Print Work: Understanding Readers at the Word Level
Two weeks ago we started an online conversation around Jennifer Serravallo’s (@JSerravallo) 5 lenses for assessing and teaching readers using the hashtag #literacylenses. We discussed engagement during our first week, including methods of assessing engagement in students and classrooms. Last week we covered the different aspects of fluency: automaticity, intonation/expression/prosody, phrasing/parsing, emphasis, and pace. Our goal is to cover one lens each week, followed by a recap. We will be providing you with some of the assessment tools we highlight as well as strategies to help you teach.
This week we are going to focus on the third piece of the puzzle: print work/decoding. We will be taking a look at running records and the three cueing systems readers tend to use: meaning (or semantic information), structure (or syntactical information, and/or visual (graphophonic information). We will continue to post tips, tools, and strategies from four of Jen's books: Conferring with Readers,Teaching Reading in Small Groups, The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook K–2 and The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook Grades 3–6.
If you're going to be at the NCTE Annual Convention this week, you can catch Jen on Sunday, November 23 at 1:30 pm at the Reading and Writing: Tools For Learning, Thinking, and Problem Solving session.
We have created blank versions of some of the tools Jen discusses in her books for you to download and use in your classrooms. Scroll down to the bottom of this post for both Microsoft Word and PDF versions of the tools from week 1 (engagement) and week 2 (fluency).
If you’re on Twitter, we are using the hashtag #literacylenses to capture the conversation from beginning to end. We'll see you there!
Jennifer Serravallo is a national literacy consultant and the bestselling author or coauthor of the Heinemann titles Teaching Reading in Small Groups, Conferring with Readers, The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook K–2 and The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook Grades 3–6. She started out teaching grades 3–5 in Title I schools and then spent eight years as a national staff developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.
