Writing to Learn

These After reading activities help students integrate, elaborate, and apply the information and knowledge acquired from the reading. In class we discussed the different strategies that prompted these kinds of connections. These strategies are broken into 3 main categories formal, informal, and creative.

We talked about informal last class, so this week we focused on formal and creative. These strategies include activities such as essays, research papers, diamantes, cinquains, and sense poems. There are many more strategies but these are the ones I like the most. Each of these strategies gets students thinking about the different elements and ingredients that went into making the text. I know from experience that when I sat down to write a paper new ideas that had not been discussed in class suddenly became all too clear to me. I hope that when I begin my teaching career that I can get students to see what they were not shown. 

I particularly like the creative strategies. I feel that these strategies would force a student to think deeper about a subject or element presented in the reading. The student would have to own part of the text and connect to that element on a much deeper level to be able to write about it creatively. 

As teachers, we need to help students fill in the gaps between the texts and the world while keeping it concise. After strategies help students elaborate and internalize ideas and concepts presented in the text. 

After Reading

The After Reading activity helps students solidify what they have just read. For me the reading process is equivocal to baking a cake. The Before Reading Activity is aline with the gathering of ingredients and supplies; the During Reading Activity is mixing all the ingredients to make a cake, and the After Reading Activity is the baking of the cake.

I do not think students of today have much experience making cakes, so for this example to work in todays classroom teachers would need to change "baking a cake" to "downloading music onto an IPOD." Maybe if teachers related the reading and writing processes to students in ways that they can connect with, the students would not be so against learning each of these processes.

There are numerous After Activities for teachers to choose from that help students solidify their knowledge, but my favorite is the Cinquain. These little poems would be perfect for helping students develop their own understanding of the text. The Sense Poems would also be fun to experiment with as well.

Graphic Organizers

Graphic Organizers are those funny little drawings teachers used to put up on the board to show how ideas are related. I personally have not seen a teacher use a graphic organizer (other than Nicholson or Bond) in YEARS.

For me personally, I can make them, but I do not like using them. I was taught to use a graphic organizer as a way to brainstorm ideas for an essay, not to help understand a text. I think if graphic organizers are presented correctly they can be very beneficial to students of all reading levels.

Struggling readers would benefit greatly from an ongoing graphic organizer that develops as the characters develop. These students would be able to visually see the characteristics that they may be having trouble imagining in their mind. A graphic organizer would help a student who can not "hear" the text at lest to see the text in a purely visual form.

An activity that just popped into my head would be to have students read a descriptive passage of a character in the text we are reading and develop a graphic organizer based on this passage. Students would then take their graphic organizer and create a visual representation of the character based on the graphic organizer.

Struggling readers as well as good readers would be able to visually represent something they have already read. This visual representation may produce a deeper understanding of the character being depicted, thus helping the student to become a more advanced reader.