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Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Help for Struggling Readers
When a student doesn't understand what he or she is reading in class, it doesn't always mean there has to be an elaborate intervention. This is a comforting fact and made me more excited to be able to share reading strategies and mathematical knowledge with my students when I become a teacher. While a school wide initiative teaching students and teachers many tools to strengthen reading skills is very exciting, think alouds, worksheets where students reflect on reading, and having students come up with questions are amazing ideas that any teacher can do. Not being a strong reader is rarely acknowledged as the reason why a student is struggling, but this chapter opened my eyes to even more ways it can affect classroom participation and academic achievement. As a math teacher, teaching students to tackle words problems will be no easy feat, but might be one of the most important skills they will need to learn. As demonstrated in the chapter, it is not enough to know the arithmetic, a student has to be able to decipher the problem in order to solve it. Open discussions and having visuals available are simple steps that require little effort but can make a huge difference in helping students understand the dreaded word problems.
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I agree being a future math teacher word problems are going to be hard to teach because not all of our students are going to be strong readers. I hated word problems because I felt that there was always to much stuff going on in the problem, and I hated having to draw a picture because I am a horrible artist. Word problems started to get easier when I learned what information to read for based on the question the problem was asking me to answer, but one of my math teachers in middle school taught me that. She called it reading through all of the mud, but now I call it sifting through all of the B.S. This does not work for all word problems, but it worked around 90% of the time.
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