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Books for Telling TimeAuthor(s): Kathy BellSource: The Reading Teacher, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Nov., 1988), p. 179Published by: Wiley on behalf of the International Reading AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20200064 .
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Practical teaching ideas
Suggest that the students may like to
look for some of the really outstanding primary books in the library. Your bet ter readers, since they feel no concern over their position as readers in the
classroom, will probably do so. As soon as the better readers are seen us
ing these books, the less able readers feel able to legitimately use them also.
Your better readers are reading them for appreciation of exceptional pri
mary books, while your less able read ers are doing so for their own practice in reading.
Book sharing has several broad ben
efits. Everyone, including the teacher, becomes more knowledgeable about children's literature. Different types of
literature can be emphasized, increas
ing children's knowledge of literary genres. Speaking, listening, and dis
cussion skills are developed, greatly
aiding the language arts curriculum. As the teacher, you learn what types of literature your class members like as a
whole and as individuals. Book shar
ing provides an effective model of the value of reading.
One word of caution: As children
become aware of good books, some
"discussions" can develop over who
gets to have which book this week. But most of us would rather deal with that
than "Teacher, I can't find anything to
read."
Melting is with the College of Education, Health and Human Development, Mon
tana State University, Bozeman, Montana.
Books for telling time Kathy Bell
Learning to tell time is a very impor tant task for 1st graders. They feel
very proud of themselves when they have accomplished this skill. Time
telling involves telling time and the time concepts.
Begin the time unit by teaching the children the features of a clock. Stu dents need to understand the meaning
of the two hands on the clock and how
they are coordinated; they must learn that there are 60 minutes in an hour.
Time concepts to be learned are se
quencing events, cycles of events (days of the week, months of the year), dura tion (how long is a minute, an hour, etc.), and calendar.
Children get involved in The Scare crow Clock by George Mendoze as
they can use their arms to be the clock's hands in the story.
The concept of time is touched on in Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
by Virginia Lee Burton. It gives the children the idea of an 8 hour day.
Reviewing the days of the week is a
good lead for Chicken Soup with Rice, an all time favorite. This hilarious book by Maurice Sendak helps the cal endar come alive and motivates chil dren to learn to read a calendar.
Caesar Rodney School District, Camden
Wyoming, Delaware. Excerpted from "Literature in the Math Curriculum" by
Kathy Bell in Trade Secrets (University of Delaware College of Education), Fall 1987, pp. 4-6.
Improving oral
reading fluency Lorraine Leidholdt
As a primary teacher I was well aware that no matter how cleverly basal reader publishers disguised the text's
reading levels or how cleverly reading groups were named, children in my classroom knew who the good and
poor readers were. They deduced this
through observation: Good readers were the ones who read rhythmically and fast and rarely stumbled over
words. Poor readers were those who read slowly and haltingly and fre
quently stumbled. Since oral reading was what sig
nalled reading proficiency level to lis
teners, I sought ways to improve it. I was convinced that, given the appro priate instruction and motivation,
readers at low achievement levels
could read as fluently as those at
higher levels. For the task, I needed the right mate
rials and equipment. Fortunately, my school system owned three sets of Bill
Martin and Peggy Brogan's Instant
Readers (a series published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970-74) and the
accompanying tapes. I employed these
along with a method which I now
know is similar to S. Jay Samuel's method of "Repeated Readings" (RT,
January 1979). First, I taped students during a short
segment of their oral reading and let
them listen to and analyze their per formance with my guidance. We dis
cussed their use of the prosodie elements of language (pitch, stress,
juncture) as well as rate. We listened to
determine if they had read in a way that was comprehensible to listeners.
We determined which words were mis
pronounced.
Next, I provided a model of fluent,
rhythmic oral reading. The students
listened to the first part of a Bill Martin
tape while they followed along in the
accompanying instant reader. On this
section of each tape, Martin provides
background guitar music which varies
rhythmically with the phrases and sen tences he reads. This step familiarized
students with the story structure, the
words, and the rhythm of fluently read sentences.
Afterwards, students read along in
their reader with Martin on the second section of each tape where his voice
dominates and guides the readers' rate
and rhythm. In this step, students prac ticed reading words and sentences
without interference or correction from an outside source. This is an es
sential element when striving for flu
ency, since corrective procedures will
impair rate and interrupt readers' con
centration.
Students then read the story on their own using the final section of the tape where Martin provides only the back
ground music as a guide for fluency.
Finally, students read the story into a
tape recorder without the aid of the
tapes. They then listened to their oral
reading performance and once again evaluated it with my guidance. We dis cussed their use of the prosodie ele
IN THE CLASSROOM 179
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