Week 6, October 23rd

What and why?

This week for my literacy reading I looked at ‘Readers as text code breakers’. This ‘code breaker’ aspect appealed to me as it alluded to ideas of espionage and secret missions. I was not disappointed, by page three I was struggling my way through a secret message, and on page four I was learning about ‘word attack skills’!

As a side note, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the exciting section was actually largely a summary of several Freebody and Luke articles. I must confess I was actually anti-Freebody and Luke up until this point, due to their disdain for paragraph usage in their paper we were provided earlier this semester. I was pleased to see that their ideas did live up to the hype after all, they just need Harris, Turbill, Fitzsimmons & McKenzie (or Jovanovic) working tirelessly to convert these ideas into concise English for me to be able to follow the ideas.

Central Premise

Text code breakers “Attend to visual information and to non-visual information to decipher text”. They build up a range of knowledge, such as the conventions like grammar in writing. They also have a range of skills, such as the aforementioned ‘word attack’ skills which include sounding a word out, and breaking a word down into its component syllables, the awkwardly-named ‘syllabification’.

I also learned about ‘phonemes’, a term I had heard of but never knew the definition of. I was interested to learn that without an understanding of these key sounds, “children are most likely to have serious difficulty in learning to read and write”.

In practice

I found the section on ‘Scaffolding Children as Text Code Breakers’ to contain the most practical advice. I have included the list as it isn’t too long. I found the idea of linking reading to ‘meaningful contexts’ to be worthwhile advice, and I immediately thought of the recipe ideas with Ali and Luca’s bakery we discussed earlier.

I don’t know whether I would use it in the method presented, but I like the idea of the six groups of ‘code breaking behaviours’ listed here. Whilst we’ve discussed that ‘testing’ is becoming an out-dated concept, at least having a list of behaviours to look out for is a very useful starting point. I could be diagnosing ‘graphophonic miscues’ of my own before long.

Criticism

I found the sections on ICT to be oddly out-dated for 2006, with phrases like “CD-Roms are not part of the internet” as well as “And what about the computer keyboard?” Perhaps this is just because ICT is second nature to me. I did a little research and note that there is also a 2001 edition of the same book, it seems like this maybe wasn’t updated for the 2006 edition.

Reference

Harris, P., Turbill, J., Fitzsimmons, P. & McKenzie, B. (2006). Readers as text code breakers, Reading in the Primary School years(pp. 114-158). South Melbourne: Social Science Press. 

What and why?

My numeracy reading for this week is the ‘Early number’ chapter from ‘Teaching mathematics in primary schools’. Whilst the article approaches early number from a school context, it is invaluable in that it frequently discusses which point children tend to be at in their number learning when they arrive at school. E.g. “Before they begin formal schooling, many young students have the capacity to subitise” or “Many children can count to 10 before they commence school”.

  

Central Premise

There are a great deal of topics covered over the chapter including classification, patterning, counting stages, counting strategies, conservation of number and so on. I find the ‘jump strategy’ and ‘split strategy’ of counting particularly appealing as it represents computation visually.

Something that surprised me was that there is apparently debate over whether base 10 blocks should be used to teach place value. This is interesting to me as I have a maths subject this semester where we have been looking at base 10 blocks, and I wasn’t aware of the debate. This is something I may research further in future.

In practice

As well as researching base 10 blocks and jump / skip counting further, I also liked the idea of presenting mathematical word problems in a variety of ways. This lends itself to my comfort with words over numbers, but also allows word problems to cover a variety of practical situations that will hopefully be relevant to the student’s life.

Reference

Zeuenbergen, R., Dole, S. & Wright, R. (2004). Early number, Teaching mathematics in primary schools (pp. 121-148). Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.