I Read It, But I Don't Get It

One of the things I really notice in my placement classroom is the resistance to reading the students have. They are supposed to have an Accelerated Reader book from the school library at all times because they need a certain amount of points for the trimester. Even with books they can choose they have resistance to reading them. 

Another thing that I have noticed about the students is their reluctance to read informational texts. I'm not sure if it's because of the material that it covers or because they don't know how to read it.

One of the strategies my cooperating teacher uses that reminded me of the strategies in the book, is called "barfing". She has them read a piece of text and respond to it with their thoughts. They are to avoid to using the words "what" or "interesting". They should define any words that they don't understand and anything that they want to know more about they should underline or highlight. My cooperating teacher uses this to help them break down the text and understand what they are reading. Too often we read something and at the end we ask "what the heck did I just read?" I know that I do that often and have to re-read more once.

One thing I really liked was how the author brought up sharing our experiences with reading and our struggles and how we worked through them as a way to build a community with our classroom. I think that teachers are looked at as being perfect human beings that don't really struggle because we are teachers. It is important to let our students know that we struggle. It makes us more relatable and eases the tension that the student may not understand something right away. 

I also liked her strategies of making inferences with the text which is very Common Core based and her strategy of determining what is important within the text and synthesizing the information to create new thinking. I think these are strategies that we should employ in our classroom because of their relation to  Common Core.