Volume 1, Issue 1
March 2009
Morse High School
Literacy Reminders Tools, Tips, and Techniques
Key Messages:
Literacy is not another thing on the plate, it is the plate. All struggling readers can benefit from literacy support strategies during content area instruction. It’s important to name the strategy as well as consistently use the strategy. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” -Ernest Hemingway
Literacy Strategy of the Month: Making Connections We need to make connections to what we taught and will eventually teach so that students recognize these links and experience any particular discipline as a coherent field of study. Readers need cause to make other sorts of connections also: between themselves and the outside world, between this subject and others, between the past and present, and the personal and public.
What to Do We can help students make connections and construct more sophisticated understandings by
Inside this issue:
Asking them how this text or idea relates to those they studied in the past Asking them to find connections to what they are studying in other subject areas
Inviting them to look for different types of patterns in text
Allowing them to make emotional connections to what they read
Encouraging them to challenge a particular text’s meaning by guessing about connections that might seem unrelated, but reveal deeper insights.
For example, ask readers to make various types of connections: structural, thematic, cultural, personal, rhetorical, political, chronological, or curricular. Ask the following questions:
How does that relate to the theme of _______________ we studied last semester?
What would this poem sound like if you played it as music?
Brain Research
Literacy Strategy
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Brain Research
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Literacy Vocabulary
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Literacy Stratigies Vocabulary
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Why a Newsletter
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Did you know that 20% of high school students are auditory learners—meaning that they learn best by hearing information. About another 20-25% are visual learners—meaning that they learn best by seeing information. That
means that the majority of our students are tactile learners —they learn best by manipulating things. With so few auditory learners in our classroom, why do we continue to lecture to our students?
Can you explain how the story “The Tortoise and the Hare” relates to Einstein’s theory of relativity?
If you used grammatical terms to describe this math question what would be the verbs and nouns?
Can anyone explain how Huck Finn’s attitudes relate to the Bill of Rights?
Keep in mind that making connections means making learning personal, live, and real. When we allow students to choose what they read and what ideas they investigate we increase the likelihood that they will make meaningful connections.
Literacy Reminders
Literacy Vocabulary lexile score: a scientific approach to text leveling based on semantic difficulty and syntactic complexity and set on a scale that ranges from 200L for beginning readers to about 1700L for advanced text. “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” Chinese Proverb
metacognition: ability to self regulate one s thoughts and use strategies to aid learning. metacognitive awareness: ability to know when material being read makes sense and what to do when it lacks clarity.
metacognitive strategies: strategies that allow students to monitor their own comprehension percentile rank: score that indicates where a student stands in comparison with others who took the test. phonics: way of teaching reading and spelling that stresses sound-symbol relationship especially in beginning reading instruction.
reading comprehension: the construction of meaning for the reader. schema: a person’s prior knowledge coupled with attitudes, beliefs, and cultural background. semantics: meaning of words or phrases syntax: word order or position of a word in a sentence
Literacy Strategies Defined “There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.” Isaac D”Israeli
decoding: the process of taking in oral or written language (listening and reading) and determining the meaning of individual components of that language. dialogue journal: a notebook kept jointly by two people, usually a student and teacher with each writing messages to each other, and exchanging the notebook after each entry.
inquiry project: a task designed around a unit of study to encourage students individually, in pairs, or in small groups to carry out an investigation, to answer questions of importance or interest to them about a particular topic, or to generate a solution about a problematic situation or problem. quick writes: strategy that gives students an opportunity to reflect
on their learning, consisting of a piece of writing on a particular topic or questions completed in 3 -5 minutes. think alouds: strategy in which teachers share their own thinking processes out loud so that students can observe the thinking processes of a strong reader or writer.
Why a Newsletter? The literacy team decided one of the best ways to support teachers in their efforts to incorporate literacy strategies into their instruction was to provide them with ready made activities every month. Our hope and expectations are that teachers make an
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effort in that month to practice that strategy. As you already learned, it’s important to use that strategy on a regular basis. It’s also important to tell the students that you are using a strategy they may already be familiar with so they can connect prior learning
with the new material. Each month you will receive a different newsletter that includes the strategy of the month, brain research, literacy vocabulary and literacy strategies. We welcome teacher input or strategies that you have found to be effective.