I hear it a lot from parents "Jane is reading chapter books." Yet I know the reality is something different. Jane reads well. She has great fluency. She reads with expression, pauses at each comma, and raises her voice when she sees a question mark at the end of a sentence. However, Jane has trouble recalling with detail the sequence of the story.
I remember when I was growing up we read our Dick and Jane basal reader, answered a few questions and that was about the extent of it. Today, kids need to be able to talk in detail about the text. They need to make predictions, inferences, and draw conclusions. We are expecting our students to "dig deeper" and pull meaning from what they read. Students are expected to create written responses based on the content of what they read. Students are expected to comprehend a story well in order to perform these higher level thinking skills. This can be a difficult concept, especially for early readers.
I explain to my students that good readers turn the story into a "movie in their mind" as they read. In order for students to do this they need a lot of practice and modeling.
The story Stuck by Oliver Jeffers is one of my favorite books to begin introducing visualization. When students can visualize and "make a movie in their mind" the story takes on life. It helps students make connections, form characters in their mind, infer information, and pay closer attention to detail.
When Floyd's kite gets stuck in a tree he throws his shoe up to the tree to try and get it down. Needless to say, he isn't very successful and by the end of the story a LOT more than a kite is stuck in the tree.
I read the story once through and we have a "turn and talk" about the sequence of the story. Next, I re-read the story but this time....students lay down, or put their heads down on their desks. They get comfortable and close their eyes. I shut the lights off and re-read the story and instruct them to "make a movie in their mind as I read."
Next, students draw what items they remember from the story that got stuck in the tree. They label their drawings. Here are some of their results:
This method can work for any story. Read some. Stop. Draw what you heard. Repeat. I like using clipboards and having the students sit with them on the rug while I read. They can make predictions, show the problem in the story, make an inference, etc. Whatever skill you are working, mental imagery is a great tool.
Poetry provides young students with excellent examples of imagery and visualization. This book is absolutely fabulous for teaching imagery:
For example:
Red reminds me of fire.
Red smells like apples and a furious fire.
Red tastes like lollipops and cherries in the summer.
Sticky notes are by far the greatest invention ever (next to ice cream). We love them, kids love them. They rock! When my district began a shift towards balanced literacy, I began having my students use sticky notes to annotate text. However, I have a confession. I am a major neat nick. I couldn't stand books being plastered with sticky notes. So I made some planning pages for my students to add sticky notes to in order for them to show their understanding of text that they are reading. It felt like the heavens opened up. For real! Now my students record the title of the text they are working on, on their planning page and pass it in and their connections, predictions, inferences, etc. are all in one place.
We use sticky notes in my classroom during guided reading groups, as mini-lessons, and during silent reading time. I try to conference with students as they are working but if my guided reading group runs over a bit too long and I don't have time that day, the kiddos just leave their planning pages with their sticky notes intact in a basket near my desk and we either conference about it later in the day or I look it over and file it as evidence. You can find Make it Stick!
REFERENCE: http://www.minds-in-bloom.com/2015/07/how-to-improve-reading-comprehension-in.html
No comments:
Post a Comment