interpreting texts

literacy teachers (which means ALL teachers ) stand to learn a lot from Margaret Atwood (of course – who else?). today’s example brought to you by the current issue of maclean’s and the ontario elementary language curriculum: “After so many books, she has learned that it is useless to try to point the reader in [...]

!!

there’s no end to how much i LOVE this. this reflects a personal philosophy and style, as well as something i was able to learn a little more first hand from some the wonderful people i worked with last year.  i think the biggest challenge for classroom teachers is that to do this, we also [...]

demonstrating comprehension in other genres/formats: surprise!

this could also be called differentiation. i keep finding/thinking/noticing ideas/sources/examples of THIS SAME THING and thinking i will give it more, better, attention at a later time.  that later time just in’t coming, so i am calling it “now” and will again when later gets here. “we” are so stuckSTUCKstuck, even when we talk big [...]

fictional-real-life inferring

hey bella, caught you inferring!  haha, not so funny {i get it}, yet highly entertaining to be reading along in this hyper-aware state of metacognition, and infer that your protagonist is inferring in her “real life” and see her clues and schema that help her make her inference… haHA!!  talk about the circle of life [...]

how my schema helps me

back to itsy bitsies and friends, i notice that when Jessica, Angela and Bella discuss the “gossip” about all the adopted Cullen teenage siblings living together and “dating” at the same time, using my schema (background knowledge) helps me infer to understand more fully why this causes gossip in Forks.  Bella says, on p21, “Her [...]

in which the vampire is switched out for morality

i really think that the books have less to do with vampires than they seem {and i understand that they sure seem to have a lot to do with vampires, yeah, got that}.  yes, in the last two books, more of the story hinges on it, so i haven’t quite worked out my thinking that [...]

itsy bitsy inferences

I’ve been thinking that it seems to me that a good chunk of the book depends on me inferring things to keep up with the story. Not sure if this is Stephanie Meyer’s “style” or if this is intentional, or if this story demands this, or if I just have noticed how often I am [...]

Re-Reading the Saga

I have to admit that this is not my first time through the Twilight Saga (and no, I won’t admit just how many times I have already been through, that leans towards embarrassing no matter how you spin it).  The benefit to this, as we know in the classroom, is that I am “getting more [...]

beginning with connections, as we so often do…

Connections: Ch 1 (not to be suggesting that jerking through novels only by chapters is the best way to model “real reading”, it’s just working as a starting point, and hey, we gotta start somewhere and we sure as hell don’t all start with perfection, so back off (sorry, talking to myself there)) – my [...]