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Me and My Reading Profile: A Tool for Assessing Early Reading Motivation      (portrait of my daughter, Tess, age 7, reading her favorite series Ivy and Bean )         The article  "Me and My Reading Profile" by Marinek, Malloy, Gambrell, and Mazzoni (2015) discusses the value of assessing a young reader's motivation. It states that motivation plays as vital a role in reading achievement as other key skills (such as decoding and comprehension), yet motivation is rarely addressed in grades K-2. The authors go on to state that it is necessary to measure young students' interest in developmentally appropriate ways so that "literacy instruction can be designed with motivation in mind" (Marinak et. al. p. 52) and propose that they have created a useful tool with which to gauge students' interest in reading. Marinek et. al. (2015) state that "Without attention to reading motivation, some students may never reach their full reading potential...

The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution This article discusses how the advancement in technological devices and their novelty to adolescents affect brain function and its ability to adapt to the demands of the digital age.  Studies have shown adolescents spend upwards of 11.5 hours daily being exposed to media, with a portion of that being spent on more than one device.  With the amount of screen time continuing to increase, and as technology becomes more widely available, the impact this will have on the adolescent brain continues to be explored. The three behaviors associated with adolescents are increased sensation seeking, a move towards greater peer affiliation, and an increase in risk taking.  During this point in a human’s life, the brain is said to have changeability and can adapt to meet the demands of the environment.  Once puberty is reached the brain then grows through specialization.  This includes greater connectivity and ...

My Reading Life (Carolyn Acker)     I have been a reader from the time I acquired the ability and books continue to be an integral part of my life.  I read daily and if I have a day or two where I cannot find at least a few minutes to read, I begin to long for a way to escape my responsibilities.  It sounds a bit like an addiction, I admit, but I really do need to read!  Any symptoms of withdrawal, thankfully, are quickly alleviated by some time with a good book.  My home is filled with books due to my reading habit, and my three children have inherited my habit, much like my mother passed her reading habit on to me.     My mother read voraciously throughout the rearing of her nine children and continues to read at the age of 80, albeit at a slower pace.  While I don’t remember her reading to me as a small child, I have a clear picture of my mother reading a book on the beach in the summer while we swam, on th...

The fact that literacy is a fundamental cornerstone to a student’s academic success is extremely powerful.  I look at this from two different angles, my own reading experience and then my experience with my children.  As a young child I remember my teachers making reading fun. If we read multiple books, we would be rewarded with free pizza from Pizza Hut.     Now I see my children who are in kindergarten and first grade receive enthusiastic reader awards, which is accompanied by an award ceremony.  Chances are given to receive tickets to a baseball game for reading multiple books and completing a short book evaluation.  They have multiple opportunities to purchase books, which yields free books for their classroom.  Their teachers also make reading fun.  I have also noticed that at their current levels, they do utilize both whole language as well as phonics approaches to literacy.    The debate between the two differing ty...

I learned to read in kindergarten, and I actually remember it rather well. I recall being dimly aware that we were in homogeneous reading groups and that mine was comprised of the best readers in the class; still, I was jealous of this kid Matt, who got to go to first grade during reading time. Always a striver, I wanted to know what I had to do to go to first grade for reading. . . turns out Matt had stayed back to work on his behavior, but he was a good reader. Eventually he skipped back up a grade. Meanwhile, I was in my reading circle in kindergarten using a basal reader featuring characters with names that seemed highly unusual to me, including "Rosa" and "Laddie" (the latter may have been the golden retriever who frolicked on the pages of that textbook). These  early memories of reading are definitely rooted in phonics instruction. I remember very little about how I was taught to comprehend --everything was decoding words and little else. We did seemingly ...

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