The listening center available in my school only works sporadically. My students need a good listening center because listening to quality books promotes fluency.
I have a class of eager and excited 2nd graders. One weakness with many of my students is fluency. By the end of the year they need to be able to read 100 words per minute and many can only read 40-50 wpm. I want to help them reach this target and listening to quality literature will help.
I teach at a charter school in South Jordan, Utah so my students come from many different areas, some from low socioeconomic circumstances.
They are eager to learn and in my classroom I really emphasize the urgency and importance of all we do. They know that "What we learn in 2nd grade we will use every day for the rest of our lives." Our school has a strong community feel about it and we use "The Leader in Me" program so they are learning how to be successful individuals. Our school has many strengths, but one weakness has been our language arts program, on which much emphasis has been placed this year in order to improve our students' literacy.
My Project
I do Power Hour in my classroom, which is where I work with small groups at their own reading level while my others students work independently at "centers". One center I feel we really need in order to improve fluency is a listening center. I borrowed one from our media center, but it is old and only works sporadically. We need one on which we can rely. Listening to high-quality literature improves fluency. When students hear how a story should be read, they will start to read this way. In our busy day, I don't always have time to do "read-aloud" and this is one way for students experience that important aspect of literacy more regularly.
A listening center will help to make my students better readers.
We have a subscription to Reading Rainbow, which contains hundreds of high-quality books for my students to listen to. Every genre of book is represented and there is a book to enhance the instruction of almost all areas of our curriculum. All I need now is a way for my students to access these books during center time.
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