Reflection on Textbook Strategies

Reflection Blog 2: Textbook Strategies

Textbook Strategies
After reading the textbook, I have discovered many wonderful strategies that I can use in my Science class. In fact, I plan to include them already in my lessons for this week. The strategies that I have chosen are the following:

1. Give the students clarity or purpose on what to read.
2. Select reading assignments that are appropriate for the age and ability of the students.
3. Provide opportunity for the students to develop meaning about the topic.
4. Allow students to deepen their understanding of the content and make connections between new and old learning
4. Provide multiple opportunities to read
5. Ensure classroom access to various types of print such as posted articles, magazines and Internet.
6. Encourage students to share their experiences and perceptions about their reading and the content.
7. Use brainstorming strategies and surveys to identify prior knowledge and interests and experiences
8. Encourage students to reread when they don’t understand and stopping to think how the reading relates to their own life and experiences.
9. Ask students to construct support for their predictions.
10.Allow students to talk and to write about their learning often.
11. Provide advance questions that organize and focus students’ reading.
12. Point out the structure and cues that can help students in the assigned reading.

Reasons of Selecting them

I have selected the strategies above because I believe they would be able to engage, motivate and encourage my students to read Science texts. A lot of Science readings are difficult to understand because of too many words that are not familiar to the students. I think by carefully selecting a strategy to each of my lesson will help them build their vocabulary and comprehension skills. The strategies that I have selected above would also increase the critical-thinking skills of my students and at the same time attack those that are lacking in reading skills. These strategies would also compliment the other strategies that I am already employing in class. In fact, some of them are listed already in the textbook. They are:

1. Applying the meaning of prefixes, suffixes, and roots in understanding Science words. Last week, my students learned the meaning of the words troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and thermosphere by simply getting the meaning of their prefixes and suffixes. The prefix “tropo” means “turning” or “changing” and when they remember this they know that this layer has variable weather conditions. The prefix strato means ‘ stratum” which means layers, the prefix meso means “middle” so the mesosphere is the middle layer and the prefix thermo means “heat” so the this layer is the hottest.
2. Using graphic organizers to make students see the connections. I have used this strategy especially when I discuss the lessons about the classification of matter, changes in matter and types of energy. These lessons use a lot of words so I use graphic organizer to give students an overview of the broader topics. I also use this strategy to accommodate students with special needs.
3. Sharing of content-specific vocabulary at the beginning of the unit by giving them words to find meaning as their homework and by using the word-wall in the classroom.
4. Giving students opportunity to see how things are alike and different by using classifying and comparing activities. I used this strategy when I discussed classification of matter.
5. Asking students to generate and test hypothesis. I am using this strategy whenever I ask my students to investigate a particular event or phenomenon related to science concept in the laboratory.
6. Using models and charts. This particular strategy has been very useful to me because most of my students are visual learners. I use this strategy a lot.
7. Use of video clips that demonstrate key learning. I find this very useful also for my visual learners and I always use this to start my lessons.
8. Reminding students to “stop to think” often during their reading. I use this strategy whenever my students are reading very long texts. I provide questions for them to answer.
9. Using of graphs and charts has been a very useful strategy though some students do not know how to interpret graphs so sometimes I am having difficulty using their strategy.
10. Having students review vocabulary that is important to them. This strategy has been very useful to me and my students love doing this.
11. Highlighting text to indicate main ideas has been also very good strategy to me because my students love this and students are well engaged.