This article is a piece that I think all elementary educators should read. I really like how it stressed the importance of exposing lower grades to expository informational text. As a pre-service teacher with a science endorsement, I strongly agree with the content of this article.
I have started collecting children books from Scholastic book orders, yard sales, and as gifts. When I first started buying books, I just got books that I thought "looked" fun or cute. But since going through Intro and Intermediate Blocks at USM, my knowledge of books has grown tremendously. I have started looking more closely at what children's books say and how the author tells the story. When I look at informational books, I try to look at them from a child's point of view. Questions that come to mind are: "Can a child understand the content?", "Is the content in this book accurate and up-to-date?", and "Will a child learn something from this book?".
I have never thought about the phrase 'reading to learn'. I guess I just assumed that 'obviously, when a child reads a book about a subject that they would learn something'. Needless to say, after reading this article I am no longer THAT naive. The statistics and references that Moss provided in the article reinforced the importance of content area literacy.
When I am (finally) a teacher, no matter what grade(s) I teach, I can honestly say that my classroom library will be filled with expository informational texts BECAUSE of this article.
Two questions that come to mind after reading Moss' article are (1) Why isn't this a bigger issue? and (2) Why aren't teachers more concerned with content area literacy?
Nice response Amanda. You're right this should be a bigger issue, but my whole deal is how you can a child learn to read while reading to learn. I feel like that is a bunch of things going on at one time. Learning to read is difficult in itself then try and pile another concept on top of it. I believe reading to learn should come immediately after a child has become more fluent and can understand the words they are reading.
ReplyDeleteVery well said, Amanda. I completely agree with you when you said, why hasn't this topic become a bigger issue. I also never thought about a child reading to learn and learning to read at the same time because my logic is that if a child is "learning" to read then how can they comprehend the text or learn through reading. I believe these two things should be done at different stages. Children need to learn to read before they can start reading to learn. And Brandi is also correct about how a child should become a fluent reader first. Then the child can start reading to learn. Moss' article was definitely very interesting to read. Learning new things as a future teacher is always important.
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