My students are second graders in a small suburban school. My school serves kindergarten through fifth grade students. Approximately one fourth of the students are English Language Learners. A high percentage of the students qualify for free breakfast and lunch, and many of them receive free backpack food from a special program for weekends.
My students are active learners who are eager to expand their knowledge and practice new skills.
They learn best when concepts are taught in multiple ways, which helps them understand abstract ideas. They are deep thinkers and love coming to school and learning new things each day.
My Project
Many of us view reading as an enjoyable activity. For a student struggling to learn this skill, reading can be a daunting task. Interesting books at the students' reading level that can be shared with a partner make practicing reading skills a fun, enjoyable, stress-free experience. Reading fluency is essential to educational success. More fluent readers focus their attention on making connections among the ideas in a text and between these ideas and their background knowledge. Therefore, they are able to focus on comprehension. Less fluent readers must focus their attention primarily on decoding and accessing the meaning of individual words. As a result, they have little attention left for comprehending the text. Struggling readers may be resistant to practicing the skills necessary to promote their fluency and comprehension. I have found that partner reading can enhance individual and small group reading instruction in a comfortable, relaxed mode. Students love to share interesting stories and are encouraged to practice reading skills including rate, intonation, and prosody, through reading partner books. They not only need to focus on their assigned text but also listen carefully to their partner's reading in order to have the text flow well.
The books I'm requesting are ideal because they were developed specifically for dual-reading.
Student passages in these books are color coded to allow students to follow parts more easily. Each student reads a specific color coded section and then they read a third colored section together. The texts are very engaging with full color illustrations and students love the interactive sharing when they are immersed in reading with a partner. Dual reading is so popular and successful that I hope to expand the book collection.
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