Strategies
It is important for my students to connect actively with any text they are reading. Graphic Organizers are a readily available resource. I rarely use a generic organizer. I am not philosophically opposed to them; I just think that using MS Publisher makes the interaction more personal to my class and the specific text which will make the organizer more memorable.
I am fortunate to have an administration that, like me, believes that students must be able to mark all over a text. Therefore, I get an enormous amount of consumable material. Every thing we read will have some sort of graphic organizer to help make the connections and the students will respond to most texts in writing, either formal or informal. Although tempted and sometimes pressured, I do not teach our state assessment test skills in isolation. I begin simply with pre-viewing a text. Then the students mark those texts up, beginning with 'the who and the what' of each paragraph.
Chris Tovani's I Read it but I Don't Get It (2000) is a great source for reading strategies for the lower level reader. Technically, these readers do not 'listen' to their voice in their heads as they are reading. Their eyes are going over the words; they are reading the words but sadly are unable to tell you what they just read. These students believe that when the voice in their head says, "What the…?" and worse, they should just skip over a word with which they are unfamiliar. They are quite comfortable at this point professing loudly that they did read it but just don't get it. When asked what specifically he/she did not get, the reply inevitably is 'all of it." It is important to train my students to listen to the questions they have in their heads as they are reading and honor them. These thoughts do not mean they are stupid; they mean they are thinking. Students will not have to use a Reader Response sheet for the rest of their lives. With practice it will come naturally.
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