Reading
Title 1
Title 1, (Part A) of the Elementary and Seconday Education Act, as amended (ESEA) provides financial assistance to local educational agencies (LEA's) and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from low income families to help ensure tat all children meet challenging state academic standards. Federal funds are designated for K through 3 here at Seven Generations Charter School.
For more information on Title 1 please visit: US Department of Education Title 1 Page
7 CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES
Resource: Salisbury University
1. Previewing: Learning about a text before really reading it.
Previewing enables readers to get a sense of what the text is about and how it is organized before reading it closely. This simple strategy includes seeing what you can learn from the headnotes or other introductory material, skimming to get an overview of the content and organization, and identifying the rhetorical situation.
2. Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts.
When you read a text, you read it through the lens of your own experience. Your understanding of the words on the page and their significance is informed by what you have come to know and value from living in a particular time and place. But the texts you read were all written in the past, sometimes in a radically different time and place. To read critically, you need to contextualize, to recognize the differences between your contemporary values and attitudes and those represented in the text.
3. Questioning to understand and remember: Asking questions about the content.
As students, you are accustomed (I hope) to teachers asking you questions about your reading. These questions are designed to help you understand a reading and respond to it more fully, and often this technique works. When you need to understand and use new information though it is most beneficial if you write the questions, as you read the text for the first time. With this strategy, you can write questions any time, but in difficult academic readings, you will understand the material better and remember it longer if you write a question for every paragraph or brief section. Each question should focus on a main idea, not on illustrations or details, and each should be expressed in your own words, not just copied from parts of the paragraph.
4. Reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values: Examining your personal responses.
The reading that you do for this class might challenge your attitudes, your unconsciously held beliefs, or your positions on current issues. As you read a text for the first time, mark an X in the margin at each point where you feel a personal challenge to your attitudes, beliefs, or status. Make a brief note in the margin about what you feel or about what in the text created the challenge. Now look again at the places you marked in the text where you felt personally challenged. What patterns do you see?
5. Outlining and summarizing: Identifying the main ideas and restating them in your own words.
Outlining and summarizing are especially helpful strategies for understanding the content and structure of a reading selection. Whereas outlining reveals the basic structure of the text, summarizing synopsizes a selection's main argument in brief. Outlining may be part of the annotating process, or it may be done separately (as it is in this class). The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples. The main ideas form the backbone, the strand that holds the various parts and pieces of the text together. Outlining the main ideas helps you to discover this structure. When you make an outline, don't use the text's exact words.
Summarizing begins with outlining, but instead of merely listing the main ideas, a summary recomposes them to form a new text. Whereas outlining depends on a close analysis of each paragraph, summarizing also requires creative synthesis. Putting ideas together again -- in your own words and in a condensed form -- shows how reading critically can lead to deeper understanding of any text.
6. Evaluating an argument: Testing the logic of a text as well as its credibility and emotional impact.
All writers make assertions that they want you to accept as true. As a critical reader, you should not accept anything on face value but to recognize every assertion as an argument that must be carefully evaluated. An argument has two essential parts: a claim and support. The claim asserts a conclusion -- an idea, an opinion, a judgment, or a point of view -- that the writer wants you to accept. The support includes reasons (shared beliefs, assumptions, and values) and evidence (facts, examples, statistics, and authorities) that give readers the basis for accepting the conclusion. When you assess an argument, you are concerned with the process of reasoning as well as its truthfulness (these are not the same thing). At the most basic level, in order for an argument to be acceptable, the support must be appropriate to the claim and the statements must be consistent with one another.
7. Comparing and contrasting related readings:Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to understand them better.
Many of the authors we read are concerned with the same issues or questions, but approach how to discuss them in different ways. Fitting a text into an ongoing dialectic helps increase understanding of why an author approached a particular issue or question in the way he or she did.
LITERACY ADVICE FOR FAMILIES
Literacy tips for early readers
• Point out print in the child's environment: on cereal boxes, food labels, toys, restaurants, and traffic signs.
• Sing songs, say short poems or nursery rhymes, and play rhyming words games with your child.
• Tell stories to your child.
• Read aloud to your child. Point to the words on the page as you read.
• Read a short passage several times to your child until your child can read it with you. Then encourage your child to read the passage to you.
• Encourage older children to read with younger children.
• Encourage your child to read (or pretend read) to you. Make this reading enjoyable. Don't worry if your child does not read all of the words correctly but, rather, applaud your child's efforts to read.
• Go to the library together.
• Have books, magazines, and newspapers around the house. Let your child see you reading.
• Encourage your child to write messages such as grocery lists, to-do lists, postcards, or short messages to family members or friends. Don't worry about conventional spelling at this point but, rather, encourage your child's first efforts at authorship.
• When watching television, have the captioning feature enabled so that the children view the words while hearing them performed aloud.
Literacy tips for more advanced readers
• Talk to your child about what he or she is reading.
• Ask open-ended questions such as "What do you think about that story?", "What would you have done if you were that character?"
• Make reading and writing a regular part of your daily home activities. Let your child see you using reading and writing for real purposes.
• Visit the public library. Help your child to get his or her own library card.
• Read to your child regularly, even after your child is able to read some books independently.
• Listen to your child read. Use strategies to help your child with tricky words. For example, when your child comes to an unfamiliar word, you might say, "Skip it and read to the end of the sentence. Now try again; what makes sense and looks like the word that you see?"
• Praise your child's efforts at reading.
• Play word games such as thinking of different words to describe the same things.
• Support your child's writing. Have writing materials such as paper, markers, and pencils available. Read what your child writes.
•Set reasonable limits for television viewing.
- Adapted from Mraz, Padak, & Baycich (2002).
RESOURCES
Reading Rockets: Is a national multimedia initiative offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help. http://www.readingrockets.org/audience/parents/
"Reading Fluency: What is it and Why is it Important?" by Linda Baisiger, M.S., CCC-SLP
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12343586/Reading-Fluency-What-Is-It-and-Why-Is-It-Important
"Fluency" by Dana Griffin
http://www.ehow.com/about_6496855_reading-fluency-important_.html
Children's Summer Reading Programs: Mom.me
http://mom.me/parenting/1071-childrens-summer-reading-programs/?utm_source=dgmodule&utm_medium=1&campaign=momme1
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