Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Chapters 5 and 6

(Page 56) “She decides to create curiosity by building some background knowledge for students and explains a few key terms…”
I think establishing background knowledge and creating interest are two of the most important things we can do to improve students’ reading. After all, if a student is interested in a topic, he or she is more willing to read about it. Hence the reason students are so interested in reading the driver’s manual. Do we really think they care about all of those technical rules? Heck, no! But they have an interest in it because they want their licenses. Many of my reading strategies focus on pre-reading because I feel like if we can get them hooked initially in the book/topic, then we can maintain the students’ interest throughout the book or unit of study.

(Page 84) “I once saw a poster in a middle school classroom that read, ‘Individually we are smart. Collectively, we are brilliant.’”
I love this! When I first read this, I thought of our blog. I think we all are smart people, but we’re able to learn so much more when we get together and share our thoughts. The same holds true for our students. When we have class discussions about what we’ve read, we’re able to get so many more perspectives. There are so many ways to have students do this…they can do it through written conversations (many of you are familiar with this strategy; if you’re not and are interested in learning more about it, just let me know!) or they can mark the text as Tovani describes then trade papers and respond to the comments. Students (and teachers!) get so much more from the text when they have the opportunity to collaborate on what they’ve read.