Not just another textbook...

There haven't been a lot of books throughout my college experience that I have kept, but like Katie mentioned in her post, Gallagher's book is packed with amazing strategies. It would be silly of me to sell this book back to the university and lose such an amazing reference.

In Chapter 5, I really liked the idea "literary dominoes" and giving students the resolution and asking them to describe the steps that led to that resolution. It really makes them think about what events triggered each "domino" in order for the story to end up where it did.

The "Reading Symbols" strategy was another that I thought could be very useful. Students are very good at summarizing things that they have read, but that's often all they do. Using the elements that Gallagher outlined encourages students to go beyond summarization.

In Chapter 6, Gallagher talked about Double-Entry Journals (which, by the way, I always enjoyed writing journals in class ;D ) which reminded me of the class blog that my field expeirence teacher has recently set up for her students to use. She used an in-class activity to illustrate what it would be like to use a blog.

She showed a video clip from KY3 about the possibility of a legislation going into affect that would require school uniforms. After the clip, she had the students write their reaction to what they had seen. Then, they wadded up their reactions and tossed them into a basketball hoop that was connected to a crate, which was just a small way to get the students moving around the room. Next, students picked a "wad" from the crate and responded to it. They repeated this process a couple times, and then the students were given their original paper back. They then read the responses from their classmates about their reaction.

Mrs. Wicklund explained to the students that the activity they had just done was like the blog they would soon be using. They would post to the blog about whatever book they happened to be reading at the time, and other students would be given the opporunity to respond to their post. I thought it was a very creative idea, and the kids loved it.