Subjects Matter-Tools for Thinking: Reading Strategies Across the Curriculum

The previous posts have summarized the importance of incorporating real-world reading in the classroom, but this chapter focused entirely on how teachers can make sure students actually do the mental work in the classroom. This chapter suggests strategies that teachers can use to help students in a variety of different subjects, while helping teachers identify students that are struggling as readers. The chapter also suggests important topics that students need to learn to become more literate. Daniels and Zemelman write, "These strategies involve discussion, writing, drawing, and even having kids get up and move around the room-activities that help students engage with, understand, and apply the reading they do-and in the process learn to use their minds more effectively as they read."  

The strategies are all broken down into four key components; 1. Before- "activities that prepare students to read- including getting students focused and excited about the reading, developing purposes for reading, activating students questions, beliefs, and predictions about issues in the reading, and making connections with students' prior knowledge to help make sense of the reading." 2. During- "helping students construct, question, and process ideas as they read"- this includes visualization, inferences, the distinguishing of important ideas, and the monitoring of comprehension. 3. After-" guiding students to reflect on, integrate, and share the ideas when they are finished"- this includes synthesizing ideas between the reading and prior knowledge, and the follow up on questions and purposes they developed as they took new perspectives on the reading. 4. Learning Vocabulary- overlaps with all three stages because studying vocabulary is more complicated then memorization of definitions.  

Showing Kids How Smart Readers Think
-Think Alouds: Actively Exploring Meaning as You Read
*use this activity before reading 
The teacher reads a passage aloud, but stops to explain her thinking process on key points as she goes. "Think alouds help students to really see how active their thinking needs to be for high comprehension. Repeated think alouds will demonstrate a wide variety of mental strategies, showing students very concretely how to bring the material to life."
*How it works: Begin by letting students know that you'll be stopping to think as you read, and indicate what they should notice in your thinking. Provide copies for students and stop after a couple of sentences to predict what you feel is coming next, express confusion about an idea, a personal experience or a question. Stop to think and shift tone of voice to indicate thinking process is separate from the reading. After modeling have students try it as a class or in pairs.

Before: Activities that Prepare Students to Read
-Brainstorming
This is a group activity in which students share what they know about a topic both personal and academic and all answers are compiled on a board. "This a quick and simple way to help students realize what they know about a topic, and to reveal to you, the teacher, their knowledge, conceptions, and misconceptions.
-Clustering
The teacher identifies a key word  and writes it on the board. Students write the word and circle it on a piece of paper, they then independently connect words that relate to the key word and build a web. The students then share in groups and each group shares their list of words on the board. The lists are then compared and the list is later reffered to as the students progress in their reading to see what they have learned. "Clustering not only helps access ideas, but reduces the anxiety people feel as they rack their brains about a topic."
 - Other activities include; KWL,  Anticipation Guide, Dramatic Role Play,  and Probable Passage 

During: Helping Students Construct, Process, and Question Ideas as they Read
-Post-It Response Notes
Students use post-it notes in novels as they read to identify key concepts or important passages, demonstrating their thinking strategies as they read. The students then use those notes during discussions or assignments regarding the reading. "This strategy helps students become aware of information or elements in the text, and their responses to it, without lengthy note taking."
-Coding Text
Students create a system of symbols to represent their ideas as they read and they then write those symbols in the book and during discussion can easily identify passages or concepts that either intrigued or confused them. "Coding helps students remember a strategy, notice when their thinking has followed it, and then very briefly note the spot in the text where that thinking occurred."
-Other activities include; Bookmarks, Double-Entry Journals, Sketching My Way through The Text, It says/I Say and Say Something

After: Guiding Students to Reflect on, Integrate and Share Ideas
-Exit Slips and Admit Slips
At the end of class students write on note cards ideas they learned, questions they have, or other connections to the novel that they just read. At the start of the next class students are given three minutes to write a response either making predictions or addressing further questions that the novel has posed. "This activity helps connect one day's learning to the next, and last night's reading to this morning's discussion, across everything in between."
-Written Conversation
After reading students are put in pairs and write short notes back and forth to each other about the experience. "With written conversation, you can have a 'discussion' where everyone is actively talking at once-though silently, in writing."
-Other activities include; Mapping, Save the Last Word for Me, RAFT- Retelling in Various Perspectives and Genres, and Extended Projects

Learning Vocabulary
-Word Meaning Graphic Organizer
Students are placed in groups and given three to six challenging words, the students then fill out a graphic organizer sheet for each word and as they find more information that expands their understanding of the word they add more information to their sheets, the students then discuss in a group which aspects of the words they think they've learned about. "An effective vocabulary graphic organizer allows students to gather their contextualized experiences of a word in one place, where they can put the pieces of their knowledge together and solidify it."
-Vocabulary Tree
Students choose five words from a list of a reading, for each word they draw a tree trunk on a sheet of paper and write the word on the bottom of the trunk, as students read they add related words to the branches of the tree. "This activity allows students to expand on a single idea or topic to link a word to others related to it."
-Other activities include; List Group Label

The book goes into detail about each activity and I feel it is incredibly valuable for teachers to implement some of these reading strategies in the classroom. Until next time...