What made an impact on you in these chapters?
When reflecting on these chapters, it is daunting to me how much one does while actually reading! I am also curious how I was able to learn all these different types of inferencing without actually learning it. I have no recollection of learning any of the inferences discussed in ch. 6. Nevertheless, I now have a better understanding of some of the underlying meanings of the popular response, "I don't get it". Additionally, some of these inferences take background knowledge which some of my students are significantly lacking. Moving forward, an idea came to my mind that could assist students with background knowledge acquisition. For my Bell Ringers each week I have specific days such as Vocabulary Monday, Trivia Tuesday, etc. I think that I could have a day dedicated to Geography where I take students to different locations throughout the US and maybe the world, although I am specifically focused on US History. Students could take a few minutes to explore this new area hopefully through Google Earth or other virtual fieldtrip platform.
Lastly, these sentences stood out to me towards the end of chapter 4. "This is one reason why reading aloud to young children is so important. They not only learn about words and the world as we read to them but also learn how texts work." (p. 39) After reading this I pondered the question of, should we be reading aloud to teenagers too? Does it have the same benefit? If a majority of students have their heads down or are daydreaming while I am reading, would it still be worth it? If I made it a routine and expectation in my classroom, would this change things?
How do you respond to students "who don't get it"? After this reading how will that shift?
Usually when a student states, "I don't get it," I ask them what part they struggle with understanding. If they respond with the phrase, "I don't know," then my next step is to inquire about potential vocabulary words that they could be struggling to understand. After reading this section of the book, I now have more things that I can pull from to help students decode and figure out what exactly the meaning of a reading is such as all those inferencing techniques.