Subjects Matter - Day 2

Christine Munzer
Subjects Matter
Chapters 4 -6

The Chapters
Chapter 4 spent a lot of time looking at how a teacher could incorporate reading into their everyday practice. It gave helpful hints for picking a type of text by breaking down the texts into genres, long vs. short, and hard vs. easy. Furthermore, it discussed the importance of building a classroom library. Although they made building a library sound so easy, I still can’t get past my own gut feeling telling me it’s not a great idea. I struggle with the fact that I share my classrooms (yes, I will have 3 rooms next year), it takes a lot of work to build and finally it will add one more thing to manage on top of my already jam packed day.
Chapter 5 offered the most amazing, easy to use activities for reading. It broke the activities down into the three categories of before, during and after reading. Beyond this, the book offers actual student work to show how some of the strategies should work (come on folks, don’t we all like to cook recipes that have pictures attached to them so that we can see what the final product should look like)!
Finally, Chapter 6 offered six suggestions for how to incorporate using the textbook into your class. If you love your textbook then this chapter is a must read because it offers great strategies!

The Reading Process
Now that I have become more aware of how I am reading, I found myself using a lot of strategies to get through the text. First and foremost, I must share that our selected passage was 100 pages long and I had to try and read at least part of it while my two kids (ages 1 and 3) were still up and needing some type of attention. I saw this as an opportunity to figure out strategies that would work well under these conditions, as I know quite a few of my students are expected to work in similar ones as they try to complete homework at a job or within in their own loud homes. The strategy I found to work the best was coding the text. I found myself putting question marks next to passages that I could not focus enough to get through; so that I could go and revisit them in a quieter environment and marking with a sticky note other passages that I could use with our last word protocol. Once the kiddos were in bed, I could go back and look at the marks I made to clarify and reflect on key pieces that really struck me.


The Protocol
Today, we used the last word protocol. Within the protocol, we were to write about one sentence or passage that had an impact on us. On one side of the note card, the reader had to write the passage and on the other their own opinion that would be reported out to the group. I really loved the protocol because it made me really focus on what others were saying before I could input how I felt about the text. I personally feel it will work well with my students because they always like to have the last word and now I am giving them that opportunity. Like that other protocol we used, this is student ran, which gives me more time to check-in with all groups as the discussions are happening.