Introduction

Hello Everyone,

My name is Sheldon and I'm a Masters in Education student at the University of The West Indies. I have set up this blog in part requirements for my master's programme.

The blog posts here will be of a professional nature sharing information with respect to reading with a particular focus on young children and adolescents.

So I'm going to dive right in, the first thing I would like to address is the question of "What is reading?"

According to Wikipedia:

Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of deriving meaning (reading comprehension) and/or constructing meaning. Written information is received by the retina, processed by the primary visual cortex, and interpreted in Wernicke's area.

Reading is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas.

Readers use a variety of reading strategies to assist with decoding (to translate symbols into sounds or visual representations of speech) and comprehension. Readers may use morpheme, semantics, syntax and context clues to identify the meaning of unknown words. Readers integrate the words they have read into their existing framework of knowledge or schema (schemata theory).

Other types of reading are not speech based writing systems, such as music notation or pictograms. The common link is the interpretation of symbols to extract the meaning from the visual notations.

Reading is an important tool for people of many societies, allowing them to access information which might have otherwise been unavailable.

Retrieved from Reading (process)(n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 3, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process).

According to the author, children should see reading as a way to explore human adventure before they even learn how to read. An example is reading a book to her classroom. The students listen intently and express how they feel about the story and the characters that they see in the book. A brief overview of what the preschoolers are learning from their exercise in reading is the ability to make human connections to the characters and the story unfolding within the book, is presented. Topics include an in-depth discussion of the goal of teachers regarding how children approach books, such as choosing thoughtful read-a-louds and encouraging reflection. Retrieved from Ruth,S.(2010, March). Making reading meaningful. Educational Leadership, Vol67 Issue6, pp63-67. This is the first in many more posts to follow.. So bye for now and stay tuned!!!!!!