Every Kid Needs a Champion

Every educator should watch this seven minute Ted Talk by Rita Pierson. Incredible.  It does not have a lot to do with reading, but it is well worth your time (I never like when people tell me that, but it is short, at least)

Now back to Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.  I read her words on fluency with interest as my seven year old son is apparently lacking in fluency.  He reads thirteen words fluently and should be reading in the fifty range.  Not being a reading teacher or an elementary teacher, I am not quite sure what this means, but I have determined that the reason why his fluency is so low is because he cannot sit still long enough to focus.  He simply cannot focus long enough to really read and understand before he moves on to the next thing.  Wolf writes that "fluency is not a matter of speed; it is a matter of being able to utilize all the special knowledge a child has about a word-its letters, letter patterns, meanings,grammatical functions, roots and endings-fast enough to have time to think and comprehend" (131).  In her definition of fluency, a child cannot  be considered a reader until they know the meanings of the words.  

So, if we define words and teach them what they mean, they will be better able to decode quickly and thereby have age appropriate fluency.    She attributes fluency to inferences and insights.  In this case, should we be doing DIBELS testing which is a test of fluency by reading unrelated words read quickly and they even read nonsense words.  See definition below from Wikipedia.  

DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is a series of short tests that assess early childhood (K-6) literacy.

It is a set of procedures and measures for assessing the acquisition of a set of K-6 literacy skills, such as phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The theory behind DIBELS is that giving primary school students a number of quick tests, educators will have the data to identify students who need additional assistance and to monitor the effectiveness of intervention strategies.

This formative early literacy assessment was created by Dr. Roland Good and Dr. Ruth Kaminski of the Dynamic Measurement Group. Research about this type of testing was first done at theUniversity of Oregon. DIBELS is used by some kindergarten through sixth grade teachers in the United States to screen for whether students are at risk of reading difficulty, and to monitor student progress and guide instruction.

The DIBELS comprise a developmental sequence of one-minute measures: recognizing initial sounds (phonemic awareness), naming the letters of the alphabet (alphabetic principle), segmenting words into phonemes (phonemic awareness), reading nonsense words (alphabetic principle), oral reading of a passage (accuracy and fluency), retelling (comprehension), and word use (vocabulary).

Wolf ends this chapter by noting that for people to become lifelong readers there must be an emotional engagement and students need encouragement to take on harder and harder material.  

And I will end with a quote from the book (which are may favorite part of this book)

At any age, the reader must come across" the child reader is the most eager and quick to do so;he not only lends to the story, he flings into the story the whole of his sensuous experience which from being limited is the more intense.        -Elizabeth Bowen (Irish novelist and short story writer)