Role nonfiction plays in the classroom and with our students

Nonfiction and narrative text

In chapter one, I was most intrigued with the discussion about the use of narrative and nonfiction texts in the classroom. In addition, the impact and changes predicted with the amount of information our students will be expected to process and organize in their lifetime. By the year 2020, it is predicted that the amount of information will double every seventy-three days (Grolier, 1995). Therefore, it is our job to make sure students are prepared to take on this surge of information and know what to do with it in the context of reading and writing.  Many instructional materials found in elementary classrooms are narrative (i.e., fictional) texts. The authors define narrative text as text that tell stories and are organized sequentially, with a beginning, middle, and an end.  The basic plan or story grammar, of narrative texts consists of such elements as characters, setting, plot and theme. The purpose of fiction is to be engaging and entertaining and involve the readers or listeners in stories about life, although the purpose of fiction can be to inform or persuade (Fountas&Pinnell, 2001).  Nonfiction is defined as a carefully crafted genre, provides ideas, facts and principals organized around main ideas, using both verbal and visual texts. To date, trends in classroom across the country use less expository text and students are far less familiar with expository writing and as a result have not been as successful reading and writing in this genre.

This brings me to our discussion about Rachel and Jeremy because; they too, struggled with using nonfiction text and navigating assignment expectations. They were told to focus on key words, look for important information, highlight as well as pick two ideas to discuss but really did not know how to do this even when scaffolding appeared to be happening during a lesson. This book enforces our discussion about the importance of teaching text features and teaching students from a particular Discourse to better understand how to read and write in a specific genre. (i.e. “What does a historian look like? What does a historian want to know?”) In this chapter, the authors created several graphs that outlined exactly what features to look for in expository text from organizational features to graphic/visual features. By outlining and organizing the content of nonfiction text, the authors believed this would better assist teachers in supporting students in learning expository text features. You could create this outline as an anchor chart, with your students, as you learn specific features. 

After class last week, I reevaluated how I would begin my interest reading groups. I know that my students have not experienced difficulties overall in filtering information, but I know I can do a lot better at teaching them about text structures, what nonfiction is and how we access information while reading and translate that into their writing. I want to pick one topic and work on researching this as an entire class so we can operate from a Discourse of historian, oceanographer, scientist, etc. I want to model how to read from the lens of that Discourse and then break up into smaller groups to work on a particular subject. My goal is that each student will gain a deeper understanding through guided collaboration. We can discuss our findings and difficulties as a group. I feel doing research, as an entire class the first time, can ensure students are the historians or scientist they need to be in order to truly understand the text and carry over the lessons and skillset into the next lesson or subject matter. Thoughts?

A glimpse into me and why I selected this book

History of my teaching and how I have changed as a reading teacher:

In selecting my book, I immediately was drawn to Making nonfiction and other information texts come alive: A practical approach to reading, writing and using nonfiction and other informational texts across the curriculum because of a huge shift in my approach to teaching reading that occurred this past school year.  I feel it necessary to give you a glimpse into my current teaching practices of reading and writing and how they have evolved to better understand my philosophy and how I will connect the framing questions to the book I have chosen.  This upcoming school year I will be entering my seventeenth year in education.  Graduate school has afforded me the opportunity to, even after a significant amount of time in education, implement some remarkable changes to how I approach literacy, even when I believed how I was teaching reading and writing was effective. While I know the core of my beliefs were solid, which were that reading should be driven by making meaning and understanding the miscues of students. Writing should be more about process versus product; I was unknowingly missing the mark for each of my students. Last year, I had the wonderful opportunity to take a reading process and a writing development course that created a HUGE paradigm shift, for me, as an educator of literacy. Prior to these incredible courses, I was using literature circles and leveled guided reading groups for reading instruction.  In my school, I am blessed to still have choices whether to use a basal program or other methods; I use other methods.  Now, I use inquiry/interest reading groups and skill based guided reading groups. The interest/inquiry reading groups are centered on what students want to read and learn about and levels are taken out of the equation. I have students on an IEP reading with students who are advanced; all reading the same material.  My pedagogical changes came after reading Beyond leveled Books, Miscues not Mistakes, The Reading Process and an article titled I am not a level 3 reader. How I approach writing was significantly impacted by reading Donald Grave’s dissertation and publications thereafter.  Prior to reading his work, I was approaching writing from the framework of using six traits, which in turn supported students to focus more on product versus the process.  Never before had I looked at the writing of my students through the lens of writing development.  Once I had a clear understanding of why my students were doing the things they were doing while writing, it changed how I approached writing instruction. I finally understood how to support my students in a process by conferencing and giving them time to develop their ideas, which ultimately helped them become stronger writers than I had ever witnessed to date.  They were finally writing with a purpose.  Based on all of the changes my students and I have experienced over the past two school years, I wanted to continue to enhance current literacy practices in my classroom.  It is with hope that I can use this book to strengthen my interest/inquiry reading groups because so much nonfiction text is used.  In addition, I want to share what I have learned and hear what you think and learn from you. 

