The first chapter that I read from Strategies That Work was chapter 12 titled Content Literacy: Reading for Understanding in Social Studies and Science. Much of this chapter focuses on different practices that can be done to helps students comprehend text in Social Studies and Science. Many Social Studies suggestions were creating things to help summarize all the information, whether using writing or visuals. Such as: concept maps, story maps, maps of countries and cultures, time line of historical events, journals and personal narratives, etc. A couple of these comprehension strategies I will be using in my reading unit. These include: concept maps, a journal, and a time line of events. For the time line, I plan on reading a book that is historical fiction and having students apply the comprehension strategy sequencing to put the important events in order. This will not only teach students a comprehension strategy to use during reading, but it will also tie in Social Studies and help them to recognize a strategy that could be used in the Social Studies curriculum. The Science reading practices in this chapter also include creating things such as posters, mind maps, and picture dictionaries. Many of them were visual representations, but there were also things such as keeping journals and everything focused around summarizing information. This chapter showed me that many of the science and social studies practices for content literacy center around making meaning of the text that is being read in order for students to walk away with the big idea and concepts from the text. There are many different ways shared in this chapter and each of them help to make connections and push student’s thinking. They are also different activities that encourage engagement from the students and serve to keep the student’s interest. This chapter helped give me ideas for different practices I can use when designing my units. It reminded me of the importance of implementing practices like these in all areas and not just during reading time.
The second chapter of Strategies That Work that I read was chapter 14 Reading to Understand Textbooks. I knew right away that this chapter would be interesting because I know that many students find reading from their textbooks to be boring and therefore do not take much meaning from the text that they read. This is exactly what the chapter says at the beginning. That no student has ever walked into the classroom loving their textbook and that often the text books either have TMI (too much information) or NEI (not enough information). The big idea of this chapter is that it is up to us to set up our lessons so that students are not just reading to “memorize” the text to complete an assignment or test, but that the students are actually thinking their way through the text. This chapter shares some practices to be actively reading through textbooks. Some of these practices include: being selective about what is read, coding text with sticky notes, merging thinking with new information, discussing in small groups, using the jigsaw strategy, etc. All of these practices help to make reading out of textbooks bearable, as well as beneficial for student’s learning. We need to make sure that students understand the purpose of reading the text, and are comprehending and making meaning of the text as they read it. These practices got me thinking about textbooks in our curriculum and how some of them could be used to help students to become active readers while they are reading them. For example, with our textbooks in science, I personally think that they are very boring to just read, and so I understand completely why my students would think so too. Therefore, when we read out of our textbook, I think I am going to implement some of these strategies to help my students make connections and taking meaning from the text. One practice that I really liked was either making sticky notes on thinking and new information or making a two-column think sheet labeled Notes or Facts/My thinking. This will help students to write down new information that they learned and make connections with their own thinking of the new concepts. This chapter provided me with a lot of practices that I can use in the future for subjects such as science where the main reading source is their textbook.