Notice and Note ~ Section 4

Question 7: Do Text-Dependent Questions Foster Engagement?
“Now students must depend on the text to answer that question, setting aside their own thoughts about this situation.”
As a reader myself, I don’t think that students should ever put aside their own thoughts.  They need to constantly be connecting themselves to what they are reading in order make meaning of the words on the page.  We want students to develop their own thinking as they read and share that with others.  This section offers the concept of letting students create their own text-dependent questions.

This post by The Joy of Teaching on annotating text is a great way to put these concepts to work.

Question 8: Must Everyone Read the Same Book?
I was very eager to read this chapter because, as a new 5th grade teacher, this was something that I struggled with.  In 2nd grade, I would do a read-aloud every day and the students self-selected their own books to read independently.  This year, there were chapter books that our district mandated that all students read.  However, I still wanted students to read books that they chose on their own, books that interested them.

I enjoyed sharing a book with the students for the exact reasons that the book mentions:

“…there’s a need for community, for learning to listen to someone else’s opinion, for learning to disagree respectfully, for discovering how to support ideas with reason, for discovering that when you talk with another about a book, you learn more than when you think it through alone.”