Chapter 9 of the text, Strategies that Work, interested me because I personally have always been a visual learner. I enjoy when books create images in my head as I read. I feel that visualizing is very powerful because everyone may have the same ideas from the book, but the images in our heads differ from one another. Visualizing and inferring are two strategies that are essential to becoming an active reader. I believe that in order for students to be able to visualize and infer, they need sufficient background knowledge. For example, if you are at an inner city school and are going to introduce a book to your students about farms, some of them may not even know what a farm is. If students don't have any information to recall about something, then how are they going to picture it in their heads and make inferences? This goes for teaching any subject, not just reading and writing.
The chapter discusses the use of descriptive words to help students make visualizations and inferences. I feel that it is important to introduce students to descriptive words with the help of physical objects. For example, as a lesson you could introduce size words to your students (tiny, small, average, large, huge, humongous, etc.). With these words you could show them objects to help them visualize the words when reading them in the text. After reading this chapter, I came up with this lesson idea because I started to think about struggling readers. If they are given enough background knowledge to create pictures in their heads,
then they can make predictions and ultimately be engaged in the text.
I believe that teaching children to ask questions during reading in order to make predictions is not only an important reading strategy, but a life skill. We are teaching students to make an educated guess of what will happen next in a situation. This can be applied to cause and effect relationships in life. For example, If Sarah refuses to study for her quiz, then it can be predicted that she will get a bad grade. From these small examples, students can be taught to question life situations and consider the consequences. As you can see, this reading strategy is essential to reading and writing, but also goes far beyond the books.
Dana, I also think that it's extremely important that students are able to question what they are reading. I think that developing this frame of mind early is essential for every young reader. It's important that we're able to challenge ideas and provoke new thoughts throughout our entire educational career.
ReplyDeleteJustin, I really agree with the last point that you made, "It's important that we're able to challenge ideas and provoke new thoughts throughout our entire educational career." The power of questioning can get us to do this, not only ask students questions about the material, but questioning them to gauge what learning level they might be on. I feel that we must know what level each individual students is on within our classrooms in order to provoke new thoughts and challenge ideas.
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