•  book

    The Units we will study this year include: 
     
    Second Grade Reading Growth Spurt
    Bigger Books Mean Amping up the Reading Power
    Becoming Experts: Reading Non-Fiction
    Series Book Clubs
     
     
     
     
     
    Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

    In Second grade the focus of the Reader’s Workshop is solidifying learning to read, and moving towards reading to learn. We will be continuing to build upon students’ skills and strategies to become great, self determining, confident readers.


    READING: STRATEGIES FOR PARENTS
          Reading Is Comprehension

        Many parents ask for help in working with their child's reading. Below is some information and suggestions that I hope you find useful in helping your child in becoming an independent, fluent reader.
        Some students think that reading means saying all of the words right. Making text sound as it was written is an important aspect of reading, but reading is to construct meaning, and even adult proficient readers do not "say all the words right!"

       The reading process involves more than that. It concentrates more on how readers use sound/symbol relationships (phonics), syntax (grammar), and semantics (meaning) together to develop an understanding of text.


    What Adult Proficient Readers Do 

        As adult proficient readers, we do not perfectly recreate the text when we read. Instead, as we sample the words in the text, we automatically use all of our general background knowledge and our expectations of what we think the text will say based on pictures, titles, headings, etc. We reflect on our previous experiences in general, think about this type of text and we consider our purpose for reading it.
       Based on all of this, we make predictions about what we think the text will say. We only sample enough print for it to make sense to us, and when it does, we read on. 

        However, if we predict: " The house ran down the road," readers reading for meaning will know that the sentence does not make sense, and they will need to reread that part of the text that was not meaningful or read on to try to figure out the meaning of the unknown word, phrase, or concept. This is a description of what an adult proficient reader does, all in a matter of seconds.


    What Is Important 

        It is important that your reader is aware that reading should make sense and sound like language and if it does not, there are strategies other than sounding out or asking for help that will move you along in text and help it make sense.