Reflection #2

Elizabeth Meyer-Chapman
Subjects Matter
Chapters 4-6

New Learnings:
Chapter 4 “Toward a Balanced Diet of Reading” focused on strategies which would cultivate an in-depth understanding of content material. It focused on primary verses secondary sources and how primary can be a real hook for students. The text indicated that an effective hook is created when readers connect with who is being written about. When the reader cares about the writer, or the character being described interest is created and in-depth understanding becomes plausible. According to Zemelman and Daniels, a balance of reading must be struck between textbooks and other genres. Within these other genres a balance of choice versus assigned; fiction versus nonfiction; classics versus contemporary and hard versus easy will also need to be struck. I do have the advantage of my own classroom and I came to classroom with several books already. As I continue to add more books, I will be buying several of the books suggested in Subjects Matter, (the book contains about 20 pages of book suggestions.)
Chapter 5 was a marvelous read. It was chocked full of activities which show kids how smart readers think. The ‘Before ‘activities were activities to prepare students to read. The ‘During’ activities focused on helping students construct, process and question ideas as they read. The ‘After’ activities were for guiding students to reflect on, integrate, and share the ideas when they’re finished. I will most likely pick two to three strategies every six weeks to try and continually practice in my classroom. I can weed out what is the best and keep the rest. It will become a go to book for me while planning until some of the activities become automatic.
Chapter 6 talked about how to use a textbook. It contained several activities which could be used to model for students how to read a textbook and make the independent reading of textbook operational.
Personal Reading Strategies:
Whenever possible I annotate and highlight text while I read. This way I can go back through and look at my questions, short summaries and ah-ha’s. I also employed rereading when I was confused by something.
Discussion Protocol:
We used the Last Word protocol in our group. While reading we were to write a sentence on one side of a note card and on the opposite side, our reaction. We read the sentence to the group and each member had a chance to share their reaction to it. The person who initially shares the sentence gets the last word. I liked it because I was able to get everyone else’s interpretation before sharing mine. Learned a lot, shared a lot and remembered a lot.