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.

Read Aloud Helps

The podcast I listened to this week was Literacy in Content Areas: A Podcast with Penny Kittle. Penny Kittle is a classroom teacher and literacy coach in New Hampshire. I enjoyed listening to her speak because it was interesting hearing from someone who coaches teachers in content literacy. Teachers everywhere have issues trying to get there students to really dig deep into their work and find ways to include reading and writing. Penny Kittle helps teachers find the light through the tunnel and have their students learn new strategies on how to organize their thoughts when reading and studying texts. One way she does this is to have teachers come take a lesson in content literacy with her. She had some teachers look at a couple of tables, charts, and graphs. She told them to look at it as a text and say aloud what they are reading in the tables, charts, and graphs. She then asks them what they could write about it. She then makes a claim using one of the graphs and has the teachers write down evidence form the graphs that supports her claim. This strategy is very helpful with science and math teacher because it allows students to view tables, charts, and graphs in a different way that involved reading and writing. I really liked her view on English classes and how there is to much writing about a book that the whole class was assigned to read. She said students would be more interested if they got to research something that they found interesting. Students would dig deeper in their reading and writing if they had the opportunity to choose what they wanted to read and write about. This was a very helpful podcast that shows you a different way to look at content literacy and make it easier to incorporate into your classroom.

In class we have been learning about "read aloud." I think this a very helpful strategy that all teachers should use in the classroom. Not everyone understand how to read different types of books. One way to help your students is to read the text with them and point out different strategies that help you personally as a reader. This way students can use these strategies themselves and read with a better understanding of the material. For example, many text books have different images, tables, side notes, etc. that act as an aid for students as they read the book. It helps summarize chapters and also puts in visual aids. In my classroom at the beginning of the year or every time I had a new book for my students, I would do a read aloud with them. I think it would be helpful for the students to put the text book on the overhead and go through the book to show them how to read it and what helpful pictures and summaries the book has to make reading a little easier. Some teachers might find this as a waste of time, but I think if you tried it out with them you would realize how much they really don't know about their text books. I found a video on TeacherTube of this girl that does a poem read aloud. After every line in the poem she makes her own observations and side notes about what she just read. This helps her understand what is going on in the poem. This could be very helpful to do with students because a lot of times reading poems can be very difficult and you get nothing from it. Read aloud is a great strategy that all teachers should take the time to use with their students.

Literacy in Mathematics

            I was really excited when I learned that I could choose any video or podcast to listen to for this blog. I did a lot of research watching clips of different videos and reading about different podcasts until I stumbled upon the podcast, Connecting Literacy and Math. In this podcast the author, Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, of the book Math Exchanges: Guiding Young Mathematicians in small group meetings, talks about the connections between reading, writing, and math. The first thing she points out is how important talking is in math class. Every math teacher needs to establish how small group and class discussion works in the classroom at the beginning of the year. Students need to discuss and share their different strategies for problem solving. At the end of each lesson it is very helpful to have a class discussion reflecting back on the lesson and where they found some things difficult and what helped them. Another good idea Kassia Omohundro Wedekind talked about it is having the students always writing about and drawing their strategies and then swapping work with another student and they can discuss what they found different. I also loved how she explained math as story telling. This helps students become literate in mathematics and understand how it is helpful in real life. Society is very complex and is continuing to become more complex everyday. Children need to develop more complex relationships with language and problem solving. Connecting math and story telling is very important. Students need to be able to retell a math problem and show how to solve it. Teach them to see math as a story and how it is in our world and occurring all around us. When you take language out of math you are taking out the reason why you are solving and the context. I think this is great podcast and if you want to become a stronger literacy teacher in the mathematics area then I highly recommend it.

