Back to Blogging

Like many other teachers out there, I’ve spent my summer trolling Pinterest for new ideas to use in my classroom.  Through my pinning, I have found several teacher blogs that have given me ideas and inspiration for my teaching this coming year.  A few years ago I started this blog as part of a grad school assignment, but I enjoyed the process.  Unfortunately, life got in the way and I stopped blogging.  After reading so many inspirational teacher blogs, I have decided to reignite my blogging interest and start this back up.  I hope I’ll be able to inspire or aid others in the way that I’ve been helped by the blogs I’ve read.
 
Because it’s been two years since I last posted, I’m going to start by linking you to a few of my most viewed posts to give you an idea of who I am as a blogger.  Then in the coming days, I’ll be posting some of my new work and some of the things I’ve been developing over the past two and a half years.

Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA)

DRTA is a comprehension strategy that guides students in asking questions about a text, making predictions, and then reading to confirm or refute their predictions. The DRTA process encourages students to be active and thoughtful readers, which enhances their comprehension. The DRTA model actually consists of three parts: D – Direct, R – Read, and T – Think. The process of those three combine to make the A – Activity.

Read Withthe Author in Mind

This is a chapter summary from Jeffrey Wilhelm’s book Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry. [Wilhelm, Jeffrey D. (2007) Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry. New York, NY: Scholastic.]  In this chapter, Wilhelm introduces us to authorial reading, a concept directly connected to the social nature of reading that encourages the reader to interact with the author while reading a text. Through the process of authorial reading, readers use the understandings that the author has put into the text to create a better understating of his/her own.

Content Area Reading Strategies

This is another reflection on reading, but this time from Cris Tovani’s book Do I Really Have to Teach Reading [Tovani, Cris. (2004) Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.]  In this post, I looked at chapters one and four in the book to describe strategies for reading nonfiction and content area text: Reading is an individual experience, and it is a different experience for every individual. Reading nonfiction and content-area text is especially different for every person. However, there are some strategies that all successful readers use, even if they use the strategies differently. Cris Tovani points out that you have to ask questions as you read, but that they have to be questions that you really care about and are curious about.