On 6/3/07 8:22 AM, "Bonita" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Later, in my teaching life, my daughter, an avid reader, was frustrated by a
> teacher who was requiring the use of strategies and such in her fiction
> reading (I had already taught her to use strategies to keep her nonfiction
> managable) and she was frustrated by the slow process of stopping to take
> notes and such. I became annoyed with the teacher for forcing such a thing,
> but my daughter is now the most vocal proponent of annotating thoughts. Yes,
> some reading she just reads, but when she wants to get more from a book, out
> come the post-its or margin notes. Sometimes she waits to do it on a
> second-read so the first-read is smooth and relaxed. Sometimes she does not
> wait because, in her words, "I want more from the start." I now find myself
> imitating her lead and taking notes myself, at times. It only happens when I
> realize I want more from a book, or if, like reading the Known World, I have
> no one to talk to and know there is much I am missing, hidden in the folds and
> seams of the
> story.
>
I deliberately left my shared reading part of the class for
strategies...think alouds, lit circles, reading response journals re
strategies (didn't have the sticky note idea then) and so on. My reading
workshop was ala Atwell - free choice, no reports, no assigned responses.
Kids keep track of books read and we wrote informal letters back and forth
each week.
When I did a bit of research asking kids about what they liked or not, what
they felt successful about as readers and that varied in these different
contexts - what Isby said kind of captures it. She said in reading workshop
(choice time) "I get lost in the book more." In shared reading "I notice
things more like the weird words [Bradbury uses] (she was referring to his
figurativelanguage).
That about sums it up for me. I THINK THEY NEED BOTH. And they do need to
learn strategies to call on WHEN THEY NEED THEM. If we never help them build
a repertoire of strategies and name them, they can't always use them in a
bind. So it isn't a question of either/or but of listening to our students
and knowing when they might need more, when enough is enough.
Oh and you know as they move on up to secondary levels, they will be
required to dig deep into texts. They can't just get lost in the story. At
that point especially having some places in the text marked one way or
another will help them with the essays they will have to write. And
hopefully those essays will be more meaningful because they are using their
strategies and the text itself and their schema to write really interesting
meaningful essays.
Sally
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