Literacy for the iGeneration

The first thing we talked about was being flexible in the classroom throughout the day. What works in theory doesn’t always work in practice, and what works then in one class may not work in another.

Moving on from that, we discussed the Frankenstein Symposium on October 30th. Volunteers were called for to teach mini-lessons at School Without Walls, a great teaching opportunity that excused one from blogging before, during, and after the symposium (hurrah). We then discussed reading the book – the audio being available online for those of us that prefer it.

Next, we went over the Anticipation Guide, the Vocab Awareness chart, and Split Note-taking. We talked about the purposes of each strategy, the positives and negatives of each, how and when to use each, and how to subtly teach students to use each strategy. For the Anticipation Guide, the purpose was to activate prior knowledge and make connections between previous assumptions and new knowledge; for the Vocab Awareness chart, the purpose was to enhance a student’s comprehension by expanding their vocabulary (also, reading comprehension comes easier if you know the meanings of all the words); and Split Note-taking organizes thoughts and main points, as well as “chunks” the information into pieces that are easily remembered.

A brief review of Systems of Meaning-Making was followed by a few group activities. First, we were given words and phrases printed on pieces of paper, and our job was to organize them into categories and then name the categories. This was a great opportunity to work with the other students in the classroom while having a little fun. The second activity was just as fun: decoding “Di Tri Berrese”. With no prior knowledge, we were told to “translate” the story; turns out it was a more modern version of “The Three Bears”. We paused after this activity to discuss how the “Three Bears” activity related to the Systems of Meaning-Making: when did we use Semantics (word recognition)? Syntax (word association)? Pragmatics (prior knowledge)? Graphophonics (”sounding out” words)?

Finally, we read our literacy stories aloud to prepare for our podcast scheduled for next week. Group members (or in my case, partner) commented on things they liked or enjoyed, things that may have confused them, and things that could be expanded on or taken in a new direction. It was especially helpful to read aloud, as most of the revising can be done by the writer as they find mistakes or extraneous information.

Assignments for 9/25:

Read: Chapters 3&6 in Z&D, Tovani (online), and an article from the NY Times. Blog it.
Revise: Literacy story for podcast. Rehearse reading it out loud.