Note Taking and Note Making: Chapter 7

This proved to be an interesting chapter to me, with two very different sides of the matter of note taking: the side of the student, and the side of the teacher. The author makes it clear that it is important for instructors to organize their information in a way that helps students pay attention to the important details. I know that as a student, it has frustrated me in the past when an instructor spent a great deal of time on one subject, only to find out that the particular topic did not really matter in the future. This always seems to happen to me after taking meticulous note of course!  Therefore, it is important as an educator to focus the lesson around the important details without getting caught up in a bunch of fluff that only drags the lesson on. I wish that someone had taught me to take notes when I was a student. However, being home-schooled, my mother was basically my personal tutor until college, therefore taking notes was unnecessary until then. After reading this chapter, I realize how taking notes can help students in many different ways. One major benefit to note taking is that it helps with organizational skills. The next really intrigued me by explaining the connection between struggling readers and organizational skills. When students are taught note taking, their organizational skills improve. They learn to attend to information that they hear, because they must hear it in order to write it down. When they accomplish this, they have notes that will help them retrieve the information that they are learning. This in turn will help them become better readers. Note taking may prove to be a support for struggling readers in my future classroom! The organization skill of note taking is useful across content areas of course. While note taking is common in social studies and English, it can also be an important organizational and processing tool in math and science. I love the DNA strategy of note taking that is mentioned in the social studies section. This strategy really seems to help the students make note taking into a process. It really requires them to think about why they need to organize their information and how they will organize it. Note taking also gives students a chance to process the information and make it their own. It is a safe way to practice writing without worrying about a grade. It will also help with handwriting! Note making is a different skill that is also an important process. Note making differs from note taking in the fact that students can look back on a text book for information when note making. This process is also important for students to learn how to do. Note making requires the students to determine the important facts in the text, as well as choose a way that they believe the notes should be organized. I am one of those people who takes the highlighter and highlights the entire page when given the challenge to mark in a book. This is a very ineffective strategy for me, although an important one. I intend to use these note taking and making strategies in this book to teach not only my students to organize information, but myself as well!

Chapter 3-Vocabulary

Vocabulary instruction has changed over the years. I believe that effective vocabulary instruction consists of using the new words learned in many different ways rather than simply memorizing the word and definition. I found it interesting that vocabulary becomes much more demanding in the higher grade levels. I have always thought that children learn more the most amount of words that they will ever learn in the first few years of their life. However, when content areas are explored more in depth, more complex vocabulary comes into play. This makes instruction much more complex since teacher have to explain vocabulary before even talking about the subject matter itself. I think it is important to make sure that the vocabulary is understood before continuing to dive into the content. There are many different learning strategies mentioned in the book that will help students learn vocabulary more efficiently. One of these strategies that I really liked was the one mentioned in the example. When David learned a new word he added it to his electronic vocabulary journal. I really like the idea of creating a personal word list. This would be somewhat like a personal word wall. Perhaps the class could compile a word wall from all of their own personal vocabulary words.
           As I was reading in the text, it reminded me of a concept we learned in a seminar that we attended last week. We learned that social language is very different than academic language. Academic language takes longer for students to acquire than social language because there are not as many opportunities to apply the learned vocabulary in academic language.  As the Fisher and Frey text pointed out, if students do not understand vocabulary words then they are likely to struggle in content areas. As I continued to read I noticed that this chapter also discusses exactly what we talked about in our ELL seminar. For students who are learning English as a second language, it can be hard for them to understand content area vocabulary. Teachers often assume that students are proficient English speakers because they may hear them using social language to talk to their peers.
          Since the need for more complex vocabulary increases during the secondary years of school it is important for teachers to pace their teaching and use a variety of strategies across all content areas. The same strategies used in lower grades should not be taken for granted in the higher grades. Teachers should always provide opportunities for students to use vocabulary words in multiple ways. The more experience that students have with a variety of words and ways to use those words, the more prepared they will be to learn the content.

Chapter 1 and 8: FIsher and Frey

     The more elements of language we use to process information, the more we learn. I think chapter one illustrates this point very well. In this chapter I learned that no matter what we are doing, it requires language to learn. I love English, but sometimes it is hard for me to explain to others why I think that teaching Language arts is so important, especially when talking to those who intend to teach high school. Many high school teachers have the mindset that there are no other options to teach students other than lecture. They look at elementary teachers and think that the only thing that keeps us from lecturing is playing games. They automatically assume that their students are too old for anything other than a lecture. This is just not the case! This chapter explains that listening, speaking, reading, writing, and viewing are all elements of language that we all must use in order to learn. It is the job of the teacher to help students apply these modes of language in other content areas in addition to English. Own its own, explicit English teaching will do no good. Students must be able to see how knowledge relates to their life and how they can apply it. The Titanic lesson was a great example of the many ways that teachers can help their students learn and apply their knowledge. This teacher not only made the story interesting to them, but also taught them how to expand their thinking on the subject and prepare for a more in depth lesson. We have talked about many of the strategies mentioned in this chapter, and I think that all of these strategies can be used even up until adulthood. Eventually, some may become a natural process. Using these strategies to teach students how to use the different forms of language is a great way to teach students how to learn on their own. The strategies that were used in this charter will help create individual and independent learners.
   Chapter 8 talked about writing to learn. I liked how the difference between the writing process and writing to learn was explained in this text. I notice that it was very clear that writing to learn involves students discovering their own writing process. I also found it interesting how the authors mentioned three types of learning that must be used in writing to learn. I never thought about it this way, but it makes since that all three levels of knowledge must be used at some point when writing in order for students to fully develop their learning ability. While it is important not to simply focus on writing as a process with a finished result, modeling is still a strategy for teaching writing to learn. Writing models are a way for students to learn how different authors write, as well as the different types of writing that is out there. Just to sum up my thoughts, writing to learn is important in all content areas, regardless of the age, subject area or ability level of the student. When students learn to make writing a habit and see it as a thought process, they are well on their way to becoming independent learners.

