Chapter 6 "When Kids Can't Read"

The author states a critical point to help students respond better to a book is by making personal connections. The author outlines some excellent ideas on how to do this including an anticipation guide and a tea party as she calls it. "the more we frontload a students' knowledge of a text and help them become actively involved in constructing meaning prior to reading, the more engaged they are likely to be as they read the text."

Involving students in a text before letting them read the text is an excellent way to ensure they become active, engaged and thinking of the main themes of the book before ever reading it. In a class I am observing we actually did an anticipation guide and went over it in class today. It was exciting to see the students debating and discussing the main themes and central ideas of the book before they even opened the cover. This is an excellent idea to use in classrooms and I am excited to use this idea in my own. I can see in motion what the author is talking about when she outlines how important it is to get students involved and interested before they read.

Chapter 5 "When Kids Can't Read"

This chapter is about inference and how to help the students that are struggling with this part of reading. On page 69 the author outlines some wonderful tips on helping students with this problem. There are 6 of these things that you could do with students as a teacher.

I think that many times teachers and students get frustrated at the inference part of reading because it is so hard to explain. Inference is in the abstract and it is much easier to teach something concrete than abstract ideas. I think by using these activities however, it could really help students understand how to infer information from the text.

Chapter 4 "When Kids Can't Read"

In chapter 4 the author is mainly talking about how to teach comprehension of text to students. There are 6 steps that she outlines, but 1 of the important ones that I have never seen modeled is the "Think-alouds." This chapter has a lot of information on how to model these strategies and how to actually teach them.

As a student there have been many times (especially in junior high) when the teacher read aloud to us. Now according to many experts this seems like a very important key factor in classes (not to mention fun for the students) but I have never heard of "think-alouds." The author sets the example that the teacher reads a passage from the selected text and then literately thinks aloud about how he/she is visualizing the text, predicting what will happen next, and trying to clarify anything that is confusing as well as a few other strategies. I think if this had been done in my classroom when I was a student there would have been a lot less comments such as "just reread it or just fill out the worksheet." No one is born knowing how to read, infer, comprehend and everything else that we are expected to learn. This seems like an excellent way to model these key elements and an excellent placement for "just reread it, or fill out the worksheets."