Who Is Andrew Johnson's Book 10 Essential Instructional Strategies

After administering a running record to a second grader, and revisiting the student’s analysis, the strategies suggested were phonetic exercises. Phonetic exercises would be helpful, but other strategies and approaches that focus on semantics and syntax need to be used as well. Many of the strategies highlighted in Johnson’s book 10 Essential Instructional Elements for Students with Reading Difficulties could be used. The analysis suggested that the student needs to focus on self-monitoring their reading. The student demonstrated visual errors meaning that the errors he made at times looked similar to the target word. In some cases, the student would substitute a target word and it would align with the sentence grammatically. Other times,

Andrew Johnson in his book 10 Essential Instructional Elements for Students with Reading Difficulties, stresses that “Reading is creating meaning with print” (Johnson, 7). Reading is not just sounding out words; therefore, instead of only doing phonetic exercises, semantics must be taken into account. One strategy that can be used is a maze. A maze is a sentence with two or three different words. The student must pick the word that makes the most sense in a given sentence (Johnson, 139). I would relate the maze sentence to student’s interest to make the strategy engaging. Then, I will have the student read the sentence with both words; the one that fits the sentence and makes sense and the one that does not. After the student reads the sentence with both words, I will have the student ask themselves which word makes sense. One sentence could be “Which [was or way] did the train go?” This strategy will help improve the student’s semantics and focus on making meaning from

Cloze is when a word in a sentence is partially or completely covered, and the student must guess the missing or unknown word (Johnson, 138). Since this student struggles with word parts and ending sounds, I will cover the beginning sound of words, and have the student guess the unknown word in different sentences again related to his interest. Relating to the student’s interest will create engagement. I will also do this activity and have sentences relate to books on his independent reading level. This will emphasize repetition, and will help the brain strengthen neural pathways and build neural networks because the student will begin to see these sentences and words over and over again (Johnson, 80). Since this strategy focuses on semantics, the student will ask themselves what word could make sense in this sentence. I will write some of their ideas on the board. After, I write the students ideas, I will uncover the following letters one by one asking the student does he think he knows the word or does he want to change his mind about the different words he suggested could fit the sentence? I will continue to do this until the student gets the target word. These kind of semantic strategies are significant because they really force the student to look at the entirety of sentences, and to make sense of it, versus just individual letters or words. Now, when the student substitutes words while reading, this practice will remind