Day 2 started off with a bang with introductions about favorite childhood books. After this community building activity, we worked on our "invitation to writing" prompt. We tweeted on todaysmeet.com ways that we defend ourselves. Afterwards, we went into a Research talk about new theories of literacy and "Learning to read vs. reading to learn."
As Jean noted this morning, giving good detail is about tying yourself to the criteria. When we are thinking about arguments, it is important that students understand how to read a text, formulate an opinion, and then make sure that their ideas come across logically and in a precise manner. One of the ways that we can do this is by interesting students in close reading strategies.
Close reading, as defined by the Aspen Institute (2012) is “the methodical investigation of a complex text through answering text dependent questions geared to unpack the text’s meaning” (1). When we give students a new text, is it important to scaffold the reading by giving them particular annotation strategies to use. At Stuart, we have really enjoyed working with the simple symbols “?= question”, “*=important”, and “!=interesting”. Students in most classrooms are required to justify their answers and annotate all work using these symbols before passing it in. It has helped students maintain an engaged learning attitude, and fills the classroom with interesting conversation.
After lunch we had time to discuss in our content groups how to build text sets around our content areas. Deborah showed us a couple of websites that have articles for you where you can select the Lexile score to meet the needs of your students.
Once the content groups time was done, we went into writing time which is when we got to write using evidence from our text set on Reality TV to support the claim we had written earlier in the day. Then when the writing time was finished we got into response groups to help each other make our writing pieces stronger.
Day 2 Blog Space--Stuart Middle
Day 2 started off with a bang with introductions about favorite childhood books. After this community building activity, we worked on our "invitation to writing" prompt. We tweeted on todaysmeet.com ways that we defend ourselves. Afterwards, we went into a Research talk about new theories of literacy and "Learning to read vs. reading to learn."
As Jean noted this morning, giving good detail is about tying yourself to the criteria. When we are thinking about arguments, it is important that students understand how to read a text, formulate an opinion, and then make sure that their ideas come across logically and in a precise manner. One of the ways that we can do this is by interesting students in close reading strategies.
Close reading, as defined by the Aspen Institute (2012) is “the methodical investigation of a complex text through answering text dependent questions geared to unpack the text’s meaning” (1). When we give students a new text, is it important to scaffold the reading by giving them particular annotation strategies to use. At Stuart, we have really enjoyed working with the simple symbols “?= question”, “*=important”, and “!=interesting”. Students in most classrooms are required to justify their answers and annotate all work using these symbols before passing it in. It has helped students maintain an engaged learning attitude, and fills the classroom with interesting conversation.
After lunch we had time to discuss in our content groups how to build text sets around our content areas. Deborah showed us a couple of websites that have articles for you where you can select the Lexile score to meet the needs of your students.
Once the content groups time was done, we went into writing time which is when we got to write using evidence from our text set on Reality TV to support the claim we had written earlier in the day. Then when the writing time was finished we got into response groups to help each other make our writing pieces stronger.