Real-Life Inquiry

For my real-life inquiry project I wanted to see how reading aloud would affect a child’s ability to read the same book. I decided to use my five year old niece for my project. She is entering kindergarten this fall. She is in the beginning stages of reading. She understands how books work (which way to hold the book, which was the pages turn, the text goes from left to right, etc.) and she knows all of her letters. She is just beginning to recognize some high-frequency words.
I decided it would work best if I let my niece choose the book. She chose to read Dora the Explorer: First Day of School. I explained to her that I was going to read the story to her, then we were going to go back through the book and see if she could “help me read it again.” I thought this would be a good strategy to get her engaged in the project because she loves being a little helper.
I read the book to her, pointing at the words as I read. After I finished, we went back to the beginning of the book. I started to read the book again and stopped at different words that I thought she might recognize, in order to allow her to say the word if she knew it. She followed along well and said more words than I expected, but most of the words were the characters’ names. I think environmental print had a lot to do with her recognizing the characters’ names. The “Letting Go of ‘Letter of the Week’” article by Bell and Jarvis discusses the use of environmental print in the classroom. I am not really sure if she actually recognized the text of the other words she said, or if she just remembered the words from hearing this story multiple times. Even if she just remembered the words, I think that is a good way for her to learn them because she can look at the text and know what the word looks like in print. The NAEYC/IRA position statement article states that The single most important activity for building these understandings and skills essential for reading success appears to be reading aloud to children.” I agree with this article. I believe reading aloud to your students is incredibly important and very beneficial to all students.

Readability vs. Leveling

I enjoyed reading the article Readability versus Leveling by Fry. I did not understand much about readability and leveling so it was nice to read about their histories, similarities, and differences. The article defined both terms and discussed the relationship between the two. It is important for educators, especially reading teachers, to know about readability and leveling in order to provide their students with books on their reading level. Most readability formulas are objective and can be done by a computer, but can also be done by hand. Leveling is less objective and cannot be done by a computer. Leveling contain seven different factors: content, illustrations, length, curriculum, language structure, judgement, and format. Readability is based on sentence length and vocabulary. Leveling is not typically used outside of the elementary classroom, whereas readability has a much wider range. There are pros and cons to both readability and leveling. I think that both should be taken into consideration while choosing reading materials for your students.

Below is an image of the Dale-Chall readability index computation sheet.