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.