"I thought I knew how to teach reading, but Whoa!"

Chapter 7, I thought I knew how to teach reading, but Whoa, was a little bit scary at first. With the chapter beginning by introducing us to a real teacher who had so many different grade levels in one classroom was a little bit scary for me! That would be quite a challenge so having this chapter go in depth to help better understand what we can do for that made me feel a little bit better.

First, I liked the section Finding a Starting Point because I like where Katie advices her this new teacher to start with what she know like read alouds, community writing, and independent reading. This way the new teacher, Rachel, could determine the strengths and weaknesses of each child specifically and she would not have to set up guided reading groups within the first month or so, it said. This made me a feel a little relieved. Another thing the next section goes on to say is that there does not have to be a set teaching sequence. You can move around based on the needs of your students. The chapter goes on to discuss different strategies in more depth. All of the discussions on each of the strategies are pretty informational but I liked a few best.

The strategy discussing voice/print match was pretty interesting to me. I liked the emphasis on which of the two pictures better represented one to practice with which talks about practicing with one with essentially enough spacing to use your pointer finger. Then after this section, there was a couple ideas that were suggested if students were still struggling which I liked because I feel like some struggling readers may not fully connect to just using the pointer finger. I personally felt like the idea of getting a book with the students name to have repetition was such a good idea.

Another thing that chapter talked about that really stuck out to me was the different between phonics and phonemic awareness! I really hadn't known that or at least realized it. I think another thing that stuck out to me was that you should not put too much emphasis on phonemic awareness. I liked that it gave the example of only needing to use phonemic awareness with a couple letters because they get the concept so they do not need to do every single letter.

The last strategy that I found really ah-ha about was fluency! I do not recall really being taught to read with expression as much as I think it should be. Emphasizing fluency can really make readers fall in love with reading, understand what they are reading, and learning to love what they are reading. When I was in middle school, my history teacher had use accents to read so that it was interesting to us. I liked doing it and sometimes with boring texts, I try to read really excitingly.

Finally, I like that the authors have a section that makes suggestions for teachers. These may be something to look back on when I am a first year teacher, or anytime I need guidance with readers! I mostly loved the closing remarks about how sometimes the hardest to teach are the hardest to love. I feel this rings true in many cases but as teachers it should be our passion to teach these students.