Integrating into the Literacy Block
This past year I used these types of graphic organizers and book discussions with my students to address some of the literary concepts that I have brought up in this unit. We did this with self to text connection, character, setting, problem and solution, and main idea. By the end of the year the majority in my class was able to speak and write about all five of these literary concepts independently and in a group, referring to a variety of books. They displayed a great amount of confidence when writing or speaking about books, especially when addressing these elements. I believe that this is not only effective because these are effective practices, but because with the help of some of my colleagues I found ways to insinuate these practices into all the different segments of our day.
Here I will describe briefly a few of the more effective ways in which I used these practices in my classroom. The most effective and ongoing place to have these practices present for independent and group work once they have been addressed is, of course, in literacy centers. Literacy centers take an hour of our day. The students work in specific centers independently or with a buddy, while the teacher takes small groups for specific instruction. During this time I give my students a variety of ways to explore books. One simple way is to allow the students to read a familiar text with a buddy. In this way the students are encouraged to learn— on their own with a classmate—the type of dialogue that they are taught in book discussion. I also have centers where books are available to read and where students can fill out graphic organizers they have already been exposed to. In this way they are able to reinforce their knowledge of the literary concepts with a variety of texts and have constant exposure to the forms in which they are ultimately assessed. The students will also be given the organizers as a response to stories they hear in listening center, and be given the specific task of having a mini book discussion on occasion.
The teacher can also pull specific groups to address these literary concepts. The guided reading that goes on during center time is, as my literacy coach aptly says, "the most powerful teaching we do all day." Therefore center time is an ideal time for teachers to pull small groups of students who are having difficulty understanding certain concepts. Such concepts can also be touched upon during the discussion before and after the students read in all guided reading groups. I was at first resistant to teaching this type of content during guided reading, thinking that at that time students would need to learn reading strategies and phonics skills, and that focusing on comprehension would take away from their understanding of these strategies. That was until I realized that the students in my class needed to be able to understand how literature worked in order to be able to read. My students were beginning to really understand and use decoding strategies, but a few of my groups were not progressing because they were struggling with choosing a reading strategy, which turned out to be the most crucial factor of all. When they came to a word they did not know my students would decode phonetically, and reread and skip the word and go back, but they were having a difficult time with the underlying necessity of thinking about what makes sense. The unknown words were being attacked in a way that isolated them from the text and the story line and therefore made it much more difficult to decode them. By addressing literary concepts during guided reading along with traditional decoding strategies, we may be able to give our students a better grasp of how to look at words in context.
An easy way to do this is to center the initial reading discussion on the literature concept you wish to highlight. When I want students to think about the mood of a story, I will pick a book like A Dark, Dark Wood, by Joy Cowley, so that my students will easily be able to discuss that concept. Before they read the story on their own, I have the students do a picture walk through the book, looking at the pictures. I have them tell me how the pictures make them feel, what the colors are like, and how they think the author wants us to feel when we read the book. I tell them the mood of the book is how it makes us feel. When the students have responded to what type of mood this book evokes (spooky or scary), I tell them that if they come to a word they don't know in the text they should remember that there are probably spooky words in a book like this, and so they need to think about what would make sense within this book. This helps students not only to understand how discuss the mood of a story, but also how to use literature elements to help them with their reading.
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