Real-Life Reading Inquiry

For my real-life reading inquiry, I decided to observe a reading classroom environment. I visited a preschool classroom, ages 3-5, to observe how emerging readers react to and interact with books. After visiting this classroom, it was obvious that building the children's' literacy is a top priority to the teachers. A lot of time throughout the day is dedicated to read aloud, quiet reading, and practicing writing their own names. During their group time, the teacher picked out a book that the class would connect to and take a lesson from. Today's reading was "It's Mine" by Leo Lionni because students had been struggling with sharing. While reading aloud, the teacher was very interactive with the students throughout the entire book. In Richard Allington's article "What I've Learned About Effective Reading Instruction" he stressed the importance of the teacher or reader having a conversation with the students while the book is being read. Posing questions and sparking conversation is extremely important so students learn how to comprehend the story.

Another thing I observed in the classroom is how print-rich it was. On every object, such as the small refrigerator in the imaginary play area or the materials in the science area, there were labels. The labels consisted of an image of the object, the word printed in English, and the word printed in Korean because one of the students first language is Korean. In chapter 3 of Classrooms That Work, the importance of a print-rich classroom is expressed because it gets children familiar with print and increases their desire to learn what the words around them say. It confirmed to me how important it will be to have labels throughout my future classroom because the children referred to them so often. For example, when putting pretend food into the refrigerator, the kids referred to the images of "fruits" or "vegetables" so they knew which shelf to place each object on. This assignment was so helpful because I was observing many of the things that we've learned about in class. It also allowed me to realize things that I need to do as a future teacher such as being a conversational reader and making my classroom print-rich.