Readings: Allington Ch
2 and 3
In
Allington’s chapters 2 and 3, he includes essential information about reading
that I believe all teachers should know and understand. I have never really looked this keep into
reading ablilities at the elementary level, but Allington has now given me the
ability to do so! In chapter 2,
Allington says a lot about the sheer volume students read in their classroom
and how beneficial reading time is in the classroom. As I was reading, I was
trying to put myself in the position of a teacher. How could I think of ways to make more time
for my class to have reading time? Would it be possible for me to eliminate
some of the “interruptions” Allington talks about? I feel as if I would need to
establish an EXTREMELY structured system in my classroom in order to completely
eliminate unnecessary interruption and transition time. I am not sure yet HOW I
would do that, but I do know that I will need to develop ideas for this. When I am in my field placement, I am now
going to pay special attention of what strategies teachers use in order to have
a structured interruption time (because interruptions will most definitely
happen; that is just life). However, there was one thing that Allington talked
about that I wasn’t completely in agreement with.
Allington talked about how some schools are now having their “specials” be 50 minutes long instead of 25 minutes long, and have them be only 2 days a week instead of 4. I really like the idea of this because it would cut down on interruption time, but I think that for younger students this would become an issue with attention span. There is definitely no win-win situation with this, so I think teachers need to find that sweet spot. We need to find that amount of time that is perfect for their attention spans, and is better on interruption time. I feel this way because I have somewhat experienced something like this in the past. Over the summer I teach swim lessons and the swim lessons are for 2 weeks, 30 minutes per day (Monday-Friday). However, our summer got cut short this past season, so our last swim lessons session was only one week long, with 45 minute sessions. From my perspective, it seemed like the children’s attention span was not long enough for this long period of time, and therefore was not as productive as the shorter 30 minute periods. The children would stop listening to their instructors and just want to play games, and it would be hard for the instructors to get any work done with them.
In Allington’s Ch. 3, he mentions a program called Accelerated Reader as one of the leveling programs schools can use. This is the leveling program that my elementary school used. When I look back on it, I remember not really liking “AR” because a lot of the books I wanted to read were not “AR” books. I really didn’t understand the concept of it at the time, but now I realize what my teachers were trying to accomplish by having us read AR books. By now, the AR program has probably expanded greatly, so the issue of not having enough books would probably be gone.
When Allington talks about “series” books and how predictable, have flat characters, and are mediocre, I was a little surprised. I was definitely a series book reader when I was in elementary school, but I never felt like it was ever a bad thing. I feel as if I fully developed my reading skills even though I was reading about the same characters over and over again. I see Allington’s point, but I think series books help children really enjoy reading! Later on Allington talks about promoting series books in the classroom. He talks about dividing the class up into “clubs” of different series. I actually think this would work out really well and students would really have an interest in it because these are the type of books I know that all of my elementary school classmates loved to read! Maybe the problem would be eliminated if we encouraged reading from multiple series, not just one series.
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