Figure 3.3. Contributors to Meaning Making with TextMany strands or clusters of standards contribute to meaning making with text. Among
them are the following:- Those that help students develop a deeper understanding of literary
and informational text. Students respond to probing questions, make
inferences, connect new ideas and information to previous knowledge, and engage
aesthetically and critically with a range of text. In the transitional kindergarten
through grade one span much of this work is done through interactive read alouds.
As students become more proficient in reading independently, a combination of
interactive read alouds and reading text is used. - Those that help students understand more complex language and
discourse structures (i.e., academic language). Students build proficiency
with more grammatically complex clauses, expanded noun and verb phrases, and
complex sentences. Much of this work with young children is done orally at first,
and then it is blended with reading text. - Those that focus on developing students’ vocabularies and knowledge
of the concepts underlying these words. Students cannot understand either
spoken or written text unless they know nearly all the words being used and the
concepts embodied in those words. - Those that contribute to students’ knowledge about a subject and the
manner by which the content is communicated. Knowledge has a major
impact on readers’ ability to engage meaningfully with the content of a text. Thus,
material used in either oral or written form should contribute to students’ growing
knowledge about the world and of the ways in which that knowledge is conveyed
(e.g., different text structures and features). - Those that lead to mastery of the foundational skills so that students
can independently—and with ease—access written language. Students
learn how print works. They learn to decode written words accurately and with
automaticity, that is, effortlessly and rapidly. They identify the sounds represented
by letters in printed words and blend those sounds into words. With practice, the
words become automatically recognized. Eventually, students reach the magic
moment when they can use the foundational skills they have been acquiring to
recognize enough decodable and high-frequency irregularly spelled words that
written text becomes like speech and they can decode and understand new (that
is, previously unencountered) text at their level. Most children should be able to
read simple text independently by mid-first grade. A significant, but by no means
exclusive, focus of the work in the transitional kindergarten through grade one
span is devoted to instruction in foundational skills. As children become familiar
with more complex spelling-sound patterns and have practiced enough words, their
growing lexicon of automatically recognized words allows them to read increasingly
complex text fluently and frees them to think about, enjoy, and learn from what
they are reading. As children progress through the grades and develop more
confidence in their reading ability, they can also productively struggle with text with
concept loads, vocabulary, and language structures somewhat above their level.
138 | Chapter 3 Transitional Kindergarten to Grade 1