Regarding: She (Sharon) mentioned teachers who hand out reading worksheets and have students write TtoS, TtoT or TtoW down the margins. I think strategies as skills is what is really on her mind.
I really have to agree with Nancy's post on this one. She is stating something that is pervasive in our classrooms everywhere. The bottom line is, everyone wants to have a trick, strategy, technique that is creative and seemingly gives kids the way to do things. We are bored with the mundane, aren't we? But here's what I know...kids like simple. And sometimes, it's not about the complicated trick, or the glitter from the glitz...it's about helping kids make sense of the text through thought. And modeling and thinking aloud are ways to get there. One thing I heard Ellin say at a conference last year was that the whole pupose of strategy is to give kids a language through which to share their thinking. If that's the case, then making a connection is one way for students to share that their thinking mirrors something that the author did/said in the text. I don't think its original purpose was to necessarily be a trick or technique. In fact, my thinking about connections is that they exist to boost and bolster a reader's schema. Think about it...when you connect something you read to a real-world experience, it deepens the value of something the author said/did, thus making it more credible and ultimately, memorable. That, in my mind, is the reason for connecting. My point...strategy only takes students to a point and so often we stop there. How many times have we just done a KWL and then never went back to well...what made you learn that idea?; or, let's think about what we knew from the text...did it really connect to what the text actually said...and exploring how our prior knowledge should connect in some way or we should reconceptualize our misconceptions. We need to take students beyond that point of just using the strategy to helping the students make meaning. It's about being metacognitive about your process... primary students can do that...with a lot of (what I infer Taberski said) modeling. Peter Carpenter _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
