Life Through my Eyes

I really enjoyed Tasha’s role play strategy. It gave an insightful look at who the characters were even though we had not read the book, the raw emotion of the play put us in the character’s shoes and allow us to have some sort of an emotional connection with them. I could use this strategy ion my content area when it comes to History. There are many plays that are based upon historical events that would allow us to change things up from the everyday textbook activities. One way that I may tweak this assignment is to get them to read the play and then create their own dialogue in a modern-day speech. In order to do this, they would have to cooperate and have a sound knowledge of the information that was going on in the play.

There are plenty of strategies that can be used to help students learn how to comprehend something that they have read. Today we spoke about writing to learn activities such as micro themes, Point of View Guides (POVGs), unsent letters, and an assortment of other strategies that can be used with any classroom setting. The one that we used today was a Biopoem it was a really interesting way to get the reader to interact with a classmate as well as having to grasp what the text is about. What made this assignment so cool to me was that we did not read from a mundane textbook but from a children's book with illustrations and all. In order to complete the biopoem my partner and I actually had to read the book, it was not one of those assignments where you could just skim through and find the answers, another thing that I like is that no two students will really have the same poem, there will be similarities but different aspects of the book will stick out to each student thus maki...

Surprisingly I had a brief conversation with Dr. Giles about this very subject, I rarely read anymore and it is surprising to me when I sit back and look at how my reading pattern has changed. Throughout my life I have never really been a huge reader for entertainment guy, well at least when it comes to books. I am constantly researching new things on the web just to know more information, I take full advantage of the ability to look up anything by having my phone and the web at my fingertips at all times. I have been diagnosed with ADD so my mind is constantly going and switching reels so being able to Google anything that comes to my mind and read about it is huge for me. I can literally name the last book that I read cover to cover Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelse, I had to write a book report about it in the 7 th grade. It took me about two weeks to read the book but it wasn’t until the I wrote the paper and turned it in that my reading life changed forever. My teac...

Content Area Reading (CAR) is a concept that I have been aware of but never knew what to call it. There are two main extensions of CAR, content literacy, and disciplinary literacy, each of these are fairly similar but different at the same time. Content literacy "...refers to the ability to use reading, writing, talking, listening, and viewing to learn subject matter in a given discipline." (Vacca, 2002a pg.16) Disciplinary literacy "... is having an impact on the way researchers and educators think about literacy and learning in content areas." (Buehl and Moore, 2009 pg.16) In layman's terms content literacy is the ability to read a certain material regardless of the subject matter. On the other hand, disciplinary literacy is the ability to take what you have read and know what it means from the stand point of someone who is a specialist in that content area. The best example I can give is when you think about someone reading the Bible. An ave...