Gay Su Pinnell

Institute 1A this morning was presented by Gay Su Pinnell, as explored here earlier this week.

Margaret and Ros from ALEA introduce Gay.

Her focus was on reading.

She said that students are reading too fast and not understanding what they’re reading, often due to the emphasis put on fast reading.

Gay also said that reading for someone else and not themselves was an issue.

In retelling and summarizing, ‘They get lost in the details they miss the big ideas.’

Gay also said that, ‘You must read with accuracy.’

She read the book Grandma’s Purple Flowers out loud and as a group we delved deeper into it.

She talked about what you do in your mind as you read: process, think of similar titles, link to own life, accommodate new knowledge, predict what will happen next, think about the writer’s style and craft.

Gay said that you never stop learning to read – reading graphic novels for instance you have to process new symbols, ways of reading and the author’s writing style.

She showed a couple of videos of teachers reading Grandma’s Purple Flowers and other books to students and we were guided through an analysis of the books in Gay’s handout.

She spoke about selecting texts appropriate for the age group of the class.

Gay said that the overall goal was to get kids to be readers and writers as everyone else in the world is. Think about your reading habits: you should want that for your kids (Perhaps a little wider genre choice than you as an adult, Gay jokingly added).

Gay went through various ‘minilessons’ about reading and comprehension.

She said that, ‘We need to ramp up mileage as readers.’ Gay mentioned a study and compared the top and bottom ten per cent of a large sample of student readers and the amount of words they read over a long period of time was vastly different.

The session – of the two thirds I saw of it – was very interactive with Gay asking opinions of everyone in the room. There were individual table discussions and opportunities to ask questions and I think the inclusive nature of the session really worked.