This
week's post focuses on one of my favorite topics: READING! Many of our students
are proficient decoders of text (they can read the words in a paragraph) but
are at a loss when it comes to making meaning of what they read. You may not
consider yourself a reading teacher, but you’ve done more reading than anyone
else in your room and are therefore the expert. In whatever class you teach,
modeling the thinking a proficient reader can help your students understand the
work that good readers do. By practicing these deliberate strategies to
interact with the text, students can begin to develop habits that will make
them more effective readers. I'll call this strategy Read Aloud/Think
Aloud!
As
you read a story, and article, or a chapter from your textbook with your
students, tell them you are going to read the text to them and say aloud the
thinking you are doing as you read. Below are two examples of what you might
read and what you might say in doing this activity. The first example comes
from a 10th grade World History textbook; the second is the opening of a
classic short story. I've italicized the "think aloud" portions of
the teacher script; the other parts come from the texts themselves:
An
Agricultural Revolution "Revolution" means
"change," so based on the title of this section, I predict I'll be
reading about some sort of change in farming methods.
By 1000, Europe's
economic recovery was well underway. The year 1000 is about midway
through the time period of the Middle Ages we've been reading about. I recall
that we read in an earlier chapter about the feudal system and the manor
economy, which was based around serfs and farming. Feudalism, I already learned,
was a factor that began the recovery the book refers to. It had
begun in the countryside, where peasants adapted new farming technologies that
made their fields more productive. The result was an agricultural revolution
that transformed Europe.
New Technologies: I
don't usually think of technology as something they had in the medieval times.
I wonder what things the book is calling "new technologies." By
the 800s, peasants were using new iron plows that carved deep into the heavy
soil of northern Europe. These plots were a big improvement over the old wooden
plows, which had been designed for the light soils of the Mediterranean region.
The book makes lots of distinctions between different sections of
Europe; here it talks about the different farming tools needed for different
regions. The northern part of Europe at this time in history seemed to lag
behind the southern, Mediterranean region. Perhaps that's because of the power
of the Church in Rome. Also, a new kind of harness allowed
peasants to use horses rather than oxen to pull the plows. Because
faster-moving horses could plow more land in a day than could oxen, peasants
were able to enlarge their fields and plant more crops. I'll bet
horses also eat less than oxen since they are smaller. That had to save some
money for farmers.
A peasant might look up
and see another new device, a windmill, turning slowly against the sky. Where
there were no fast-moving streams to turn a water mill, the power of the wind
had been harnessed to grind the peasants' grain into flour. So. .
.to summarize, the three technologies they mention in this section are iron
plows, horse harnesses, and windmills. If I'm taking notes on this section, I'd
want to list those three main points under the heading "new
technologies."
(Prentice
Hall World History 197)
________________________________________________
An
example from literature:
She
was one of those pretty, charming girls, born, as if by an accident of fate,
into a family of clerks. First of all, I think it's interesting that the
author begins this short story with "she," not even telling us the
name of the woman the entire paragraph—and perhaps the entire story—is about.
Second, he describes her and mentions that she was born "as if by an
accident of fate." I wonder if that's her opinion of herself or the
author's opinion of her. And I assume that a family of clerks is not a wealthy
family, which might be the problem. With no dowry, — The footnote
says that a dowry is money or property a woman brings to her husband at the
start of marriage; that confirms my suspicion that a family of clerks is poor.
—no prospects, no way of any kind of being met, understood, loved, and
married by a man both prosperous and famous, she was finally married to a minor
clerk in the Ministry of Education. That’s a long and somewhat
confusing sentence; I think I need to read it again to make sure I can put the
pieces together. With no dowry, no prospects, no way of any kind of being
met, understood, loved, and married by a man both prosperous and famous, she
was finally married to a minor clerk in the Ministry of Education. Reading
it a second time really helped. At the end of the first paragraph, I get
a pretty good idea of the mental state of this character. She's sad because she
didn't get to marry a rich guy. And he works for the Department of Education.
They'll never have any money. And money seems to be the thing she thinks will
buy her love and happiness. Since the story is called "The Necklace,"
I predict it's going to have something to do with an expensive necklace the
woman wants.
She dressed plainly because
she could not afford fine clothes, but was as unhappy as a woman who has come
down in the world; for women have no family rank or social class. Family rank and social class
seem like things people were more concerned with in the past. Today, I think
people care more about how famous you are, and wealth doesn’t necessarily mean
you have any class at all. I remember in the author's note in the textbook that
this story is taking place in France in the 1800s, when someone might be
concerned with her own family rank. With them, beauty, grace, and charm take the
place of birth and breeding. Their natural poise, their instinctive good taste,
and their mental cleverness are the sole guiding principles which make
daughters of the common people the equals of ladies in high society. The author seems to have a
high opinion of women if he's going to say that their beauty and intelligence
make them able to go beyond any kind of social rank. So he thinks her
unhappiness and worry should be all for nothing. We'll see how that turns out.
. .
("The
Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant)
_________________________________________
Obviously,
this is a little overkill, but it helps the students understand that reading is
an active process. We're not necessarily "reading" when we let the
words flow past our eyeballs; reading involves predicting, summarizing, connecting,
and questioning. By showing the students overtly what we do when we read, they
can begin to internalize these processes that will make them better students
and better readers in the years ahead.
If
you want to read more about this idea, take a look at Kylene Beers's book When
Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do. Many schools have copies in their
professional library. It's the most practical book I've ever read for any
teacher who wants to know the various troubles facing our kids when we assign
things for them to read.
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