            As I have continued to read the Tovani text I become more in love with this book. In chapter three she explained a time when she went to a math class and showed students how to read the math textbooks. Math teachers sat in on the lesson even though they all thought it was a waste of time. She wanted to show how textbooks have certain features that are designed to make reading easier for those who struggle at it. As she went through one of the pages she wrote notes on the side of thoughts that she had or something she might not have understood in the text. She came across a figure that consisted of math symbols and wrote down beside it, “What is this for? Is it a formula from a previous chapter that I didn’t learn? Now what?” One of the teachers stood up and said, “that is not a formula. That’s just a graphic, some artwork. It’s found throughout the book.” She flipped through the book and pointed out every time she saw that same graphic. Then they realized it appeared every time a new mathematical property was introduced. I thought this example that Tovani shared was excellent because it really does show how important it is to know how to read your textbook. Textbooks are there to help and I think all teachers should go over with their student’s different strategies to read their textbooks. 

            I have been thinking about different ways to incorporate content literacy into a math classroom. I have created an example that would be used as a “starter” to begin a lesson. I decided to use an activity that was for 8^th grade level math and the standard is MCC8.F.5 Describe qualitatively the functional relationship between two quantities by analyzing a graph (e.g., where the function is increasing or decreasing, linear or nonlinear). Sketch a graph that exhibits the qualitative features of a function that has been described verbally. Here is the problem I would give the class:

I thought this was a good problem because it gives the students the opportunity to write a story that goes along with a mathematical graph. I think it is very helpful and useful way to incorporate content literacy into the math classroom because you have them writing their own stories and then reading/listening to other students stories. 

The double entry diary

Over the past couple of weeks I have been defining content literacy in my own words. So far I have come up with something that goes like this: The ability to use reading and writing in all subjects through various creative content-specific strategies.

In class we have been learning different content-specific strategies and how to use them in the classroom. One of the strategies we learned is called the double entry diary. This is a great strategy that will help your students read texts that are difficult for them. It is a good way to organize your thoughts and ideas from readings. In class we made double entry diaries for three different types of texts. We had to make one for a chapter from the book Do I really have to teach reading: Content comprehension, grades 6-12, by Cris Tovani, we made another double entry diary for an article we read on small pox, and the third double entry diary was a math problem that our teacher gave us. Here is a picture of my double entry diary for chapter 2 in the Tovani text:

I organized my thoughts in two different categories. On the left I have different examples and quotes taken from the text and on the right is where I share my thoughts and connections that I make to the text. The double entry diary was very helpful for something like this because it made me think deeply about the text and different ways I could use the examples from the text in my classroom. 

This is a picture of my double entry diaries for the math problem and the article on smallpox. In my math classes I have to explain all of my math problems. So doing this double entry diary for math was no new to me. I think it would be a good strategy in the classroom, but I don’t think it is the most helpful strategy. The explanation on the right is exactly what you see on the left. I just don’t see these really helping students because you are just explaining the steps you took to solve the problem. The double entry diary for the smallpox article I did not find helpful at all. The article is a bunch of facts so on the left side I had a lot to write down, but on the right I had nothing to say because everything was already explained on the left.

I really enjoyed learning how to use the double entry diary. I definitely saw in class ways that it can be helpful and also ways that it isn’t helpful. I think this is a great strategy to use with your students if you use it for the right text. It is a great way to make you think deeper about different readings and have an organized way to write down your thoughts and connections. 

Our teacher has us listen to very interesting podcasts and this week we listened to a podcast from the Hempfield School District that talked about different content literacy strategies and how students need to stop relying on their teachers for answers. The teachers in the podcast were saying that students are now not challenging themselves to figure out their own problems. Instead they are going to the teacher to get the answer and not figure it out on their own. I can completely understand this because i know that when I was in middle school I would give up on my school work a lot. I would go to the teacher and ask for help. A lot of my teachers would just guide me to the answer, but I definitely had some teachers who would give me answers to problems out of frustration. I think it is important for teachers to figure out where the student is confused and help solve their confusion by guiding them to the right answer. Students need to discover answers on their own. There are many different strategies that can be used, and every teacher needs to find one because there will always be students that just want to  give up.