February 11

Chapter 7 Strategies (Strategies for Analysis and Strategies for Knowledge Utilization)

Well, this will be the last post for this book study. I really hope that you have found this resource useful! I know that I have been enjoying it and our conversations around the topics. It has been wonderful having so many people joining in the discussions 🙂 I decided to do the last 2 sets of strategies together as there are only a couple of strategies in each one.

 

Strategies for Analysis:

31 Web It- Everyone knows how useful a web can be. It is useful for accessing prior knowledge, knoweldge learned, and setting up for a presentation, an essay or other written activity. Another great thing about a web is that the topic is variable and the amount of information that goes onto the web is personal.

 

32 Collect It- What a great strategy for having a student represent different topics! Being able to show the different concrete items related to a topic would be very meaningful. Having a sentence or two of information added to the display would make it even more interesting.

 

35 Compare It and Contrast It- Venn diagrams can be tricky for students, but with a little support and lots of practice, they can be excellent ways to show similarities and differences about a couple of topics. The information that goes into the Venn diagram can be level appropriate, even if the topics are the same for all students. Venn diagrams are definitely an easy way to adapt an assignment!

 

37 Edit It- This strategy would be useful for all students! Varying the level of difficulty could be as simple as some kids simply circling the errors while others have to write the correction above and others still have to re-write the text with the corrections made. This could be done to support peer editing, editing personal work or even just sample editing practice to support the learning of spelling, punctuation usage, etc. Super simple!

 

Strategies for Knowledge Utilization

38 Judge It for Yourself- The Judge It for Yourself graphic could be used in numerous different situations. STEM Project reflections, Social siuation problem solving, lit circles problem analysis and I am sure many more! You could easily change the “What did you do?” to include the name of a character in a story, keep “Then what happened” and change the “Would you do it again?” to something like “What could they have done differently?” or “What would you do in their situation?” etc. This could also be done using pictures rather than written statements. So many different uses!

 

39 Investigate It- The Investigate It strategy is great for students learning to research and write reports. It lays out the information nicely, allowing students to find the necessary information by answering some simple questions. It would be easy enough to make the questions more specific or vague, depending on the level of the student.

 

40 Predict It-This strategy is intended to have students make connections between what they already know and what they have learned. They can then use this information to predict what might happen in the future. This could be useful in science when doing similar experiments, in language arts, when exploring similar texts, even in artwhen exploring mixing of colours or examining different art techniques. It encourages students to use their critical thinking skills and dive deeper into the topics as they are making these predictions.

 

The strategies that Nicole Eredics has laid out for us in this book have been wonderful! I have enjoyed learning about/revisiting them over the course of this book study! I am going to have many different strategies to support my colleagues with and use in my own groups!  I really hope that you, too, have enjoyed this book and the strategies within it. Feel free to add any of the ways you have used the strategies over the course of trying them out. We would love to hear about it! If you have found one or two of them to be praticularly useful and have a good story to go along with it, consider entering a short blurb into our publication to share with our members!

 

Thank you all again for your participation! I have once again enjoyed the book and the wonderful conversations evoked by it! I look forward to the next one! If you have any book suggestions, please do not hesitate to let me know! I am always looking for ideas 🙂 Remember to also join us at the book study luncheon at Crosscurrents!

 

Sarah

February 4

Chapter 7 Strategies (Strategies for Comprehension)

Sorry that I am late with this post! My Mom came out for a visit (I haven’t seen her since the summer) and I chose to visit rather than write a post!

Here are some of the Strategies for Comprehension that I found to fit into my teaching (although I hav enot used them yet, I think that they will be good ones :))

 

Strategy 20- Read It: This strategy looks interesting. I like how they added the page with the visuals for the main vocabulary words. I noticed that the text is simpler and does not contain all of the vocabulary words. A student could then highlight the phrase that best describes the vocabulary word using different colours for each word.

 

Strategy 21- Sequence It: I have never used sequencing for numeracy (not in this way anyways!) This is such an interesting concept to me. You could also have visuals to support the story and have a child sequence the parts of the story. This could have varying difficulties- someone might sequence 3 events (beginning, middle, end) while abother student sequences more in depth and has 5 or 6 events to sequence.

 

Strategy 22- Make It: I love this strategy and am using it with one student that I have been working with. She is learning about different topics of interest (tigers, robots, octopuses) and has created a diorama of the tiger, a recycled model of a robot and is now sewing an octopus stuffie. On top of this, she has been researching the topics using Google Read and Write and has created short “essays” with her new knowledge. So much fun!

 

Strategy 26-Cloze It: This strategy is great for sight words, vocabulary and even recalling texts. You can vary the difficulty of this activity as well by adding a word bank or a first letter to aid the students in finding the correct answers. It can also be made a bit more difficult by removing the word bank and having them pick out key details from the text. The hard part with this, is that some kids will be excellent at finding the necessary information and just filling in the blanks but not actually reading the text, so ensuring that thetext is read first might help solve that problem.

 

Strategy 29- Note It: I like how this strategy helps to synthesize the information about a topic into small, manageable chunks. Students could work with a partner to determine some of the key ideas about the topic. Some of the ideas could be highlighted within the text for the student to search out and record. They may even draw some of the key ideas about the topic, if that is more suitable to their needs. This could also be done using a speech to text software, such as Google Read and Write.

 

Strategy 30- Report It: The graphic organizer for this strategy would help students organize a story, or could be modified to allow them to do research on a specific topic. It is not too overwhelming, only requiring small amounts of information at a time. For those students who are able, it could then be turned further into a written essay-type piece, or handed in as is for those students where essay writing is not an option.

 

How would you use these strategies? Which ones are your favourite? Any further suggestions on how to make them better/modify them for your own use?

 

Until next week, when we look at the Strategies for Analysis!