On Saturday, January 19, 2008, I attended the Tucson Area Reading Council (TARC) conference on targeted reading interventions with Dr. Maryanne Manning and 2 educators from Alabama. They were like a comedy team–lots of laughs and lots of great lesson ideas that I’d like to share with you.
One reading lesson that caught my eye was the one on text features. Since ELLs typically struggle with informational text, I thought it would be a good place for us to start. You can use any Weekly Reader, Bear Essentials, or any informational text that you have multiple copies of. Have your kids scan the text for features like bold print, italics, speech bubbles, bullets, etc. It’s like a treasure hunt. Have them make a mini-poster of the feature to show the other kids. Of course, you will need to go through an example together with an organizer for them to identify and name these features orally. In the book that all conference attendees received, there is a great 2-column table with the text feature on the left and a box for an example on the right. It would be easy to create something like that for the kids to record on, and you can make a class-size poster to go along with it.
I will implement this lesson next week on 1-29-08 and let you know how it went. I would love to have you try something similar and post your results.
Instead of having my students make a poster to illustrate nonfiction text features, I found that they found it MUCH more motivating creating an example on the computer, using Word.
They both used BOLD fonts, underlining, and bullets. They also went online to find pictures for their examples. We then posted one of them on our SEI student writers’ blog! You can check out their examples at:
http://seiwriting.wordpress.com
Let me know what you think! Stephanie
I have been working on many of the same things for my kinders. They are doing Small Moments, which I took from Lucy Calkins book on writing, The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching writing. I really like you idea of using the computer for writing. I know that many of my students are currently practicing Tux Typing and once they know some of the keys, I would like to print out some of their writing on the computer. If I used Kid Pix, I guess they wouldn’t even need to know how to type. I am going to look into this.
Thanks for your response! I have also used “The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching Writing” to guide my writing instruction. My Kindergarten and First Graders are working on illustrating their small moments with clip art from Word. I like your idea of using Kid Pix or Tux Paint!!! That is something I will try!
I think this idea would be helpful for any reading student, not just ELL. I think I could use this lesson idea with my Special Education class. I think it would really point out to the students the fact that you get information just by looking at bold faced words, etc. (a form of skimming for info).