Content Area Literacy

          As I was reading this article, I realized that this is no foreign concept to me. Content area literacy has been an important idea in my world for a long time, although not in those words. My mother was a teacher and she always stressed the importance of reading to me and my siblings. All of us love to read in some form. Since my mother home-schooled us, the majority of our learning experience was reading or writing, in all content areas. When my brothers were 4 and 6, they were in the library picking out the informational texts on bug species (most of which would be hard for a 5th grader to read) and my mother would read them out loud. My youngest brother shocked our friends when he pronounced the scientific name for a common insect at 4 years old. I realize this is before actual reading began for my brother, but it continues throughout his education to read a variety of texts.
           I think it is very important for young students to become comfortable and familiar with all types of texts while they are in the early grade levels. Not only does it increase comprehension, but it also provides more experience with reading and writing to learn. Writing becomes interesting and relevant to a child when they can write about something they enjoy. Reading can also make content areas more interesting. I could never really get into history until my mother decided to go with a series of books spanning from founding America, to the great depression and beyond. These books sparked my interest and caused me to want to learn more about the many events in our history. Learning in all content areas can be such a literature rich experience! Teaching lower elementary grades all of the possibilities will prepare them for the types of reading they will need to be able to accomplish in high school.  It doesn't have to be a dreary, dreaded process. In my classroom, I hope to provide many different opportunities for exploring many subjects at a deeper level through literature. When a student shows interest in a subject, I will introduce him or her to the informational and fictional texts that are available. The internet can also be used. Blogging could be a great tool to start an interest group on a subject as a class project. Students can write about their experience using a computer, or just the old-fashioned pen! They can use pictures and many other media to go along with their reading and writing experience.
           Writing can also be used across many content areas.I really liked the idea of learning logs in math, as Barbara Moss mentioned in her article. Not only are the students improving their writing abilities, but they are reflecting on their own understanding of the material. This can be a great learning tool for each individual student as well as a teaching tool for teachers! Teachers can use this to understand where students are struggling and how to help them. This article has illustrated for me how important it is to teach many different reading, writing and comprehension strategies to students in lower elementary grades across content areas. By teaching students many different reading strategies early on in their education, they will be well equipped for future learning through content area literacy. Providing students with the tools they need to be effective readers and writers opens whole new worlds to them, making them life-time learners.

Writing to learn

The main point that I got out of this article is that writing is an ongoing process that should help the student become a better learner throughout their life. Writing to learn means that writing must be used across content areas. writing can be used in many different content areas in order to learn about other subjects. Writing helps connect the learner to the subject. When writing to learn the student must make connections to the text. They activate their prior knowledge and begin to think about the text. Writing is a process that is never finished. It is a learning process. In my future classroom I hope to interest students in writing by allowing them to write about things that they are interested in. I also intend to use quick writes and other strategies to help my students learn to use what they read immediately and connect to the text by activating their prior knowledge about whatever subject it may be. I plan to have many informal writing situations in my classroom so that my students will become more comfortable with writing and continue writing throughout their lives. I really liked the Biopoem strategy that we used in our class this week. It interested me and helped me retain knowledge that I never would have remembered in a history lecture. I also was able to use my own creativity, although there were guidelines to go by, so that I was not just overwhelmed with what to start with. I think that the best thing about writing is that it can be used in so many different areas. I love the way that so many subjects can be integrated into language arts by reading and writing. Not only does it make reading and writing more fun, but it also helps the learning process when teaching other subjects. I plan to use quick writes, reading logs, biopoems and many other strategies to incorporate many different subjects into my classroom someday.

Peer Blogs

I choose to respond to Laura and Nicki's blogs because I have not spent much time with either one of them and would like to get to know them better! I discovered that Laura and I both have an apprehension to teach math, and we both like the book "Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers. The coolest thing to me about her life are the boat trips to islands! That sounds like so much fun to me! I also noticed that she was apprehensive about the big writing assignment in the course, whereas I am really curious about that one. While reading Nicki's blog I became aware that we have similar goals for teaching English and reading. I really like how she phrased one particular sentence. She said "I want to be a part of the phase of a child's life where they build a strong educational foundation that will carry them a lifetime"  Like Nicki, I also noticed familiar tools such as kidspiration and a blogfolio. I also saw the possibility of using online pin boards as a possibility and I got kind of excited about that. 

Syllabus

It took me a while to figure out that the syllabus was in the first email sent to us by Dr. Bishop, but I found it and I have read it now. There were a few things that stood out to me such as the fact that there will be little lecture in this class. I noticed that class participation is very important in this class. I like this because I think it will actually help us prepare for teaching our own classes. I also know that by participating rather than listening to a lecture, we will retain more information. One of the projects that seems interesting to me is the multigenre writing project. I am beginning to like writing more than I used to and I like the idea of using this project to allow more room for creativity.