Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Strategies that Work/ Possible Unit Texts

Well...so much for highlighting! I had to go back and make side notes in order to make sure I understood everything! Lol... Seriously though, these chapters had A LOT of good information, and I'll probably have to read it again in order to soak it all in. The one topic I didn't quite understand was using anchors. How would I use this when teaching math?

Questions:

Q: What are the possible texts you will be using in your literacy unit?
A: The only text I can think of using is the Algebra 1 textbook. I'm also thinking of asking Javier for economic topics and seeing if I can create a lesson on translating economic issues into math equations.

Q: What challenges do you see these texts posing to your students in terms of comprehension?
A: The first thing that comes to my mind is students not understanding the meaning of the words they read. If I don't teach them such words as dividend, quotient, product, sum, etc..then we won't be able to move forward. Also, my Precalculus students of three years ago couldn't figure out how to draw or solve a given word problem because they didn't know what a buoy was.
Q: Looking at the lists of strategies that good readers use, which strategies do you think would prove most useful to your students in their comprehension of the text you give them?
A: Drawing pictures, making a list of what they do understand and what confuses them, pair share,...there's so many

1 comment:

Etherius said...

Hi Chrisel!

Yeah, those funny words like "buoy" show up in story problems all the time, don't they? I always liked story problems when I was younger, because they made the math more tangible -- but I can see now how they would pose a problem if your literacy skills were lacking.

Hopefully the vocabulary techniques we talked about tonight will help you to teach those tricky content-related words to your students more effectively!

Cheers,

Chris