I found this article to be very beneficial as a future teacher. The article broke the important components of literacy down into modeling comprehension, vocabulary, text structures, and text features. I would rate this article very highly because of the examples real life teachers demonstrate throughout the article. Sometimes it doesn’t come naturally for adults to step back and be able to teach children what it is that we already know; such as predicting throughout a story and summarizing it along the way. Here are a few examples that I found helpful…
Comprehension: “Another teacher added, “Yes I agree. And it’s also metacognition–knowing that you’re doing this, but not paying attention to it.” I found myself using comprehension strategies naturally as I read the national geographic website about Blackbeard. A specific example is where it talks about Blackbeard wanting a medical chest. I thought to myself, why would Blackbeard want a medical chest, and then made a prediction about the story. We all make predictions subconsciously as we read along in books and as we watch TV, this is what keeps us coming back for more. We naturally make guesses and want to see if our predictions are correct so we continue to read the story or watch the same television show.
Vocabulary: As one teacher stated in the article, “I don’t have time to tell the students the meaning of every word they’ll encounter.” This teacher is right, but it is our job to teach them the tools necessary to figure out what those words mean. These tools include: inside-the-word strategies,outside-the-word strategies, and the use of resources.My personal favorite is to use context clues! As I was reading the Blackbeard website I came along a word that a child may not know. The word was menacing. The child could use context clues to figure out what the word meant. Here is the sentence: He stuffed the burning rope under his hat to make himself look more ferocious and menacing. He scared everyone. Even if the student didn’t know what menacing meant they could read the following sentence that says “he scared everyone” and lead to the assumption that he was mean so the pirate probably didn’t have a very loving exterior.
Text Structures: The structure of the text is very important for children so they can organize the story sequence as they go along. On the website about Blackbeard a good example of sequencing it that the party he had foreshadowed his death because Captain Maynard’s crew trapped him and killed him after getting wind of the big party he was throwing.
Text Features: Text Features are very important and lead to clues on what the story/chapter will encompass. The text feature posted on the website stated Blackbeard was British held key information about his childhood and gave us more background information on his as a young mate.
