Subjects Matter Ch. 4: Toward a Balanced Diet of Reading

 

In chapter 4 Of Subjects Matter, one main thing stuck out to me. Examples of ELA classrooms and their applications were cited much less than the other subject areas. Here’s what this made me think while reading it, balancing reading content is much more important in an ELA classroom then they explicitly say, and secondly that a large part of the ELA teacher’s task may be reading that supports the other content areas.

I think the reason they don’t give many specific examples of ELA scenarios is because generally our content has an easier time seeing the importance of reading outside of a textbook. However, even though that is true I think most importantly we need to be careful of assigning just novels, and of the diversity of the authors and stories we share. In my own experience in ELA classes I remember reading novel after novel or literature except from textbooks but I don’t remember doing much non-fiction reading at all- which probably led to my future misery when asked to read non-fiction. I think the text makes a strong point that our other sources need to be closer to real-life reading materials. Why aren’t we sharing newspaper articles, reviews in magazines, letters and government documents even in our ELA classrooms. This is where we can spend our time focusing on how to read these different texts as well.

 

 

With this in mind, as ELA teachers we can be huge assets for the other teachers and our students. If we can use materials that supplement what they are learning in other classrooms, we are increasing connections and repetition of materials, presenting in different ways and strengthen our students’ reading and writing skills. It’s a win-win-win for everyone involved.

The next idea that stood out to me for my classroom in particular is choice in addition to variety. The first step is building a large classroom library which shelves a variety of different genres, fiction, and non-fiction, poetry, written from multiple perspectives.  But what about allowing more student choice in “assigned” classroom readings? I was thinking of the idea of jigsaws what if you took a theme which the students were studying in their science or history; class chose a few different books written in many different styles which related to that theme in some way, had students read different texts that they chose from your selections and did literature circles? This activity would support different reading levels, interests, other content areas, and variation within the ELA classroom without taking up an entire unit on one single text.