Daniels and Zemelman Chapters 4&5

Chapters 4 and 5 of Daniels and Zemelman go on to discuss more about reading across content areas, elaborate on different kinds of text that can be used, and provide many strategies for reading.  Chapter 4 is titled “Toward a Balanced Diet of Reading” and it clearly discusses the many different types of text that can be brought into classrooms of all contents. One thing that stuck with me from this chapter was that when we are teachers, we need to help and encourage our students to become real, lifelong readers.  This is something that should start when they are in middle and high school.  They should be reading material that people in the real world are reading.  As adults, we read articles, books, magazines, websites, and other text like this.  It is not often that you find someone curled up leisurely reading thick, hardcover textbook.  Although I do still believe that textbooks are valuable resources in the classroom, I now see that they must also be supplemented with other kinds of text.  Something else that I took from this chapter was creating a classroom library.  This is something I would like to do in my future classroom. I can imagine it filled with books, scientific magazines, copies of articles found on the internet, and other valuable and engaging pieces of text that hopefully students will enjoy reading.

Chapter 5 provides numerous examples of reading strategies and discusses how they can be used.  This chapter was very valuable and I think it will be something I will continue to look back on as I begin lesson planning and eventually teaching.  I recently attended the RISTA annual conference and one of the sessions I attended was based on how to integrate common core reading standards into science classrooms.  The presenters provided examples of some lesson plans that incorporated some of the strategies discussed in the chapter.  In one example, the teacher divided her class up into groups of four or five and each group was assigned a different article to read on the same topic.  While they were reading, they had to annotate the text and keep post-it notes. After reading, each group had to answer the same set of questions on their different readings. They were also asked to discuss the reading with their groups.  The next day, the groups were mixed up so that new groups were formed where each student in the new group had read a different article. The students were then able to discuss each of their readings and share their thoughts to create a poster on the topic.  Some of the strategies students used in this example were annotating the text, using post-it response notes, and turn and talk.  It was great to be able to see a real-life example of how these strategies actually worked for a science teacher.