Leila's Reflection: Ch 1- Understanding our roles and goals

The main idea that I got from this chapter is that reading is like a partnership between the teachers and students. Sharon mentions a couple of roles that a child must do/need in order to learn how to read. The child must recall on his/her own experiences and background knowledge to figure out the text. The child might asked himself/herself "where have I seen this word before?" or he/she might try to decoded it by sounding it out.
Then there is our role (the teachers) in teaching the children how to read. The child might know only one way of figuring out new words is to simply sound it out. How effective is that? Not at all. I see some of my students at work who struggle with reading constantly just sound out 75% of the words. It takes so much time and it is distracting them away from constructing meaning of the story. That is why it is our job to demonstrate effective reading strategies to them. Also, as Sharon mentioned, it is important to hold individual reading conferences with your students frequently. It helps teachers to gather information on how the student is reading. We don't want a student to be reading something too easy and vice-versa. It will turn them away from reading once and for all. Even though we give time to read independently, it is good to assess them every so often because some students might be sitting in their seat and just staring at the texts. It would be a waste of them to have silent reading if some of them are just pretending to read.
Overall , it is being able to "relate the old to the new, or what is known to the unknown."