"Differentiating Reading Instruction Chapter 3 - Reading Response

Ch. 3 - DRI - Read Alouds and Differentiation

by Laura Robb

This chapter covered the center of literacy instruction: read alouds. These seemingly small acts during the day of reading to students can have massive impacts on their literacy skills. Read alouds can be used for all kinds of instruction and assessment purposes. In many aspects, they can be used for everything in a language arts lesson! It's truly amazing how Laura Robb explains how read alouds of all kinds can benefit every student in a classroom.

Information and Summary

Robb talks about using read alouds in many different ways. She calls the read aloud text, "a common instructional text." She goes on to explain how you can model many things with a read aloud text that can then be applied to level texts for the different reading levels within a classroom. As for what to do with the read alouds, she lists a few ways as described. Read aloud texts can be used to model how to apply strategies for reading. Comprehension, visualization, inference, and several other skills can be taught through a common instructional text. Robb even includes a way to tell if students have absorbed a skill and are ready to move on! She also explains how to use a read aloud to demonstrate narrative elements. These include climax, protagonists, plot, etc. Typically she uses a short story or text to model these strategies, but longer texts and poems can be adapted to fit the lesson format. Thirdly, she discusses how students can connect to an informational text through a read aloud! Through her modeling and strategies, many of her students were able to make connections with "dull" texts. Read alouds can also be used as a catalyt for unfamiliar themes and to build background knowledge. If students do not understand a particular life experience or don't have any schema on a subject, a read aloud is the perfect way to remedy that. As discussed in previous posts, journal entries are highly important to the growth of literacy within students. Again, read alouds can be used to explore topics and themes in books that expand students' thinking. Finally, read alouds are great additions to a unit of study. They can add connections, bring insight to different points of view on an event, encourage students to explore history, and so much more. Throughout the chapter, Robb gives a series of lesson plans for each of the ways read alouds can be used. They are not detailed, but they are extremely well written and are perfect to use in a classroom that needs depth with literacy.

Reflection

Since I've been in primary literacy and language arts classes this semester (actually, that's all I'm taking), I've become quite privvy to the importance of read alouds. I find them to be the panacea for many of the classroom blunders that teachers encounter. They provide background knowledge, modeling opportunities, and so much more! I was constantly astonished about the responses that students were giving to the lessons that Laura Robb was teaching. It was amazing how a fourth or fifth grader was responding to her lessons and prompts! I knew a lot of the ways that read alouds could be used, but I had no idea that it was so deep into learning. The "common instructional text" idea is a brilliant one that I love to use in the classroom. It's a great modeling strategy for all ages of students!

I did notice, however, that many of Robb's lessons and activities are for the older grades, mainly middle school. She touches on the upper elementary grades, but her read aloud sample lessons focus primarily on seventh and eighth grade. It's nice to know that these can be used for the older grades, but because I am elementary education, I would like to know how they can adapt to younger grades as well. Still, she does an excellent job explaining how to use these lessons and I have no doubt I will be able to implement them in any grade I teach.

#readingresponse #DRI