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