Graphic Organizers..Chapter 6

I think that graphic organizers are a great tool for students to use in the classroom. They allow the students to get a visual representation and help organize their thoughts. I remember using charts, web maps and other graphic organizers in school and it always allowed me to really remember the information being shown. I'm a visual learner and can remember things much easier if I can see them laid out and organized. Concept maps and venn diagrams were always the easiest for me to understand. I like being able to see all of the information in front of me and being able to compare and contrast different things. We always used them a lot in groups and would then present the information to the class and share the different things we came up with. I think that this not only helped the visual learners, but also the auditory learners as well.
I feel that this is a great way for the visual learners to express themselves. Not all students can tell you orally about a certain topic. Some find it much easier to use a graphic organizer of some kind to show the information they gained. I felt this way in school and often couldn't express myself about certain topics. We were sometimes forced to do oral presentations without visuals, and I always did terrible. I could never get the point across like I was supposed to and knew that a simple visual would help. Anytime we were allowed to use a visual aid, I had a much easier time sharing what I learned. I'm a very creative person and love the chance to be able to show my creativity and how my brain comprehends things. I think that graphic organizers are perfect for students like myself. It gives them the chance to show the teacher what they can do and show that they actually learned the content.
I also feel like they benefit students who are good at expressing themselves through writing (papers). The graphic organizers will organize their ideas and help them to choose their main points and topics. I think that this will help them to build their own ideas to include in their writing and help them to include every bit of information into their paper. As I mentioned earlier, I think that sharing the different parts of information to the class in groups allows the students to feed off of each others ideas. This will open up each students' thinking and they will build their own ideas from what was gained. Doing the graphic organizers before reading or before learning certain content never really appealed to me as much as doing it after. I just found that I never really paid close enough attention until after the content was actually presented to me. (if that makes sense) :)  I used them to show all the knowledge I knew/gained about a certain topic after it had been discussed. It allowed me to throw out anything I knew about a topic and put it into some type of organization on paper so that it could be organized in my brain.
A question that I had while reading was:
Because I never had interest in using the graphic organizers before reading/learning new material, How can I correctly use them to help my students gain knowledge before reading/teaching? How can I show them that this is a helpful prereading/learning tool when I never found it helpful myself?

Text Talk

I feel that read alouds  and shared readings are a very important way for children to experience reading. I really enjoyed reading the article and found it to be very interesting. What stood out to me and made me think about my own experiences was the fact that during the study, teachers were asking questions that only required short answers that didn't really call for the children to think. Instead of using questions like that, they should use open ended questions that require the children to think about what was being read. This reminded me of what we did in class the other day. Have the children think about their own experiences as you read the story to them. This will allow them to think about their own experiences and be able to relate them to the text.  This also allows the children to really think about what is being discussed in the text and forces them to think about the message behind some of the reading. This will also help build their language and vocabulary. I really enjoyed seeing the examples that were listed in the article. It gave different scenarios of how to change your questions to challenge the children to think further. The past few classrooms that I have been in have not used any of these strategies during reading. I have never seen the children really engaged in a story or reading that they were reading aloud or during shared reading. I have seen several examples of "round robin" reading where the children take turns reading in a circle. I think that this is awful. The children are definitely not engaged in the reading and are just sitting waiting for their turn to read their part.
Something else that stood out to me was when the article discussed pictures. The children often ignored the content and relied only on the pictures to capture what the story was about. When  the pictures were taken away and they only used the reading, the students paid much closer attention because they couldn't rely on the pictures to tell the story. I am a huge lover of children's books, but the pictures definitely don't always do the book justice. The text is often much greater than the picture represents. I really enjoyed the material in the chapter and in the article. Reading a story to a child seems like something that isn't a big deal, but can be a huge impact on a child's educational growth.

Questions:
1. Why don't all teachers feel the importance of these type of activities? It's so obvious that the children are not paying attention during the "round robin" (read alouds, shared reading)
2. Is the fact that the children's attention is being taken away by the pictures actually research based? or is that just an assumption or opinion of one researcher? I have often been told that for some children the pictures help them to focus on the story and remember certain things.