Before this course, I had recently began exploring blogs and participating as an audience member.  I “fell” into reading one particular blog post because a friend posted the link on her Facebook page. From that day forward, I followed this blog, reading on a regular basis simply because of the difficult journey the blogger was sharing with the world. I admired her bravery. Now, as I explore blogs and the act of blogging with a frame of literacy my perspective and impressions have heightened.

Wikipedia defines blogs (weblog) as:

·         Blogging is about reading and writing
·         Literacy is about reading and writing
·         Blogging is about literacy
Blogs are about communicating by observing your experience, reflect on it and write about it. Others read your reflection, respond from their perspective by commenting or writing their own blog.

I currently follow a blog written by a mother, and sometimes father, who lost their child to SIDs at four months of age and a blog by our former school nurse blogging about her daughters who have Autism.  With these particular blogs, the writers are open and honest while blogging a difficult journey.  What I noticed with these particular blogs were, as they continued, the writers turned their challenges into educating others about SIDs and Autism.  I taught in a second grade inclusion classroom up to this school year.  Every year I have several students who are on the Autism spectrum. I cannot even begin to explain how much I learned through them, and I am a better teacher because of my students. I thought I really had learned all there was to learn with regard to supporting students on the spectrum until I read Julie’s blog.  And I knew one child on the spectrum is one child on the spectrum.  Julie shared that she always had to prepare her one daughter whenever she would leave even for a simply errand. She was talking to her daughter, going over what time would be like when she was gone and what to expect.  Julie told her daughter to look at her and give her eye contact so that she knew she was listening. Her daughter, who was 13 at the time said, “It hard for me to look at you and listen. I am listening and I do better when I don’t look at you.” That was a HUGE wow moment for me, because I reflected back on all the times I had my students work on making eye contact.  You better believe I changed how I approach my students with regard to eye contact.

In my continued search of interesting blogs, I found one titled What would Emma Pillsbury wear? (All Glee fans will know who this is. This blog is dedicated to the fashion of this character. It was super fun. I have added it to my favorites.) I found one I like about fitness titled Fit Bottomed Girls and my FAVORITE was written by a nine year girl from Scotland title Never Seconds. I found her blog while searching organic living and eating. (http://neverseconds.blogspot.com) Her blog is completely devoted to blogging about her school cafeteria and what they serve. She has had over 2 million hits since the inception of her blog! What is most interesting is she was told she had to stop photographing the school food and blogging about it. Once word got out that she was told, by school officials, she no longer could write about her school food, she went viral and was on and off in one day. In addition to her blogging about her own experiences, she posts reader’s contributions about what they eat in school. Most importantly, she has turned her blog into a fundraising effort for Mary’s Meals in Africa. She has raised enough money to purchase an entire kitchen for this program, which was her goal, along with 8500 meals to date. I was in complete AWE of what a nine year has done in such a short amount of time; all within a blog! This is a must read!

           In closing, I have found blogs to serve many purposes. They can be interactive, educational and help bring awareness to a cause. They can be practical and offer applicable ideas such as teaching sites. I also find they serve for one’s healing and growth through any experiences; painful or happy. I believe they can also help people with accountability in their own personal goals in life. Blogs are a form of communication that brings communities of people together to learn from each other through commentary and sharing of one’s ideas.