Chapter Five: Learning to Make an Inference

     This chapter has several good ideas that will help teach students how to make inferences. This is something that came quite naturally to me, so I would really have no idea how to teach this. There was certainly a vast difference in the attention and comprehension of the activity between the two classrooms. Beers first showed the 'movie theater' lesson to eleventh grade honors students, then she had to show the same lesson to C and D students. Their responses were very different, and unfortunately what I expected before reading their actual responses.

      I really liked Beers' idea of having the students kind of dissect cartoons/comic strips. This is such a good idea because kids know to laugh and they "get it", but how do you explain why you "got it" or how you automatically understand the joke? I think this is a great idea because kids can laugh and look at something that they relate to, but they can also learn from it as well. The last part of the chapter with the bumper stickers was pretty interesting, too. -Katie May

Chapter Six: Frontloading Meaning

     This chapter is primarily about pre-reading learning strategies, and it gives us several great examples of strategies we can use in a classroom. The K-W-L chart seemed great for younger kids, but I think that the Anticipation Guide would be a great pre-reading activity to do with older students. I absolutely loved the way Mr. Davidson prepared his students for Anne Frank. He really got them thinking deeply on the subject before they even knew what they were reading.

     Something else I enjoyed was the Probable Passage. I think that is a great way to have students work in groups, kind of predict the text, but more importantly they are able to recognize words that are in the text. I just think that they will truly want to read it to see if their prediction came true, and although it probably won't, I think it's neat that they will want to read it anyways. 

     I can most definitely see myself teaching with some of these ideas in my future classroom, and I really will be keeping this book to help me. -Katie May

Chapter Four: Explicit Instruction in Comprehension

     While reading this chapter, one thing really stuck out to me, and that was the part about the 'Scripted Instruction' and the 'Direct Instruction'. This really frightened me because I do not want to have to teach through what can be described as reading a script. In one of my other education classes, somewhere in our country (can't remember where), they wanted to do this in the classroom. This is petrifying as a future educator, because I don't feel that you would need a degree to this, and you could probably just hire a person off of the street to read a prompt to students! I may sound dramatic here but I just really support the direct approach, and I hope it stays that way.
     In other news, I liked the part with Kate and how her lessons continued to grow and improve. Hopefully we all will have some form of mentor like Kylene Beers when we teach and make lesson plans, at least for the first couple of years. If not, at least we have her text. -Katie May

Chapter Three: Asserting Dependent Reader's Needs

     In this chapter, we learn about all of the different factors that could possibly lead to WHY a student can't read and WHAT we can do about it. She gives us a detailed list as a guide to use to hopefully identify a potential problem in helping dependent readers.
     Something that really got my attention was about the student named Amy. Amy can read, but she hates it and doesn't think that it is interesting at all. She said that she didn't try hard, and didn't care about what she was reading. Beers identified that she was not really understanding because she didn't like anything she was reading. After Amy read a love story that was sad but had a happy ending, she found a favorite author and couldn't stop reading. I loved this story, because something so simple was the solution for making a dependent reader an independent one. If I can do this with my students, I would be happy because they were reading for fun and enjoying it. I just think that reading is so crucial in development and even as an adult, due to the fact that it is not only fun but also because it improves your speech and vocabulary in every day life. -Katie May

Chapter Two: Creating Independent Readers

     In chapter two, something that really caught my attention is how Kylene Beers identifies struggling readers. Most of the time, we will think of the kid slumped in the back trying to take a nap, but she has let us know that this is not always the case. We can't just stereotype who we think is struggling with reading, we have to identify the problem in all students because they are all different.

     Also, in the part with Haley and Justin doing 'word-sorts', it was clear to me that all students are different, and although they may all be in the same grade, it does not mean that they are all the same in their reading abilities. We wish that all of our future-students could be great independent readers, but this is not the case. All that we can do to help them is try to figure out what their "it" is, like George never did, and go from there. Beers certainly gave us a few tips on how to achieve this as well. -Katie May