For this week’s reading, I chose to look at Chapter 10, “Determining Importance in Text: The Nonfiction Connection” and Chapter 14, “Reading to Understand Textbooks.”  I chose these topics because I think they are some of the most difficult areas to teach and for students to learn.  Let’s face it; most of us do not enjoy nonfiction or textbooks either. 

            Chapter 10’s big ideas discussed how often times students are asked to pick out or highlight important ideas in nonfiction texts but that they are never explicitly instruction how to do this.  The results may include almost every word of a section being highlighted.  Teachers need to model and scaffold students into being able to read for information within nonfiction text.  I like how the chapter discusses the importance of pointing out key elements within the text such as looking at graphic organizers, bold or italicized text, pictures and their captions, and titles and headlines.  All of these features stand out to us as adult readers, but young students may overlook these details.  Learning to pick out details in nonfictional texts is extremely authentic because this type of reading is guaranteed in each of their futures.  Secondary Education involves this skills as well as future jobs. 

            These ideas were also addressed in Chapter 14 but in dealing with school textbooks.  I thought the point that the authors made about not leaving students alone with their textbook was great.  It makes a lot of sense to allow students to navigate through these thick and sometimes dull textbooks with pairs or small groups.  Even with explicit instruction and scaffolding, textbooks are still intimidating, but students should get more and more comfortable as they practice with support from peers as well as teacher.  This is just as authentic as addressing nonfiction texts because it is going to happen in their future education and possibly their future careers.

            Both of these topics will be extremely important across other subject areas in the classroom as well.  Math, Science, Social Studies, Integrated Arts, Health, and all other subject areas require nonfiction texts and sometimes textbooks for students to gather information.  These strategies written in the two mentioned chapters are extremely helpful when approaching these other subject areas.

Suggested Topic for Book Club Blog: For the two chapters you selected to read for this week, what is the ‘big idea’ or ‘take away message’ from each, and how do they help you think about offering authentic learning opportunities in literacy across the curriculum in your classroom?

Questioning and Visualizing while Reading

Authentic question:  What strategies would you like to use in your classroom to encourage your students’ questioning and visualizing in just a few mini lessons each?

I would personally begin with modeling how I question things while reading. Then I would want the students to read a text and list their own questions, we would go through the questions and talk about what kinds of questions they are. To assess how they are questioning I would have them read a mystery story and as we read stop and have them pose questions that they have about what is going to happen at the end of the story.

For visualizing I would use a wordless book like it suggests in our book. I know of one I can’t remember what it’s called, but it is about a day at the beach I think and it is a good book  for filling in the in between visuals. I would have the students talk about what they think they would see if they were not skipping from one image to another, like it is a movie rather than a book. Another lesson I would do would be to read some very descriptive text, possibly poetry, while I am reading it the students would have their eyes closed. I would then have them draw a picture of what they saw. To assess how well they are visualizing, I would have them visualize any scene that they want and then have them describe it in writing and will help them to use descriptive vocabulary.