Jim Trelease

I hope you all enjoyed Jim Trelease as much as I did (even though he said I’m now classified as a stalker since it was my third time seeing him). One thing that really stood out for me that I haven’t heard Trelease mention before is that seven percent of incoming kindergarteners from poverty score the same on tests as students from high income families, and that is the exact same percentage of students from poverty who are graduating from college each year. I think we’ve all known that income level has a great impact on student achievement (hence the reason why a neighboring district always scores so well on standardized tests), but do you think there’s anything we can do to increase the number of poverty level students going on to college and graduating? What can we do at the high school level to promote lower income families to become more literate? For this post share any ideas you have to answer that question as well as one thing that you learned from Trelease or something that you found exceptionally interesting.

As a side note, if you look under the links on this blog page, you’ll find one to Jim Trelease’s website. He basically has his entire Read Aloud Handbook posted on it.

Subjects Matter: Chapters Three and Nine

Chapter Three
(Page 40) “School textbooks belong in the same category with encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauruses…textbooks are designed to inventory huge amounts of information that can be looked up when needed.”
Y’know, when I read these sort of statements, it just makes me want to knock myself upside the head and say, “Duh!” This really is such a common sense thought, but having gone through school the “traditional” way, I never thought about it because the textbook was the curriculum. How much better prepared would our students be if we relied on the textbook very little and used an abundance of other resources, so students could discover different way to find information since they won’t be given textbooks at different points in life? (They certainly didn’t give me a baby textbook after giving birth when I left the hospital a few weeks ago. That would have been helpful, but I’m having to rely on other sources to get information.) When I first started teaching in a learning disabled resource class, I was very frustrated because there was no textbook for me to use, so I had to go out and find things on my own to use to teach the students. But it certainly ended up helping me in the long run because I was able to pull a lot of different resources for class. Of course in hindsight, some of things I used weren’t so great, but some of the things were.

Chapter Nine
(Page 202) “Book Clubs help…differentiate instruction in (the) classroom…by using temporary kid-driven forms of grouping and re-grouping.”

Ah, the magic word: differentiate. Book Clubs really are an easy way to achieve differentiation in your classroom. The key is that the students get to choose what they want to read, so they can’t complain about it too much! It’s generally a bit easier to get kids to do things when they’ve had some say in it. Even though the students are reading different texts, you’re still able to cover the same concept and all of the students are able to get something from it, not just those who always do their work. If you’ve never used book clubs in your classroom before, I think you’re going to enjoy experiencing one for yourself and seeing how they operate.

Devising the groups for book clubs can get a little tricky. You want to give everyone his or her first choice, but this is rarely possible. In dividing y’all into groups, I wasn’t able to give everyone his or her top pick, but everyone did get either their first or second choice. During our next class, y’all will get together with your group and decide what method you want to use lead your book club discussion. Different methods are mentioned on page 207 of this chapter and we’ll discuss them in class. Here are your groups and the book you will be reading:

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things: Ruth Anne, Cheryl, Karen, Anna

The First Part Last (Group One): Nicole, Bill, Stefanie

The First Part Last (Group Two): Lisa, Rachel, Amanda, Deborah

Now don't be one of "those" students who goes and gets the book and finishes it before our next class! Besides, you'll end up having to go back to reread anyway, because you won't know which method of response your group will use.

Subjects Matter: Chapter Two; When Kids Can't Read: Chapter Three

Subjects Matter
(Page 32) “In short: understanding what we do now, we will teach reading, not just assign it…”
I love how Daniels and Zemelman use all of the different reading examples in this chapter to show us what a difference a little background information makes when reading text. I think one of the things we run into as teachers is that because reading something related to our content comes pretty easily to us, we don’t realize how daunting it can be for our students. I would be interested to know if our social studies and science teachers were able to understand the sample passages with their first readings…I know I was clueless when it came to reading these excerpts. It’s so easy to think that it’s the English teacher’s job to teach student to read, but they have their own content to cover: language and literature. There’s no way they could possibly teach how to read everything—lab reports, maps, primary documents from different disciplines, manuals, etc. Besides the fact that they don’t have the time to do that, they’re not experts in all of the subject areas, so they’re not the best resources in teaching kids how to think like scientists, historians, car mechanics, etc. I think Daniels and Zemelman are showing us that while reading is very complex, there are some not-so-difficult things we can do to make text much more understandable for students.

When Kids Can’t Read
(Page 36) “…we can’t fix the reading problem by buying a particular program; instead, as teachers, we must learn how to teach students to comprehend texts.”

There have been times when people have asked me what program they can use to help their students become better readers. It certainly would make things easy if there was a magic program that we could administer to all of our students to make them great readers, but that just isn’t going to happen! If that were the case, everyone wouldn’t be in a tizzy about making sure all students are proficient by 2013 per the NCLB mandate. The key is that teachers need to be knowledgeable about best practices in teaching students how to read and write. Once a teacher has a toolbox of resources, they can decide which one will work best with certain students and topics. Not every strategy will work with every student—I think we’ve seen that in our class; we all haven’t necessarily liked the same strategies. One of the key words Beers uses in this quote is “how.” So often students are just told to read something but they’re never told HOW to read it. Or, they’re given a practice HSAP or SAT test and told to do it and given their scores, but they’re not told HOW to solve the problems. It would sort of be like giving me a test for medical school. I could take it 50 times and get my scores back (failing miserably each time, no doubt), but until someone explains to me HOW to solve the problems, I won’t do any better. There’s nothing that can replace the teacher. A program may have some great features, but it won’t know the student like the teacher does and can’t make judgment calls based on a student’s ability.