The big idea of chapter 11 is summarizing and synthesizing
lessons using different kinds of strategies. The chapter talks about ways of
summarizing information during/ after reading and pulling out the most
important information. As an example of “Summarizing the Content and Adding
Personal Response,” we summarized a book we read and responded to the story to
bring out important take away messages from the text. During my first lesson,
we read a book called Me on the Map
by Joan Sweeney and summarized verbally how the character describes her room,
house, neighbor and country. After summarizing the story, I asked several
questions for their responses about the book such as their own room, neighbor
and themselves as well. Then, I asked them to draw a map/ picture of their
favorite places. By summarizing and synthesizing readings, not only we pulled
out the big idea, but also we could connect their own experiences with the readings.
Also, as we summarize the story, we were able to make a sequence; we discussed
how she ordered her own room, house, neighbor, state and country in sequence. Therefore,
I believe that it is very important to summarize our text in order to recollect
their readings for our post-assessment and place stories in order.
The big idea of chapter 14 is to read actively with
textbooks and teach students to read textbooks. The chapter talks about issues
with textbooks, active reading with textbooks and teaching kids to read
textbooks which teachers and students may encounter as they cover their
textbooks. There might be some obstacles that teachers and students may
encounter such as “quality and accuracy of information, clarity of the writing
and explanations, amount and accessibility of the information, logical
organization on the page and within and across chapters, reasonable use of
feathers, fonts, and call-outs and how they explain information and Headings,
subheadings, and other signposts that guide the reader through the text.” Then,
it talks about how “covering” all parts of our textbook may occur negative
effects to students learning. Lastly, it gives different ways of teaching kids
to read textbooks such as navigating the format, learning from text and visual
features, previewing the chapter. Before we discussed about the chapter, it was
very interesting for me to observe how each teacher uses different materials,
textbooks or readings and resources from different sources. In Korea, there are
certain textbooks that all the same graders use all over the country. Schools distribute
textbooks to every student in our country on the first day of school and we only
use them for the whole year; teachers may use different worksheets and exams to
assess them. Hence, it was very interesting for me to observe how each teacher
has very different ways to use different textbooks although they are teaching
the same grade.
In our classroom, we use Treasures for first grader book as our textbook and we follow
weekly unit in the textbook to do our lessons. However, we do not try to “cover”
the whole units since our schedule/ plans change every week. We have been busy following
our daily routines since it was their first time to be in two different
classroom and switch class from morning to afternoon classroom. Hence, we could
not cover all the texts for two weeks, instead, we tried to assist them to be
active readers. Among the list of Active Reading with Textbooks, we tried to
slow down the rate of reading. We instead of letting them to read all the new
vocabulary words and sentences from each unit, we helped them understand the
story and pull out the take away messages. We read stories very slowly, we
sometimes spent a week to finish and summarize one story. These days, students
are engaged to read books at home and in school whenever they have free time.
We just started to go to the school library to check-out a book and students
take it home to read with their family members. Sometimes, they ask their
parents to read it for them or they read it by themselves. We emphasized how
reading is important in school and at home. My MT often emphasized importance
of reading by saying “you need to read at least one book every day with your
parents at home.” Therefore, our classroom focuses on reading texts as much as
they can and bring out thoughtful messages using their previous knowledge.
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