Chapter Four and "Text Talk"

                Reading this article was less fun to me because it gave a rebuttal to a few strategies that I thought were supposed to aid in comprehension. The first was pictures in a book. I have previously learned that pictures help children to understand the story and now I learned that they do, except when they don’t and they actually distract. The next was background knowledge. If I had a quarter for every time I have heard how much “schema” and a child’s environment is essential to comprehension, well, I would be living by the beach somewhere. But, now I read that background knowledge can distract. Thanks, article, for busing that bubble. However, in the end, I gathered that the moral is to use background knowledge, but don’t rely on it. Use the pictures in the book, but don’t rely on them either. Now I understand why Ms. Walker would always read the entire page, and then after, show us the picture. I always wondered why she did that. I was sitting there thinking, “Just show us Franklin the Turtle already!” Turns out, that was a comprehension strategy.

I agree with the article that “Children can handle challenging content.” As long as the material is not too high above their “zone,” they can use what they know about the world to make sense of the difficult text. I found that with the second graders last semester, they actually did better when I read them a book that I initially thought would be on the hard side for them to understand. Because it had a challenging plot, it kept them engaged. On the other hand, when I read a predictive text book, they caught on to it by the third time, so by the fifteenth time, they were tired of repeating with me, and therefore got distracted. It is amazing the behavioral problems that we can likely avoid by keeping kids challenged and engaged. (The books were Anansi the Spider series, if you were wondering).

On chapter four:

I loved the example in the beginning about the (effective) history teacher, who using colonial-style lanterns, engaged students by making history into story hour. I hear of so many people who hate history because they were made to memorize seemingly meaningless facts in social studies. I think that teachers need to be great story tellers. I need some work on this!  

“Students need to be read to by their teachers on a daily basis.” Agreed. This this is the type of more challenging literary material, of which the article spoke. I think that more so than not, we challenge the students, but simultaneously provide support and scaffolding.

This chapter made me think of Dr. Hanna a lot because it talked about self-questioning and self-monitoring. She used to say that we have to be the voice inside the child’s head asking, “Does that make sense?” so that students learn to monitor themselves. Also, the book discussed how teachers are responsible for conveying to students the importance of new knowledge. We must show the “why” and not just the “what.” Teaching children how to be strategic is teaching them to be independent readers and thinkers.

Lastly, I learned a new word, “interspersing”, so I think that I will intersperse it into my spoken vocabulary.