Opening the Door: Teaching Students to Use Visualization to Improve Comprehension

Resources for K-12 science lessons!  This is awesome and has everything from The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Animal Farm reading with science. 

Great interactive reading activity for a Spanish classroom! 

Teaching prohibition & organized crime with The Great Gatsby and the attached resources is a BREEZE! (:

This is such a cool way to close a lesson, a unit, or a school day!  

The ideas about engagement and motivation and their place in encouraging at-risk students to read was incredibly interesting to me.  I wonder in which district in Michigan the study was done.

http://www.amazon.com/Readicide-Schools-Killing-Reading-About/dp/1571107800/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331056184&sr=8-1

I ran across the book Readicide by Kelly Gallagher while searching for books on Amazon. I got so wrapped up in the description and the reviews of other readers that I knew it was one I NEEDED to read. So, I talked with an administrator with which I work closely to redefine our grading and assessment practices. She paid for me to order the book and then asked me to read it and report out to administration if I believed it to be valuable. After having read it, I most certainly do believe it to be so.

Kelly Gallagher writes as an experienced English teacher about the perils of championing breadth over depth in instruction as well as the exorbitant amount of time spent (or wasted) on "test preparation." Schools are actually killing the minds, creativity, and interest in lifelong learning of their students. These are all things that I already noticed and believed. However, the observation that struck the deepest for me, as someone who LOVES getting "lost" in a book and who has taught English in the past, was the ways that readicide is occurring the most within our Literature classrooms.

One of Gallagher's greatest complaints is the way that books are "chopped up" and "beaten" beyond recognition. Students are never able to enter into "reading flow" because they are either stopped every moment or so by a teacher trying desperately to cover all the standards in each individual book or are given difficult works and no support in comprehending them. As Gallagher repeatedly states, it is in the balance of these two extremes that students' minds will be fed and that they will be most likely to finish their education with an amiable sentiment towards reading.

This book has radically changed the way that I approach reading and teaching reading. It has made me bolder and more willing to fight for the best interests of my students. Also, thanks to Gallagher, I have ammunition in the form of data to provide evidence for the existence of readicide in my own school and to do something to change it. Every student deserves the opportunity to love reading.

Christine Cziko, a former high school English teacher, writes about a year-long undertaking that she was a part of that sought to transform students into capable readers.  Her desire to do something about the lack of reading ability that her students exhibited came out of her concern about her students' apparent inability to read independently or to understand what they read.   I was greatly impacted by this whole idea.  I would LOVE to do something like this at my school.  I have taught high school English at a private school where many common issues don't exist and I still had students not doing the reading or not understanding what they read.  However, once we read CS Lewis' The Great Divorce (which is written at a very high level) they were engaged and devoured the difficult text.  We would then come together and ask questions, discuss, and analyze the text.  I didn't have to beg my students to read it, they WANTED to.  One of the big differences was that I talked it up and let them know that it was going to be very difficult but that people would be impressed to know that they had read it in high school.  They were so proud to have read, analyzed, and understood this difficult text. 

I know that this isn't *exactly* about reading and learning.  However, this article was so revealing of our culture and mindsets.  I read it with a reading comprehension group I lead at school.  Basically, we (society) spend almost all of our time consuming and, consequently, judging information from all sorts of electronic screens.  We create very little and are so afraid that what we are capable of creating will be judged as "not good enough" because of our judgments of the creations of others.  So, it encourages the reader to go out and create something - write, draw, dance, and learn what makes him or her tick. 

We make a LOT of things in my Spanish classes. Creativity is stretched and encouraged. As far as my comprehension group, they all said, "this is boring... Is it almost over...??" except for one student who loved it and said, "So, we just need to do things that make us happy! It doesn't matter what other people think!" So, I am not sure how much they got out of it...

For my first journal, I read this article about multi-sensory language arts instruction.  It claims that if you can provide students with visual, auditory, and tactile-kinesthetic methods for learning, they are more likely to be successful.  One of the things that I agreed with most strongly that it seems many educators today shy away from is the idea that students should "practice to the point of automatization."  Automatic reading is not the key to comprehension but it is surely a necessary foundation for meaningful reading.  When I was a student, we practiced grammar and spelling until it was second-nature and generally my current abilities testify to that.  However, we have steered away from correctness in favor of sparing student egos.  I do not think that it has done them any good.  I wholeheartedly agree with this article that we MUST train our students to be good readers and writers. 

I googled SUN.