For this week, I chose to read Chapters 11 and 12. The "take home message" in Chapter 11 is students summarize and synthesize a text to better understand what they read, and to make what they read meaningful to them. When students summarize, they retell what they read about by using their own words. When students synthesize information, they combine what they already know with what they read to add more to what they already know, or to create new understandings about the topic. This chapter got me thinking about authentic literacy instruction in my own classroom. Currently, we have the students doing some summarizing, but not much synthesizing. For example, each week we read a different Big Book as part of our Reading Street curriculum. After we have read the story aloud a couple of times, we have the students draw and write about their favorite part of the story. This involves summarizing because the students are pulling out what was the most important part of the story for them. The only other bit of summarizing I have seen so far is in our Social Studies time. We have an optional task students can work on at home entitled Very Important Person (VIP) Reports. The students take home a book about a famous historical figure (e.g., John Chapman/"Johnny Appleseed"), and they read the book with an adult at home. Then, they come to school with 3-4 facts to present to the class about that person. In this case, students are summarizing what they read into 3-4 big ideas about what they learned about that person. However, I would like to try teaching my students how to synthesize what they read (or what we read aloud) to better understand what is read. The best way to do this in my classroom would be to teach the students through a lesson similar to "Synthesizing: How Reading Changes Thinking" in the textbook. In this lesson, the teacher noted how reading changes/adds to our thinking, which is why we read in the first place. One thing the teacher did in this lesson was to have her students discuss their thinking about the topic before reading, and then discuss their thinking about the topic after reading (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007, p. 183-184). I would have students do this by turning and talking to their neighbors, both before reading and after reading. Then, I would have the pairs share their ideas aloud, and I would record their thoughts on an anchor chart.
The "take home message" for Chapter 12 is to incorporate science and social studies learning into literacy time as much as possible becuase there is little time in the daily schedule dedicated to teaching these subjects. This chapter got me thinking about science and social studies instruction in my classroom--we do not do much of this, except for the VIP reports in social studies. One of the simplest ways to integrate science and social studies into literacy time is to have interactive read-alouds with picture books in these content areas. For example, I could read my students a book about weather or a famous historical figure. This would expose my students to science and social studies, while still staying in the realm of literacy (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007, p. 209). Another technique I would like to try with my students in social studies is "Stop, Think, and React to Videos." My students love watching learning videos, and they love to talk. Therefore, watching videos about social studies concepts and talking about those videos would be right up my students' alleys (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007, p. 211). For science, two techniques I would especially like to try are "Anchor Charts That Document Thinking and How it Evolves" and "Creating Posters, Projects, Murals, and Mobiles." My students are very curious about everything, so giving them the ability to write their questions on a chart would give them an outlet to tap their natural curiosities about a science topic. Also, my students love working on art projects, so they would enjoy displaying what they learn through a visual product (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007, p. 213, 216).
I read chapter 14 about textbooks. This chapter caught my eye because I believed that some of my teachers growing up relied too heavily on textbook reading and did little interactive things to help us understand. The "take home" message from this chapter was that since textbooks are so dense and challenging it is not appropriate to just read them; they cannot be the only resource for our students. When we do use textbooks we want to teach kids how to read them. Strategies such as text lifting, thinking aloud, learning from visuals, note taking, reading a small section, discussions with groups, are just a few that can help students understand. While my Kindergarten class does not use textbooks this chapter taught me things that I can take into my future classroom (if I teach a grade older than Kindergarten). For an assignment or task to be authentic and meaningful to the student they must see it as beneficial to them personally. Therefore, I think when they are able to understand what they are reading after learning the strategies presented in this chapter, a textbook reading assignment would be more authentic.
ReplyDeleteI also read chapter 11, like Allison. I too found that summarizing means to full out the most beneficial information from a text, understanding that in one's own words, and being able to recall it. Synthesizing means to take different pieces of information and seeing patterns. Synthesizing has students take what they already know in addition to what they read in a text. Similar to Allison, I have not seen much synthesizing. I liked the suggestion of having students answer the question, 'What does immigration mean to you' in their journals multiple times after they have read and talked about it. I think this is something my Kindergarten class can begin to do and could be integrated into social studies or science. For example, they could begin by drawing a picture of a plant and write a corresponding sentence about what they know. After reading books they could draw another picture adding detail and things that they learned.
I read Chapter 10 about determining what is important in a book and how determining what is important is the difficult part and many student's are not taught how to properly do this. I related a lot to the beginning of the chapter where it talked about a teacher who looked through previous college textbook and she had highlighted way too much, I have definitely done the same thing. The "take-home message" from this chapter is that students must be shown and taught how to find the important information in a text, you cannot just expect them to do it. The chapter gave some helpful strategies for finding where important text is such as Overviewing, where students briefly scan the text and note the overall appearance of the text and things like what they will choose to ignore when they actually read it or if any of the text is important at all, looking at headings and subheadings, and activating background knowledge. Another strategy for finding important information is highlighting, which is something that needs to be taught and modeled, otherwise students cannot be expected to do it properly. The chapter also goes into detail about things like headings and photographs which can also indicate important information even though they are not long passages of information. This chapter helped to remind me that even kindergartners need to be able to sort out important information in a book from less important information, especially when it comes to non-fiction books. I really liked the idea about giving kids three sticky notes to put by three main ideas that they think are important so they remember there can be more than one and it is a good way to introduce the idea that some information is more important than others into a kindergarten classroom.
ReplyDeleteI also read chapter 12 about integrating science and social studies with literacy because there is not enough time in the day to teach all four individually, especially when I am in a class where I have two groups of students for half a day each day. I agree with this idea and I like how my curriculum (Treasures) tries to do that with each unit, but it could definitely be improved. I think that by including these topics as much as possible into reading then students will have more fun and become more interested in all of the content they are learning about. It also reminds me how many times I get different questions about science when we read a book and they tell me they want to learn science or about science topics, even if they don't realize that that is what they are talking about!