Ideas to Inspire

This series is from a handout given to Harvard freshman titled “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard.” It’s never too early to practice, even if we’re not all going to Harvard. But first, some background from Susan Gilroy, Lamont Library, Reference Services.

Critical reading – active engagement and interaction with texts – is essential to your academic success at Harvard, and to your intellectual growth. Research has shown that students  who read deliberately retain more information and retain it longer. College students rarely have the luxury of successive re-readings of material, either, given the pace of life in and out of the classroom.

Previewing: Look “around” the text before you start reading.

Preliminary impressions (looking around) offers you a way to focus your reading. For instance:

• What does the presence of headnotes, an abstract, or other prefatory material tell you?
• Is the author known to you? How does that influence your perception?
• How does the layout of a text prepare you for reading? Is the material broken into parts–subtopics, sections, or the like? How might the layout guide your reading?
• Does the text seem to be arranged according to certain conventions of discourse? Newspaper articles, for instance, have characteristics that you will recognize (inverted pyramid with the important information at top); textbooks and essays are organized quite differently. Texts demand different things of you as you read, so whenever you can, register the type of information you’re presented with.

Next up: Annotating

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman is about the economic turn of the world economy caused by technology’s ability to raze global barriers. The  title also alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

What that does for education is that it opens up our classrooms and crushes the “sage on the stage” pedagogy. We may still be boss of our own domain (the pysical walls of our classroom), but we are facilitators of learning (including our own learning), and not the gods and goddesses of wisdom. Shucks!

The positive of this movement is that I have FREE access to quality resources at my fingertips, and without a lot of time commitment on my part. Here’s my example:

1. In the 6th grade language arts classroom, kids are working on a poetry recitation about Africa (tie-in to their social studies research on. . .Africa) They go to the internet link http://www.poemhunter.com/search/?w=title&q=Africa

2. They use their handy-dandy class generated rubric to find an appropriate poem for their group.

3. Maybe they need help memorizing and reciting a poem. I go to google and find:

• How to read a poem: Look at the poem’s title: What might this poem be about? • Read the poem straight through without stopping to analyze it (aloud, if pos- sible). …
  www.englishcompanion.com/pdfDocs/howtoreadpoem.pdf
• How to read a poem out loud by former poet laureate Billy Collins. In fact the link allows me to have Billy Collins talk about reading a poem out loud on this site http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-howtoread.html

4. I found examples of sites with people reciting poems on video

• http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems/video_bestpractices.html
• http://www.favoritepoem.org/videos.html

5. I created a powerpoint with what I learned from the poets, inserted Billy Collins talking about reading poetry, copied some poems from videos I was going to share with the class and voila – the lesson is ready to go in an hour.

Share Tabs is a free site that allows you to put all your bookmarks in one place for a specific event or assignment. This works much better than handing out a paper of websites to students because they are notoriously sloppy typers that rely on shortcuts anyway, (OMG), so when they are faced with long urls, they are USELESS.

The screen shot is from a workshop that the elementary teachers had with teacher and author Stephanie Harvey on non-fiction reading and writing. The tech teacher would go to every link that Stephanie talked about and by the end of the presentation, she was able to send us the personalized link to Harvey’s resources that she mentioned in her workshop.

We’re trying this with 8th grade science next week where the students will read an article on the hoopla of the 2012 end of the world prediction based on the Mayan calendar, and the students will go to the share tab site to find other science web sites that will debunk the myth with scientific facts.

It’s free, it’s simple, and it will save everyone time so that more teaching can focus on the basics like how to read a website, and what the different entry points are to non fiction writing.

The middle school reading club, Hui Heluhelu is a mostly online book club that offers students a way to talk about books and meet fellow readers. Here are some benefits:

• The club is mostly online, so it doesn’t take away precious school time like study hall and recess
• The book club members choose themes so that if someone is not interested in a particular book, they can find a plethora of other books in the same theme. (November’s theme is mystery)
• Members are able to form sub-groups around particular books so that they can have specific online conversations about what they’re reading
• The faster readers can jump from group to group and read more than one book a month
• There is no minimum amount of posting that students need to make, although they are encouraged to post a response to the regular discussions (What are you reading on Monday and Teaser Tuesday) as well as blog about a book they finished.
• The book club includes all three grade levels, so students meet students that are not in their grade level.
• The online site is private, secure and well-monitored, so our students are safe.

If your child would like to get involved with Hui Heluhelu, see any of the English teachers, or catch me in the hallway. Hope to see you in the technosphere.

If you want information on how to order online, go to the scholastic book order page on this blog, or see Mrs. Ikeda in 1103.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – This is the fight-to-the-death sequel to The Hunger Games.

Savvy by Ingrid Law (2009 Newberry Honor book).

For generations, the Beaumont family has harbored a magical secret. They each possess a “savvy” -a special supernatural power that strikes when they turn thirteen. Grandpa Bomba moves mountains, her older brothers create hurricanes and spark electricity . . . and now it’s the eve of Mibs’s big day.

As if waiting weren’t hard enough, the family gets scary news two days before Mibs’s birthday: Poppa has been in a terrible accident. Mibs develops the singular mission to get to the hospital and prove that her new power can save her dad. So she sneaks onto a salesman’s bus . . . only to find the bus heading in the opposite direction. Suddenly Mibs finds herself on an unforgettable odyssey that will force her to make sense of growing up -and of other people, who might also have a few secrets hidden just beneath the skin.