Strategies That Work

In the readings for this week, I found that I learned SO MUCH from the chapters we read in Strategies That Work. It was so great to finally read a text that when I started reading it, I didn't want to stop! I am normally more of a skimmer when it comes to reading, but with this text I found myself grabbing my highlighter and labeling important facts, things I agreed with, and so forth.

I learned a lot from these chapters, some information that I already knew but it was good to have a refresher. For example, in my opinion and in my experience as an educator thus far, I have seen and personally witnessed how important it is for the "text-to-self" connection. We are more likely to engage in reading and understand it when we have something to relate to. As an educator, I don't really have any interest in reading about accounting, which is what my brother is currently studying, so I would most likely not be as engaged in reading about that.  However, based on a quote from the reading that "when we connect our past experiences to new information, we are more apt to engage in the reading as well as understand it," I would try my best to do this while I was reading about accounting. I would try my best to not only relate to it somehow, but to try and comprehend.

I also believe that reading is so much more than just reading the words. This text gave me some new insight about children and their comprehension. I think it is so true that at a young age, children are so focused on reading the words correctly and decoding that they forget about the meaning of what they are actually reading. Reading is as much if not more about comprehension than it is about decoding. The example in the text of the teacher who had a child read the page but then he couldn't even go back and tell her what he read was a great example of how important comprehension is. The reader skipped right over an important and fascinating fact because he was so concerned with the decoding of the text. I loved the teachers method to think of reaching the end of a page as a red light- he would reach the end of a page and the think about what he was reading before going on with the text. This helps readers really appreciate what they are learning and what they are reading and shows them to focus on comprehension as well as decoding.

I can't wait to keep reading this textbook and to keep learning more about strategies that work and how I can apply them in my class this year. I am looking forward to keeping learning about ways to incorporate strategies that work into my classroom and applying what I am learning in this class to the classroom where I hold in my hands the education of 24 amazing young students.