Personal Model of the Theory of Reading

Nikole Hilterman

EDRD 7715-W02

Dr. Ritchie

June 4, 2012

Personal Model of the Theory of Reading

Teaching a child to read is one of the most important things I can do to prepare them with a foundation of academic excellence.  I truly enjoy reading with children in my classroom.  I love to see my students make a connection with a story and/or show a strong emotion after reading or hearing a story.  I enjoyed reading as a child, but the older I became the less interested in reading I became.  I would read for my school assignments but didn’t read for pleasure. Interest in other activities seemed to fill the free time in my life.  Once I started working with young children, I realized how much they enjoyed having someone read to them.  This experience helped me to develop a passion for instilling a love of reading in each of them.  I hope to help my students develop a lifelong love for reading, one that another interest can never replace.

For several years I worked with preschool children in a daycare.  During that time I found myself collecting children’s books and digging through my childhood collection of books to have new stories to share with them.  At that time I was still taking core classes for my bachelor’s degree.  I didn’t really know how to teach a child to read, but I was enthusiastic about reading to them, and they were always excited and eager to hear the next story.  I believe this type of positive reading environment, at a young age, motivates children to become avid readers themselves.                

After teaching for several years I am much more comfortable teaching my students how to read.  I have gained a lot of valuable knowledge throughout my years as an educator from fellow teachers and various other resources.  I’ve watched children grow from struggling readers, to emergent readers, and eventually become independent readers.  I am currently a first grade teacher, and I believe first grade is a critical year in a child’s reading development.  I constantly express the importance of reading to my students and their parents.  I use sight words, phonics lessons, fluency passages, echo reading, vocabulary words, guided reading, graphic organizers, and comprehension strategies in hopes of eventually developing an independent reader.

In my classroom I like to use a variety of reading strategies to help build confident readers.  At the beginning of the year students review letters and letter sounds, the basic building blocks of reading.  Then, students begin working with words through phonics lessons and a sight word list.  Once students are familiar with these concepts they can begin to understand sentence structure.  Through guided reading emergent readers are taught to recognize the beginning of a sentence by its capital letter and the end of the sentence by its punctuation mark.  This helps to build a fluent reader by teaching the students where to pause and take a breath while reading.  Students can then spend their year reading sentences, poems, and books in a variety of ways such as; listening to a reader, echoing a reader, and choral reading.  It is also important to have students read silently as well as with a partner.  This gives them an opportunity to read the text themselves, but also to hear someone else read it and to practice reading out loud to someone.  I believe all of these strategies, techniques, and resources combine together like puzzle pieces to create a strong, confident, independent reader.  Throughout this course I hope to obtain even more knowledge about teaching reading, so I will be able to further assist my students in the future.