Dig In! It’s time to read!

1. Dig In! It’s time to read! “To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”~ Edmund Burke ~ Quoted from: http://www.richmond.k12.va.us/readamillion/readingquotes.htm, Retrieved February 19, 2010

2. Reading is like eating? Awesome! Re-read the opening quote, by Edmund Burke: “To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.” Burke is using an analogy to compare these two ideas. How useful is eating food if it is not digested by your body? Sure, you can enjoy the immediate taste of the food, but your body won’t benefit from the nutrition that food provides.

3. Wait a second… How is eating like reading again? Like eating, we may not always like what we read or see (or have to eat!), but that doesn’t mean that we still can’t benefit from the experience. If you ‘digest’ what you read and what you see, the ideas will stay with you. You will grow because of what you read.

4. Sometimes I have a hard time reading… • Students who are good readers have certain habits in common. • Good readers: • engage in the text • monitor their understanding, and • explore and share their experience

5. Engage with your Reading • Good readers: • Set a purpose for their reading • E.g. “I am reading this because I need to find out…” • Ask questions and they try to find the answers while they read • “Why did the author say this? What does he mean by that? • Make predictions while they read, then follow through to see if those predictions come true • “I wonder if this means that a change is ahead for the character? I think he might struggle later on with this choice.” • Try to make personal connections with what they read • “I know exactly how it feels to have someone else eat the last pizza pop in my freezer! Poor guy!” • Visualize what they read, even drawing diagrams or mind maps to help organize important details http://www.seattleschools.org/schools/blaine/index_files/Traits%20of%20Good%20and%20Struggling%20Readers.pdf

6. Monitor Your Understanding • Good readers frequently check to see if they are understanding what they read. If they struggle (and all readers face texts they don’t understand, by the way!), good readers will: • Record observations while they read • Slow down their reading pace • Re-read difficult sections • Look up difficult words, and try to understand them as they are used in the text • Ask questions http://www.seattleschools.org/schools/blaine/index_files/Traits%20of%20Good%20and%20Struggling%20Readers.pdf

7. Explore and Share • It is important to try to find and connect to the meaning in the text. Sound scary? • By asking a simple question throughout your reading process, you can quickly get to the big ideas in the text. • You’ve heard this question before… So What?

8. The So What? Thinking Strategy Tovani, C. (2004). Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Stenhouse Publishers, Portland. P. 17

9. The So What? Thinking Strategy • Start with the text: • Why am I reading this text? • What kind of text is it: an essay, article, poem, or billboard? • What is the title? • What ideas do the pictures and captions suggest to me?

10. The So What? Thinking Strategy • Connect with the text and ask yourself: • Have I read texts like this one before? • Am I familiar with the time and place it is set? • What do I know about the people involved? Do they remind me of anyone? • What is my opinion of the main idea?

11. The So What? Thinking Strategy • More Thinking Strategies: • Ask a question • Draw a conclusion • Visualize • Sift and Sort • Recognize confusion • The assignments you will do in this course will help you develop these skills. Tovani, C. (2004). Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Stenhouse Publishers, Portland. P. 17

12. The So What? Thinking Strategy • Now it’s important to consider the relevance of what you’re reading. It will help you grow in your reading. • Ask yourself: How does this thinking help me better understand the text? • Sometimes a double entry journal can be helpful in this process. So What? 1Tovani, C. (2004). Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Stenhouse Publishers, Portland. P. 14

13. Writing a Double Entry Journal • In a double-entry journal, you will make two columns for “before” and “after” observations • The “reacting” column is where you will put your reactions to the text, whether they are comments, observations or questions. You would do this as you read through a piece of text. • The “reflecting” column is where you would revisit these questions after you had read the piece of text and formed all your “reactions”. Using what you’ve learned from reading, you would then answer your “questions” or clarify your initial findings with new knowledge.

14. Now What? • When you are given readings like a short story, poem, novel, or other pieces of text for school, you are given these readings so that you will take something away from them. • By interacting with the text, whether it be taking notes, forming questions, writing double entry journals, making predictions or using sticky notes for points of interest, you are ensuring that crucial learning or “digestion” process is taking place. • It is more meaningful and helpful in the end to form a genuine understanding about a text then it is to simply memorize what is going on. • These methods and strategies are only a few suggestions to try to help you interact, engage, and digest texts. If you would like more suggestions, talk to your teacher!

15. Bon Appétit! All readers need find strategies that work for them, because everyone struggles with reading; whether we grapple with words themselves, or we struggle to see new perspectives. As you grow, it is most important that maintain an active interest in trying new foods… and texts!