Learning to Reading At Mistwood
Mistwood uses a cross-curricular holistic approach to early literacy acquisition
Holistic cross-curricular literacy acquisition refers to an educational approach that aims to develop students' literacy skills in a way that is comprehensive, integrated, and meaningful. This approach emphasizes the importance of reading, writing, speaking, and listening across all subject areas, rather than teaching these skills in isolation.
Holistic cross-curricular literacy acquisition involves connecting literacy skills to real-world contexts and experiences, such as using reading and writing to learn about science, social studies, or mathematics. This approach encourages students to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills as they engage with a range of texts and media.
What does this mean?
Cross-Curricular: “Instruction that intentionally applies multiple academic disciplines simultaneously, is an effective way to teach students transferable problem solving skills, give real-world meaning to school assignments, and increase engagement and rigor.” This means that you will not see a class or curriculum labeled "reading", "phonics" or “writing” because literacy skills are being addressed across all our classes everyday.
Holistic Approach Literacy: Mistwood’s holistic approach to literacy consists is eclectic consisting of three parts in the grammar school: 1- Whole Language reading instruction, 2-Phonics, and 3-Holistic view of Language
Whole Language Reading Instruction: In the simplest terms, the whole-language approach strives to teach children to read words as whole pieces of language. Influenced by the Constructivist Theory, proponents of the whole-language methodology believe that children draw from their perspective and prior experiences to form the framework for new knowledge. This form of instruction is taught using a holistic approach, meaning that children do not learn to break down sounds individually but to take words at face value and associate them with prior knowledge. Think of it as the way we learn to speak a language. So, if a child sees the word “dog” written enough times with a picture of a dog he or she will then associate that word, in its entirety, with the idea of a dog. A study done in Scotland showed that young students who learn to read using only a phonics-based program read at a significantly slower pace and understand less than those who are in a classroom that utilizes a blended approach. This trend continued when the students were 11 years old, with many of them years behind their peers in identifying new words. The difference was even more pronounced when these students were in university, many of them years behind their peers in fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary.
Phonics: Phonics is an academic approach to teaching reading where instruction develops an understanding of the connection between the letters and their sounds. The English language has 44 phonemes and the knowledge of these can enhance the reading learning process. Phonics is taught through stories, crafts and activities. Research suggests that phonics is particularly beneficial for younger students (4−7 year olds) as they begin to read. Teaching phonics is more effective on average than other approaches to early reading (such as whole language or alphabetic approaches), though it should be emphasized that effective phonics techniques are usually embedded in a rich literacy environment for early readers and are only one part of a successful literacy strategy.
Holistic View of Language: A holistic view of language does not attempt to separate out the act of reading from comprehension of the content. Program’s embracing a holistic approach to language understanding that comprehension of the material is the fundamental purpose of reading. Instruction therefore focuses on what the student needs to learn to be able to have adequate comprehension of the whole text, not of the exact details of phonic and fluency. This view also reaches to writing AND interpretation of a variety of media. Multi Media literacy is a focus of our group 3-5 literacy program.
Why do we do it this way?
Overcoming Defeatism: Students can suffer from a lack of confidence, resulting in academic underachievement. Typically, struggling readers have to contend with more than academic challenges—there are a number of emotional challenges facing these students well. Some of the emotional challenges we as teachers need to address include:
Sense of Failure: The failure of another previous attempt at improving reading skills. As a result, many students suffer from a sense of defeat, believing that they can never make the grade.
Embarrassment. Students are embarrassed by their lack of reading skills, and as a result avoid reading in front of others in order to hide what they believe to be a personal failure.
Lack of confidence. Students’ feelings of frustration and failure can lead to behavioral problems and withdrawal, both of which lead to academic underachievement.
Lack of intrinsic motivation. Many students are neither engaged nor motivated to acquire the skills to overcome the challenges they face, believing it to be a pointless venture.
Mistwood’s literacy program for groups 1-2 are set-up to prevent this internalized defeatism that we see in our transfer students.
What does this look like?
Engaging Content: We strive to engage learners through authentic experiences and engaging stories in all classes. Students that love books, learn to love reading regardless of when they begin to read independently. We teach cross-curricular thematic classes that center on content that is engaging to young students. We feel their natural curiosity with fun books and read-alouds that makes our students want to read. Students who love reading become lifelong learners, researchers and critical thinkers.
Read Alouds: Reading aloud is one of the most important things parents and teachers can do with children. Reading aloud builds many important foundational skills, introduces vocabulary, provides a model of fluent, expressive reading, and helps children recognize what reading for pleasure is all about. Read-alouds let teachers build a community of learners, build a collection of shared texts, provide age appropriate reading material, teach comprehension, teach language skills and develop the students ability talk about texts.
Modeling: Modeling is when an educator shows students how to perform a skill while describing each step with a rationale. Learning by being modeled to is the most basic and instinctual way humans and other social species learn. Between 30-80% of students will learn to read simply by being consistently exposed to reading in an intentional way. As teachers read aloud to students they model the skills and practices of effective reading to the students: sounding out unknown or new words, looking for context clues to understand new vocabulary, making predictions about what will happen next… Modeling effective reading happens in all of our classes everyday.
Scaffolding and Support: In a traditional school setting a shift is made between learning how to read and reading to learn content in the 3rd or 4th grade. At Mistwood, because of our mixed age groupings, we provide differentiated instruction and support in all of our classes. No student at any grade level will fall behind in the content of a lesson because they cannot read “at grade level”. All students at all grade levels are able to access curriculum and content while still learning how to read independently.
What about the other 5-20%?
The same study found that 15% of students need direct instruction to learn to read fluently. If we see that students are still not engaging in independent reading at the end of group 2 or the beginning of group 3 we then begin to offer additional support (with parent permission) for those students. However, we always keep in mind that not all students learn to read the same way and some of those “ways” need specific cognitive development stages to happen before they will be able to effectively learn to read. We do not force or pressure students to participate in additional reading instructions especially if the student has anxiety around reading.
The Dyslexic Brain and Reading
Most of what we as educators AND dyslexic adults know about how dyslexic people reading learned is anecdotal but the newest brain science backs it up. Unlike language (verbal and visual) or walking, reading it not a inate skills with specific parts of the brain dedicated to it. Different people use different parts of their brain to read and write. This does not mean these people will not learn to read, but they may longer to learn to read then people that use other parts of their brain. However, the "dyslexic brain" has other strengths.
Sources:
http://www.nclrc.org/about.html
Weaver, C. (2002). Reading process and practice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books.
https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1953&context=etd-project
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1066819.pdf
https://readingrecoverysrvusd.webs.com/Marie%20M.%20Clay's%20Theoretical%20Perspective.pdf
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1048740
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221083191100021X
https://evidenceforlearning.org.au/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/phonics
https://ectutoring.com/phonics-based-reading-whole-language-approach