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Favorite Books for Teaching Reader's Workshop
Favorite Book List with Links
Reading Comprehension Titles
- 7 Keys to Comprehension
- Guiding Readers and Writers Grades 3-6
- Interactive Read Alouds Grades K-1
- Knee to Knee Eye to Eye
- Mosaics of Thought
- Revisit, Reflect, Retell
- Strategies that Work
- Teaching Comprehending and Fluency
- Teaching Comprehension Strategies All Readers Need
- Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency
- The Comprehension Toolkit Grades 3-6
- Toolkit Texts Grades 2-3
Check all forms of reading implemented regulary in your classroom
Blog Archive
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2007
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- Teacher Made Reader's Workshop Materials
- Materials and Organization: Questions, Ideas, and ...
- Changes for the Future
- Chapter 11 Synthesizing Information
- Chapter 10: Determining Importance in Nonfiction
- Chapter 9: Asking Questions
- Chapter 8: Inferring
- Chapter 7: Digging Deeper
- Chapter 6: Creating Mental Images
- Chapter 5: Schema
- Chapter 4: Settling In
- Chapter 3: Reader's Workshop-Real Reading from the...
- Chapter 2 "In September"
- Chapter 1: Guided Principles
- Reading for Meaning by Debbie Miller, Book Study
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August
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5 comments:
This is a strategy that I was quite fearful of teaching. The students all infer naturally, but again they don't know how to explain themselves. So I have been using poems again to give them practice with the strategy. I have found that they are more able to work with a shorter piece of text and still get the practice and ideas behind the inferring strategy. One thing that I have found that helps is when I refer to the author's clues, I tell them I am trying to listen for the "author's whispers". They seem to think that is so neat and so it helps them focus.
We have been working on the strategy for about 2-3 weeks now and they are still struggling a bit. They are doing guided practice, but they still need to work with small groups. I haven't even attempted to discuss inferring in terms of context clues. I hadn't even thought about that! Anyone with any suggestions believe me it would be helpful, because before too long I am going to move on to questioning.
I am not sure where everyone is with concern to inferring, but my class has been doing okay with this strategy. This one seems to be giving them the most difficulty because they are again struggling to explain their thinking. This seems to be an issue in all subject areas, so we have tried it using several different methods. I launched very simply with "riddle poems" where they would have to use clues that the author gave them to figure out what the poem was about. I think that worked really well in giving them a basic working knowledge of inference. I am moving on to inferring word meaning, and again they are having a difficult time. I don't know how long I am going to focus on this strategy before moving on to questioning. I really want to fit that in before the year is over!
For me, teaching inferring is like teaching someone common sense. It's similiar to predicting except you can't always prove or disprove your inference. I like the idea of starting with poems. I started even a step further back with just sentences. Some of the sentences were obvious and others took some figuring.
I haven't gotten to inferring yet, we're still studying mental images or visualization. We're going to move into questioning next and then inferring.
I agree, this is like teaching common sense. We also started out with poems. Next year I'm going to start off with sentences. Some of the poems were too long. I picked poems about one thing, like a lawn mower. I left out the words "lawn mower" and they had to guess what the poem was about. They made predictions first then shared them, I wrote them down. We went line by line to look for important words or ideas. At the end we went back through our list of predictions to see what would make sense. They knew right away which ones were way off.
The first poem we tried was like pulling teeth. To me, as an adult, they were so obvious. To my class to took a lot of work to figure out what made sense and what didn't. By the end of the week they were saying, "no that doesn't make sense. See where it says..."
I know Rachelle had some samples she made of individual sentences for the kids to get used to making inferences. I couldn't believe how hard it was for some of them!
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