Originally I was going to discuss Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, but as I read the material I realized that the strategies in Chapter 5 should be given additional thought and applied to other areas besides reading comprehension. Several of the strategies would work very well as learning tools in science so that the students can absorb and retain extra information. I think this chapter is very important to high school chemistry courses since most of the teachers do not use a chemistry book as part of their class. Instead the teachers typically present all the pertinent material through the lesson plan, which makes the comprehension activities that can be done during class all the more important for that course structure. I have witnessed many of the different strategies when watching different chemistry teachers, but they use the reading comprehension activities as ways of enhancing the new material.
My favorite activities are the 'Say Something' , 'Sketching My Way Through the Text', 'Anticipation Guide', 'Mapping' and 'Word Meaning Graphic Organizer'. I suppose that I am somewhat bias as to which activities I like because I seem to only like the brief during reading examples and the longer after reading examples.
I selected 'Sketching My Way Through the Text', 'Mapping', and 'Word Meaning Graphic Organizer' due to the visual nature and the ability to create categories. I believe that in science this is a good way of developing a students understanding in a very systematic fashion. This is great for new informational texts and new content from a lecture.
The 'Say Something' and 'Anticipation Guides' are good way of focusing students in a very brief way. This can cause interest within the classroom and help the students become engaged in the days topic. Anticipation Guides would be an item that I would have to improve upon because my 'on-the-fly' question skills are not very well developed, but I can provide some pre-made questions to accomplish the same task. I would probably do the task by having the students answer the questions through hand signals or having them move (stand-up, sit-down, stand-on one leg). This method may sound odd but the secondary purpose is to get the students to be active after a period of inactivity.
Those are my basic ideas of items that I think would be really effective for reading and lesson activities.
The same happens in my biology class. Since we do not have enough books for each student we have a class set, but often they go unused because the material is taught through our lesson not by the students reading the text book. The textbook serves as a guide to the students but the way we structure the notes is primarily through thier INBs, interactive notebooks. I too enjoyed the anticipation guide and I would agree that it seems like it would be useful to science classrooms.
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