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My Reading Life

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

Article Review - “Poetry and Writing: Improving Fluency and Motivation For Students With Developmental Dyslexic Traits” by Dr. Benita Bruster

 The article I chose  was “Poetry and Writing:  Improving Fluency and Motivation For Students With Developmental Dyslexic Traits” by Dr. Benita Bruster,   Professor of Education and Interim Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at Austin Peay University in  Clarksville, Tennessee.  The article was based on Dr. Bruster’s work in a fourth grade ELA classroom with a small group of students who had been selected by their classroom teachers because they were struggling readers (Bruster, 2015).  In her article, Dr. Bruster explains that she was a volunteer who was “interested in literacy” (Bruster, 2015, p.93) and was approached by the classroom teacher to work with five boys during “their regular small group reading time”  (Bruster, 2015, p.93) for a period of nine weeks).  She goes on to explain that the boys selected for the intervention were identified as demonstrating characteristics of “developmental dyslexia”  (Bruster, 2015, p.94) based on “work samples supplied by the