“Organizers are visual illustrations; a tool to help students understand, summarize, and synthesize the information from texts to other sources.” I really like the definition they have given to organizers here. I think they are very helpful for students to break down a big picture and really understand the parts of the information. Like we all know, not all students learn the same. Organizers are great for those visual learners. I am personally a very big fan of organizers because it helps me see everything broken down and how it is related. Instead of understanding all of the facts in a paragraph form, I can organize them into a chart and really see and understand the facts. When I read a text I do not always comprehend what I read, but by using organizers to choose the main points and ideas it helps me understand and see it all come together to make sense. Whenever I think of graphic organizers I always think of concept maps, but there are so many different organizational ways to lay out your information. I think students need to learn how and use flow charts, diagrams, maps, matrices. If teachers use these in their lessons students will learn to focus on the important things while reading text.
Question: Sometimes charts and visual organization is not the best way for a student to show what they know about a subject. When using organizers as an assessment tool, what is the best way to use them and still be fair to all types of learners?
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Text Talk
My personal experiences of read aloud activities in school are both good and bad. In school I always had a fear of reading aloud in front of the class. When we would do read alouds in class, I would follow along very closely in fear I would have to speak, so even though I was scared the benefit was that I paid attention and followed along. If the text was not in front of me to follow along, then I would daze off and not keep up with what was being read. I know this is just me, but I feel like other students might feel and do the same things as I did.
I think that asking questions that cause students to describe and explain text ideas is a much better idea than just having them recall words from the text. I think it is important for teachers to select texts that students can relate to. If the students are interested in the topic, then they will pay more attention to what is being read aloud. I think the text talk approaches to the components of reading are really great. I will use these for my future classroom.
I think that asking questions that cause students to describe and explain text ideas is a much better idea than just having them recall words from the text. I think it is important for teachers to select texts that students can relate to. If the students are interested in the topic, then they will pay more attention to what is being read aloud. I think the text talk approaches to the components of reading are really great. I will use these for my future classroom.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Chapter 8 and Article
I found the section in Chapter eight about applying three types of knowledge to be very interesting. It explained that “Writing to learn requires that students use different kinds of knowledge at different times.” The three types of knowledge are declarative, procedural, and conditional. These types were defined in the book and I found them very interesting because it was something I have never heard before. I also really enjoyed reading about the different writing strategies that can be used in the classroom. These gave me great new ideas that I can document and use in my future teaching lessons. It is so important that students learn to write not only in English class, but all other subjects as well. I thought all of the ideas about writing in math and science were really good and they could really help student’s understandings of the subject matter. I think every teacher should get a copy of this article and read this chapter, then the students would have a better benefit with writing.
When I was in school, writing seemed like a boring chore than anything else. My experiences were the same as everyone else, I had to copy my spelling and vocabulary words multiple times each. That was never fun and really took my creativity from me when it came to writing. It wasn’t until seventh grade that I became interested in writing. My English teacher had us keep a spiral notebook that was our journal. At the beginning of every class she either had a topic prompt about something we have been learning about in not only her class but our other classes as well. We would have to explain things or answer questions, but it encouraged us to think and improve our writing skills. If we would have done this in every class we could have benefited so much more!
1. How would I implement all of these strategies to my students without over doing all the writing?
2. Where could I find even more strategies that would work in multiple subject areas?
When I was in school, writing seemed like a boring chore than anything else. My experiences were the same as everyone else, I had to copy my spelling and vocabulary words multiple times each. That was never fun and really took my creativity from me when it came to writing. It wasn’t until seventh grade that I became interested in writing. My English teacher had us keep a spiral notebook that was our journal. At the beginning of every class she either had a topic prompt about something we have been learning about in not only her class but our other classes as well. We would have to explain things or answer questions, but it encouraged us to think and improve our writing skills. If we would have done this in every class we could have benefited so much more!
1. How would I implement all of these strategies to my students without over doing all the writing?
2. Where could I find even more strategies that would work in multiple subject areas?
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