Writing to Learn

I found the article and chapter to be very interesting and filled with lots of important information. "Integrating writing with reading enhances comprehension because the two are reciprocal processes." This was a sentence from the article that really stood out to me and made me think about situations I have had in different classroom settings. I have been in classrooms where the only type of writing that the children ever do is copying words from the board or completing worksheets. I believe that it is very important for the children to learn spelling words and practice material, but these type of activities are not engaging and turn some children off to writing all together. I remember having to write spelling words 20 times each and never remembering anything I wrote because all I could think about was how bored I was and when would we get to go to recess. However, I have also been in classrooms where teachers used writing in a way that helps the children learn and also engages their interests. One class that stands out to me was a  2nd grade class. The children were read a story and then the teacher discussed a related topic and then allowed the children to do a free write using some of the content that she just discussed. They took ideas from the story and some of the material that they had learned, and used this to create their own story with their own ideas. This showed what the children had learned, but also let them use their own ideas and imagination. This is a fun and creative way that this teacher chose to use writing to learn content material.
I really enjoyed how the chapter and the article discussed different writing strategies to use in the classroom that would help engage the children and adolescents and give them the chance to use writing. One of my favorite strategies that I can remember from school was quick writes. Teachers use to put a word, topic, or question on the board and we were to write about whatever we wanted to on that topic or whatever we knew about a certain thing. This got our minds going and really made us think about what we knew. This was more during the jr. high years, but I can remember a few times during elementary. Something else that the book mentioned was an "I AM" poem. We had to create these in 8th grade english class and they got posted in the hallway for everyone to see. I remember working so hard and trying to find just the right words to express myself and be appealing to someone in the hallway stopping to read it. That was a creative way for the teacher to get us involved in writing and for us to have something to be proud of. I agree that teachers should support students' ideas and encourage them to express themselves in their writing.
The article was much easier to read and much more interesting. I hate reading out of a textbook so if there is a choice between the two I will almost always choose the other. The article broke down the strategies and explained them and really got me thinking about my own experiences with each of the different types. I also like how it gave the structure of some of the poems and writing ideas.

Questions from the article and chapter:

How can I be sure that I am introducing the writing in way that won't turn off the students who are less interested in writing than the others?

Why isn't writing in content area classrooms encouraged more than it is? I remember doing it in some classes, but not as much as I feel we should have now that I know the things I do.

Making a case and a place for effective content area literacy instruction in the elementary grades

I found this article constantly reminding me of my childhood experiences in elementary school. In my elementary school classes we did a lot of reading, but I cannot ever remember it being for learning about a certain topic. In other words, we read a lot for enjoyment (stories and poems) but never for strictly learning purposes. (science, social studies) When we did read about these certain topics, it was straight out of the textbook, either alone or with a partner, or we listened to the teacher read aloud (we were supposed to listen). We were never taught how to comprehend what we were reading when reading this type of material, so most of the time no knowledge was gained at all. I now feel that it is very hard for me to read things from textbooks or other material such as articles and actually keep up with what the message of the text is. I think that exposure to these things at a younger age would have helped me to have a much higher reading comprehension than I do.

I feel that it is very important to start teaching children at a young age to read and comprehend expository material. Not only do they need to be taught how to read, but they need to know how to understand what they are reading. I have come in contact with children who can read all day long and at a very fluent rate, but when asked what they read they can't answer one question about the reading. Another thing that I found to be very interesting was the fact that instead of the teachers reading the material aloud to the students let them independently read some too. This will help them to be able to learn how to read it and comprehend it on their own instead of just gaining listening comprehension from hearing it out loud. Having material that is appealing to the younger students is also a good way to gain their attention to content area literacy. Books from National Geographic have amazing pictures and will catch the eyes of any age of students. These are very informative and will give them a good experience with these types of books. I have already made a point to began building my library for my future classroom. Since I never had access to these kind of books and never learned how to read and comprehend material other than pleasure books, I want to make sure that my children have full access to every kind of text possible. I think reading is an amazing way to learn and I cannot wait to show my future students how much fun every kind of book can be.

As I mentioned earlier, while reading this article I was constantly thinking about my elementary years and wondering why I was never exposed to this type of reading. Two questions that came to mind were:
1. Did my teachers not realize how important it was, or did they just not know how to incorporate it into their lessons?
2. How can I make sure that my students never feel like they didn't have the opportunity to experience all different types of text and reading?