Deeper reading helps make sense of the journey

I got a lot of great ideas from both readings this week in Deeper reading and Making the Journey. Gallagher gave us some great strategies to use in class to help kids perform on the reading to accentuate their comprehension. I'm going to try the Scoring Comprehension and Color Coding strategies with my students. I also think we should always acknowledge to students that everyone has problems with comprehension, like the chapter continually reiterates. Some students will grow more compfortable with pushing their comprehension further by knowing this. I agree with Gallagher that memorization should still have a place in the classroom. Memorizing different poems was a lot of fun when I was a kid and it made learning fun, too, but memorization helps exercize your brain. Gallagher gave a couple of great sponges at the end of the chapter to help familiarize students with new words, also. Besides being used to better comprehension, these are great ways to get students warmed up to learn...you know get their mind set on the class.

Christenbury's concepts of giving students time to write by the management of pacing their writing workshops or assignments was very good. I totally agree that we all need more time to write revise, etc. on papers. This was something my teachers never did. They always used the traditional model of writing. Since I've been in college, I've really enjoyed the writing a lot more because the new process is being used more and more now, and I think it's helped me tremendously to grow, as a writer. The "dealing with time" section tells to give your students practice in timed writing situations. This was an excellent idea. Most of the writing people struggle with are the deadlines, so being able to write quickly and still give good content is a must, so why not prepare your students for this. I think I'll correlate the two of these somehow in my classroom so my students can be ready for deadlilne writing, but also have the opportunity to enjoy the creativity of writing, like actual writers do, as Christenbury points out, in a recursive way, also. I think that was a comma splice!