Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Chapter 2 questions
As I read chapter 2, I did have to think about the errors from our own processing which cause blindness. I think that too often my students look at only the beginning letter when beginning to read. I know that some of this is developmental, but they are over-generalizing their reading. For example, every word that begins with a /c/ is the word "cat" to them. I do understand that there are blindness factors that must be considered when we are teaching. My students are experience change blindness because they don't recognize or notice the other letters. When I use strategies to encourage them to notice the other letters, only a few of the students apply these to their reading, and that application doesn't transfer to other words or settings. The students that really need to improve their reading skills are the ones that seem to get locked on this blindness. If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them.
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Penny, Do you feel that what the children are doing is change blindness - not being able to detect the difference or do you think it is inattentional blindness - failing to notice that a new object has appeared? I guess I think change blindness. Do you do your "spelling exercise" when introducing a new word? (Hands at waist for c, hands at waist for a and hands up for t) If so does that help by adding kinesthetics?
ReplyDeleteYou had mentioned that you are having trouble getting your students to notice the end of words instead of just the first letter. This is kind of a different approach but what if you started class with animals having a dog head with a horse body and a cat head with a fish body. Have the students explain why these look so funny. Then maybe have the words cat, cow, can, etc. on the board and rearrange the 2nd 2 letters leaving the original c's on the board. Maybe that would help the students to see that it is not only the first letter that makes a difference. Maybe you could do this with magnets. You could use a cat, cow and can mixed up instead the dog and horse etc. and end up having the correct word under each picture in the end. Just an idea that they might remember enough to put into long-term memory.
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