, magazine article, website or text. These reading types are useful as individual skills also. Read on! Just on the surface… SKIMMING – We do this to quickly look over a piece of writing and take in the illustrations to see if we can get a very quick idea of what the text is about…Like if you were skimming a stone over water. This takes about 10 seconds. E.g. – This is useful for non-fiction texts to see if what we are looking at will be useful to use for a research task. Just below the surface… SCANNING – We do this when we are looking for something in particular. We FOCUS ON A KEY WORD, and when we find it, we read ‘around’ the word. Read the rest of the sentence (also the sentence before and after) to see if this is useful to you or not. It’s like looking just below the surface… what do you see? Does it attract your attention? Should you look deeper? Dip your head under… SPEED READING – We do this when you want to get a quick general idea of what a whole text is about. It is a very QUICK type of reading; we may not read all the little words, and we do not understand everything of what we are reading. For example – you might use this type of reading if you need to refresh your memory about something you read before. This does not take very long. You usually don’t use intonation or emotion when you speed read. It is very monotone. Practice speed reading something out loud to a partner to hear what it is like. Dive right in... NARRATIVE READING – This is reading at a normal speed, reading every word, which lets us have the opportunity to really understand what is being read. This is the kind of reading you do all the time. It is the one that is necessary for you to have full comprehension of what you are reading. At ISS we have almost finished assessing all the student's reading so that we know exactly where to pitch the learning for your child.
At ISS we focus on reading for meaning and comprehension. This means that we aim for our students to understand everything they read, as opposed to moving as fast as they can through the levels. It is always interesting to meet a child who can read everything on a page, but cannot understand or interpret it. I did some more research and found a website with lots of information about the importance of children being developmentally ready to read. If you are interested in the neuroscience behind reading, have a look at Children of the Code. |
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