Reading’s
NEW Tools
Early-elementary teachers use books, tablets, tests and more BY TAMMY DiDOMENICO
Jonathan holds a tablet, one of reading’s new tools.
W
hen Christina Amodie begins teaching this fall, she will be spending an even larger chunk of the school day helping her students become better readers. “When I first started teaching kindergarten, everything was focused on learning letters,” says Amodie, who is beginning her 20th year in the profession at Verona’s J.D. George Elementary School. “We had the Letter of the Week. We would teach the sounds for each letter. Now, we have them doing 50 sight words. We start sight words before they even have letter recognition or sound recognition.” She confirms what many parents have long known: Kindergarten is no longer a leisurely transition from home nurturing to structured academics. And the push to get students reading and writing as early as possible has become more demanding. In addition to sight recognition and phonemic awareness—identifying the sounds that make up words—elementary school 20
classrooms are now tasked with developing complex critical thinking and text evidence recognition skills. But Amodie, of Camillus, and other local educators are finding creative ways to get students building the literacy skills they need. “The reading piece is so key,” she says. “We’re trying to foster a love of reading. I have book nooks and little reading corners in my classroom, and I have all kinds of literature.” In Amodie’s class, students are counting syllables and recognizing context clues during a lesson about the days of the week—bringing literacy practice and skill building into other subjects whenever possible. Students have activities based on their reading levels, but Amodie also has a “quiet time” read-aloud during which she chooses material that is just beyond their reading levels. “That builds vocabulary, but also piques interest in something that they couldn’t
FEATURE STORY
read themselves,” she says. “They are listening to vocabulary that is a little bit higher than what they would be used to hearing in some of their grade-level stories.” More Content, Earlier Getting students to make progress in reading comprehension before they have mastered decoding is not easy. But the Common Core—more formally, the New York State Common Core Learning Standards Assessments—requires that students become adept in their understanding of complex text, starting in kindergarten and even earlier. Building reading comprehension while also working on decoding (figuring out what words mean) early is the new normal, says Eric Larison, assistant superintendent for instruction for the Solvay Union Free School District. For the past two years, Solvay has been implementing the Core Knowledge Language Arts program, which is recommended by the New York State Education Department for use in kindergarten through