Fountas and Pinnel

          My mom always tells me this story when I was pretty little, we were in the car and a Lays semi truck was driving next to us. The truck said Lays and had chips on it. I said "L-A-Y-S, L-A-Y-S" and my mom asked me what that spelled, I replied and said chips! This is just an example of how I depended too much on the picture for support. I knew the letters but I didn't take the time to actually figure out what the word said, I simply just guessed based on the picture. I have also seen a lot of kids that I work with do the same thing. I was reading with a first grader and she would stop mid-sentence and look at the picture to help her with the word she was stuck on. I steered her away from this strategy because pictures don't always match up with the words, this strategy is unreliable. The Fountas and Pinnel article talked about how students need to use strategies "on the run." No matter what they reading and where they are they can always rely on these strategies.
         I liked how the reading started off by stating that all kids have the capability to become literate, teachers just have to help kids get there. It should be our goal to prove that every kid is capable of reading. Students should be capable of reading for meaning. In my field work I'm in a 5/6th split class and whenever they are doing social studies they take turns reading aloud from the book. Once they read a paragraph or so Ms. Davis will stop them and ask a question about what had just been read. This ensure that they were paying attention and they understand what is being said in the text. She also asks questions that allows them to make inferences about the information.