Reading Response

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Summary and Response My favorite piece of reading material this week is Drawing on Text Features for Reading Comprehension and Composing. It echoes chapter 3, from our Content Area Literacy Instruction textbook. It shines a brief, but rich light on the fact that there is a huge variety of text and media resources available to teachers. The article explains how multimedia publications have the potential to draw students into learning, in ways that textbooks may not. It also mentions that sometimes presenting these different types of reading materials to students can add an additional challenge because students may need to use a new or different reading strategy in order to understand them. Typically the information is not presented as linearly …show more content…

In my opinion, it is important because using trade books exposes kids to the style of reading material they will find in everyday life. Some examples are magazine articles, brochures, short documentary style videos and picture filled “Eye Witness” type books. I agree that these types of short informative pieces, require a different reading approach than textbooks, and do not come with comprehension questions but, they will help kids develop the reading skills to utilize information resources that they will find at the bookstore, at the library and on T.V. I also think that sometimes other books are better than textbooks because when a textbook section ends with a chapter summary it creates a definite stopping point where if kids are just reading a regular book they may be more likely to keep reading on, instead of staying on the assigned …show more content…

This seems like a strange thing to say because from one perspective, textbooks seem like they would make teacher prep very easy since all of the information is one convenient location and technically, the company who published the textbook has made sure that the lessons are complete. But, the problem is that they may also turn some students off. They may, as the article says, “lack depth and perspective.” They may, as in the case of some U. S. history books only present a view shared by one certain ethnic group. Since textbooks are expensive and not replaced yearly, they may not even have the most current information on certain subjects. One interesting thing from the book is also that textbooks often have a readability level that is higher than the grade that they are intended

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