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.

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.