Resource Blog 1

http://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/who-should-teach-disciplinary-literacy-and-should-we-integrate-the-curriculum#sthash.G29PUDc7.7JrIKa6v.dpbs

For my resource blog this week I chose a blog written by Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The part of the blog that caught my eye is Shanahan talking about whether ELA teachers should be integrating content-area literacy in their classrooms or if the content-area teacher should be teaching literacy in their subject. He makes the point that it is difficult to make an ELA teacher try to approach a text in the way that an English teacher, scientist, historian, and a mathematician would at the same time. This blog post would be good for content-area teachers to read because it shows that it is important for the content-area teacher to teach literacy in their classroom.

Chapter 2 Synthesis Blog

The first week of class and Chapter 2 of the book have really opened my eyes to what content-area literacy is and what reading really means. A quote from the book that stood out to me is, “Now we’re starting to see content-area reading from a kid’s-eye view: how students can read every word on a page without deep understanding…” (Daniels and Zemelman, p 28). As a teacher you can assign a reading to your students and they might be able to decode every word but if they are not literate in the content. This inspires me to want to include methods in my classroom to help students actively read, meaning they develop the reading into meaningful concepts as they decode. When I was a kid in school I never really thought about all of the methods I was using to comprehend texts because it had always come pretty easy to me, so it was cool reading about the different strategies and how to make sure you’re an efficient reader. I really loved the GPS analogy that the textbook made. It made it very clear that familiarity and prior knowledge is so important in comprehending a text. The content-area literacy unit from the first week opened my eyes to how important being literate in a specific content and this week’s chapter helped me understand the aspects of what being a good reader is. I hope the textbook shines some light soon on what strategies we can implement in the class to make the students better content-area readers and pull from their network of schema.

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Josh Hendricks