Chapter 4 Post

Chapter 4: Tools for Active Literacy: The Nuts and Bolts of Comprehension Instruction

This chapter begins with an interesting quote from Cris Tovani who says “Schools should not be places where old people go every day to do the work for young people. Isn’t it interesting how when the bell rings at 3:00 P.M. on Friday afternoon, the kids bound out of the room like so many Bambis, as we teachers drag our exhausted rear ends out the door. The kids should be dead tired, and we should be ready for a 5:00 P.M. power yoga class!” We all commented on how true this is in our classrooms. We as teachers work so hard on stuff that the students should be doing themselves. How many of you can relate to this excerpt?

The chapter moves on to discuss options for explicit instruction in teaching reading comprehension through eight different strategies.
Think- alouds
Read-alouds
Interactive read-alouds
Lifting text
Guided discussion
Anchor lessons and anchor charts
Rereading for deeper meaning
Sharing our own literacy by modeling with adult literature

We discussed Interactive Read-Alouds and Lauren shared that she does this in some of the content areas of study in her classroom. She still felt that her students could me more involved in the instruction by giving each of her students a packet of stickies and having them write down their thinking while she is reading. We all felt that during these Interactive Read-Alouds that you as the teacher were probably only really interacting with six or seven of the students in your class. However, by giving each of them a packet of post-its, you now have everyone in the classroom interacting with the text being read aloud.

We also discussed the topic of Rereading for Deeper Meaning. Some of our questions were “How can this be done?” and “How many times should you reread?”. Jamie shared that in her classroom she has her students first read a story in guided reading groups, again with partnered reading and finally by independent reading. We also talked about how to motivate our students to reread text by charting their fluency and timing them and having them compete against their time. Do any of you have ways that you work on fluency and rereading in your classroom that you would like to share?

There was also an interesting portion in this chapter about annotation. The authors took a paper given to incoming freshmen at Harvard University and shared how it is important to write down your thinking as you are reading a text rather than just highlighting. We all talked about how we wish we were given more instruction in this manner in high school in preparation for our college experience. Lauren shared how her 6th grade teacher really got her started reading this way by requiring her students to underline as they were reading and to write notes in the margin of their books. We felt that this type of instruction would be beneficial for all of our students but especially for that 30% who need any strategy that they can get.

Ultimately, this chapter reinforced that the reason behind our explicit instruction in reading should guide our students into becoming learners who are thinking about what they are reading and working out their thinking to construct meaning.