Laurens-Marathon

1. Laurens-Marathon February 22, 2012

2. Quick write on how Think-Alouds can help you as a teacher.

3. Think-Alouds can help teachers: • Deepen their own awareness of the reading process • Use this heightened awareness of their strategic and interpretive process to help model these strategies to kids • See what students do and don’t do as they read, which helps the teacher to assess students and plan appropriate instruction • Understand what in a text confuses readers • Support readers to identify problems and monitor their own comprehension

4. Ways to present Think-Alouds: • Teacher does Think-Aloud; student listens • Teacher does Think-Aloud; student helps out • Students do Think-Alouds as large group; teacher and other students monitor and help • Students do Think-Alouds in small group; teacher and other students monitor and help • Students do Think-Alouds individually; compare with others • Teacher or students do Think-Alouds orally, in writing, or on overhead, with Post-it notes or in journal

5. Quick write on how Think-Alouds can help students.

6. Think-Alouds Help Students to: • Understand that reading should make sense • Move beyond literal decoding • Learn how to make sense of text by using many different strategies • Use particular strategies when reading certain text types • Share ways of reading • Learn about themselves are readers

7. 6 Steps of Effective Instruction • Teacher explains what a strategy consists of • Teacher explains why this strategy is important • Teacher explains when to use the strategy in actual reading • Teacher models when to perform this strategy in an actual context • Teacher guides learner practice • Students independently use the strategy

8. Use Think-Alouds to Model: • Setting purpose for reading • Making predictions • Connecting personally • Monitoring Comprehension • Using Fix-Up strategies when needed

9. Prompts That Guide Students to Use Strategies • Set Purpose for Reading • Research shows it is important to model purpose setting for students • It is up to us to help students see the purpose in everything they read • Prompts (See Handout)

10. Make Predictions • As you begin reading, begin predicting what will come next. • Correct and revise predications as you gain information from the text.

11. Connect Personally • Show how you use your own experience to help make meaning, and the ways you bring your experiences of other texts to help you understand this one. • This is “relating life to literature” • “Relating literature to life”

12. Visualize • Show how you take the sensory and physical details the author gives you and expand them in your mind’s eye to create an image or a scene. • This ability to “see” what one is reading, to create accurate mental model and/or sensory-rich story worlds as one reads is crucial to engaged reading. • Demonstrate how you develop and adapt images as you read

13. Monitor Comprehension • Demonstrate how expert readers constantly (though subconsciously) monitor comprehension by asking, “Does this make sense?” • Show that you expect what you read to make sense to you and that if it doesn’t you will stop to identify this as a problem.

14. Fix-Up Strategies • Used to address confusion and repair comprehension • Follows Step 5 • Demonstrate how you use various strategies when you can’t grasp something or wish to check your understanding

15. Fix-Up Strategies • rereading • Reading ahead to see if that will clear things up • Reviewing and synthesizing previous ideas from the text and relating these “chunks” of concepts to the confusing ideas • Replacing a word or words they don’t know with one(s) that they know and think would make sense in this context; looking up a word in the dictionary • Changing their ideas or visualization of the story • Asking someone for help