San Luis Obispo County Reading Association (SLOCRA)

Lucia Mar USD > Educational Organizations > 04/05 Happenings

05.18.13

SLOCRA News and Happenings!


	Reflections by Jane Peterson, IRA Conference, San Antonio, May '05

It was my great pleasure to represent SLOCRA at the annual IRA conference in San Antonio Texas the first week of May. I presented a session about creating class eBooks in response to literature. It was well attended (about 300) and well received. I look forward to submitting a proposal to speak again next year in Chicago. This was too much fun to not do again!

Here are some of my thoughts and reflections on the hot trends and topics:

Vocabulary/Comprehension—There were many sessions, publications and vendors concerned with vocabulary development as an aid to comprehension. I attended one session that shared many practical classroom strategies for improving vocabulary/comprehension. The presenter shared a number of ideas based on the work and research by Isabel Beck. The ideas seem to be engaging and fun for children and are certainly some things I intend to try in my classroom.

Fluency—I did not get a chance to attend a session on fluency but it was a hot topic. Many vendors were selling readers theater materials, blackline masters as well as individual student books, as an aid to fluency. Some vendors had whole programs developed around it. Some of the readers theater books were just a printing of nursery rhymes and chants that everyone knows (a waste money) but some were more diverse and included non fiction as well as fiction themes. I plan to investigate them further as this is something I have been planning on doing more of in my classroom.

Non fiction readers—There were many vendors as well as sessions devoted to non-fiction books for learning to read. I met a researcher, Dr. Nancy Romance (interesting name, huh?), who has been doing a research project on whether students learn to read better with fiction or non fiction books. The study proves that non-fiction books do the same or better, in the case of ELL students, for teaching reading . It seems that they help the ELL learner comprehend better because the child has more schema for non-fiction than fiction and can thus transfer what they know and learn vocabulary as they learn to read.

Dibels, a kind of phonemic awareness tool, was a big topic. I didn’t learn much about it except that educators like Regie Routman do not like it! She said it is an assessment tool that is unnecessary since any competent teacher can figure out what a child knows right from the student’s writing samples. No one else I encountered had anything positive to say about Dibels either.

Technology issues (my area of interest)—The reading educator community in general seems rather opposed to technology. They appear to fear that technology is doing away with books, which is totally untrue--it is just a tool, like a typewriter. As a tool it supports reading and literacy. An example is a research project session I attended which shows that students, and especially ELL students, learn vocabulary and comprehend better when using electronic animated books. Apparently the animations help with comprehension better than the static illustrations of a book. But the study did also show that electronic books with lots of extraneous game type activities built in were distracting. If a child was left on his or her own to listen to the story as well as play the games they chose the games. No surprise there!