Strategies that Work Jigsaw - Week 7

Since we recently shifted from making connections to determining the importance of a piece of writing I decided to read chapter 10 from Strategies that Work. The authors cite the following to be important to call attention to while reading and teaching strategies, “fonts and effects, words and phrases, illustration and photographs, graphics, text organizers, and text structures” (p. 158-159). This was interesting to me because thus far we have been asking the children to find the important aspects of the task without the help of those clues. I am not sure if there are plans to incorporate these strategies, or draw attention to them, but after reading this chapter I have decided to mention them to my MT to see if she would like to use any of them. They seemed obvious after reading them, but for some reason we did not think of them before. The main takeaway from this chapter was that the students will need to be able to read in order to comprehend so that they are not only reading, but taking something away from the reading. Also, the students should be taught strategies rather than setting them free and expecting that they will “just know” what to do when they come to important parts of the text. To offer authentic learning opportunities in the classroom using the strategy of determining importance I hope to use a piece of writing that would interest the students or give them the chance to gain something that is meaningful to their lives from the reading. For example, using articles from the National Geographic mini-magazines the classroom receives will give the students information about animals that they will later encounter during our Big Zoo lesson. This will give them information to draw upon at a later time and get them excited for the zoo lesson. Reading about varying cultures will also open the students’ eyes to their surroundings, or lives that they have had little exposure to in order to make them more understanding and aware citizens.

 

For my second article I read the chapter focused on Reading for Understanding in Social Studies and Science. This was a chapter that I was interested in reading because Social Studies and Science are my favorite subjects, yet we do not see them often in the elementary setting. This is something I would like to change as I develop professionally by incorporating texts that focus on Social Studies and Science particularly because, "content literacy gives kids the tools to learn information, ideas, and ways of thinking in a variety of disciplines" (p. 218). I want to use these pieces of text to correspond with CCSS criterion that has a heavy emphasis on informational text. The main takeaway I took from this chapter was that reading content pieces can be done in multiple ways that will fit into various aspects of a curriculum. Additionally, the variety of disciplines leads for the students to have experiences with multiple texts to widen their depth of knowledge and how to apply that to everyday life using comprehension strategies that they are equipped with. Authentic instruction would be similar to the above pieces of text (animal articles and cultural insights) and finding pieces that interest the students based on their particular areas of study that motivate them. There are several students in my classroom are interested in geography and this has been something that I have been working to feed as I have taken more and more of a lead in the classroom. The class uses daily clues that can be further researched when the children get a chance and then the place is revealed on Fridays.