Accessible text

This week we read about accessible texts and rigorous texts. I believe that as a teacher it is really important to make sure your students understand the readings that you assign them. Many teachers may think just because the students know what each word in the texts means that they understand what they are reading. This isn't true. I remember as a student being assigned textbook reading was the worst homework ever!!!! They looked so easy to read because I understood all of the words, but once I had to answer questions or do worksheets after the reading I would realize that I had no idea what I had just read. It wasn't because I couldn't read it, but I just didn't find it interesting and putting the concepts together was difficult. It is really important that teachers notice these things in their students. One strategy is to use accessible reading. For example, for social studies you could find newspaper and magazine articles for students to read. This way they could relate what they are learning to real life current events. Students would find this more interesting then just reading a textbook. Many teachers would say that accessible text isn't rigorous enough. What exactly is rigor? The word challenge always comes to my mind. Yes, we do need to challenge our students, but just because you give your students an accessible text doesn't mean that it is low level or dumb down text. You can make it challenging for your students, by giving them more challenging reads that are still interesting. If you give your students a challenging textbook that they really do not understand and are not getting anything out of it, that is too rigorous and a waste of time. You can challenge your students in stages, but you always need to make sure it is interesting for them.
As a teacher I know I am going to find this challenging in the math classroom. Textbook reading is my least favorite thing to do in math! There are many different ways to use accessible texts. It doesn't necessarily have to be a book or an article, but you could also use videos and pictures. Math is always a challenge for me to think about in content literacy class because I forget that text doesn't only mean something you read, but you can read many different things as a text. This is something that as a teacher i am going to have to work on by incorporating a variety of different texts that students can learn how to read differently.