A Simple Teaching Move Designed to Help Beginning Readers by Dr. Sam Bommarito
NOTE: Beginning this week, I will be trying out a new format for the blog. In one week, I will post a short and simple teaching tip. The next week, I will post a full blog post, including some interviews. Here is this week’s teaching tip:
Teaching the Concept of Word- The importance of making it match.
While working with a kindergarten student this summer, my student told me, “My friends told me to memorize the books.”
RED FLAG!!!!!
Memorizing leads to fake reading- it looks like they are reading, but they are not. Give them a text of appropriate difficulty that they’ve never read before, and they can’t read it at all. There are a couple of simple teaching moves to use with students to help them overcome that way of thinking.
Dr. Sam’s Chant –
“Make it match don’t make it up, that is what to do. Make it match don’t make it up, you’ll read your story true” ©2024 Dr Sam Bommarito.
The teaching move is simple. Teach the child to point to each word as they read. At first, you can even give them the first sound of each word. Play a game with them after reading. Ask them to find all occurrences of a single word (e.g., all the “the’s”). After the child begins to understand and use the concept of word, gradually release them from this scaffold. Usually, this happens by Christmas.
This is me modeling the finger-pointing. My child this summer likes to point with her “magic wand.” The book is one we made together- she picks pictures, we write something about the picture and turn it into a little book for her to read and reread. We also do Elkonin boxes and onset rhyme practice with selected words.
That’s the teaching tip, so until next week:
Happy Reading and Writing.
Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides)
Copyright 2024 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.
Hi Dr. Sam — Enjoyed your post/email. Your experience and knowledge provides practitioners and scholars insight into the dynamics of the process of learning to read as it pertains to young children. I like the light you shed on the importance of having a strategy to separate memorization from actual reading for meaning. The one-to-one matching that you shared is one strategy that I find as critical. I believe this strategy can only be used in one-in-one short reading conferences… and that the best way to make this a possibility in a classroom is through the use of a 3 part workshop approach. What say you?
First, you are not alone in liking this technique. Many teachers have written me to say they use this “olde but goodie” method and that it works well. I have actually used it in large group instruction. “Make it match don’t make it up, that is what to do, make it match don’t make it up you’ll read your story true”. After chanting that with the group, I ask them to point and read a short passage they each have a copy of. I do some child watching to see if anyone is having a problem carrying this out. For those kids who do I have a follow up teaching conference and those are one on one. So this can be used in a limited way in large group both as a screen and to provide some whole group instruction. Thanks so much for your comment.