Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Reading Rockets: Building World Knowledge: Motivating Children to Read and Enjoy Informational Text

Hello and Happy New Year! I will do a proper New Year/Australia Day post soon. I the meantime, I wanted to share this article which has some good ideas for tackling non-fiction texts in the early years. It contains some very simple strategies for helping students to get the most out of a text, and to support comprehension and thinking skills.
Reading Rockets: Building World Knowledge: Motivating Children to Read and Enjoy Informational Text

2 comments:

  1. Antonia, an interesting article. The strategies seem primarily aimed at the formal classroom situation - any thoughts on adapting the techniques for use at home, in a more informal fashion?
    I do like the idea of addressing tricky or new vocabulary prior to commencing reading a new book - and one-on-one it would possible to help them use a dictionary to find the meanings.

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  2. Hi Skye, I think that these strategies could be quite easily adapted for use at home. They are really just a more formalised version of the sort of advice we often hear about how to read to and with our kids. The first stage, text impressions, is basically just orientation, preparing the students to be alert for salient features of the information. At home, with pre-readers, orientation is achieved through activities such as discussing the cover; having a quick look at the pictures; wondering about what the book is about, and finding out what your child already knows about a topic. (eg in a book about Ancient Egypt, they may already be familiar with pyramids and mummies.) This is also a stage to show them or tell them about something they may not be familiar with, but that they will be learning about from the book. (eg "This book is about a very famous person who lived a long time ago. He/she had many exciting adventures and was very brave. His/her name was....")

    The next two levels, questioning and retelling, in a home setting, is really just the discussion you have with your child. It's a good ideas to try to ask questions from each level of the matrix, just to ensure that he/she has understood the information. Generally when reading at home, a child's level of comprehension is pretty obvious - they will maintain or lose interest! When reading with my own kids, I tend to discuss things using questions from the higher levels requiring more complex thinking.

    If the child is older, and can already read, following the steps suggested in the article may sometimes be appropriate or helpful, for example, if the child is struggling with an assignment, and you want to ensure that they have understaood what they have read, or to assist them to think about what they have read at a higher level.

    I think teachers could find the question matrix a useful tool for reflecting on their own practice, and checking that they are providing students with adequate opportunities to engage in higher order thinking. Similarly, parents could use the matrix to check that their children's comprehension activities at school provide a suitable variety of questioning levels.

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