Opening a New Chapter: Strategies for getting the context of curriculum chapter books!

As the Mind Wing blog has been focusing on using chapter books for older students, in conjunction with narrative and expository development tools, this Tech Tuesday post will also! In this post, we’ll take a look at technology resources that facilitate your access to chapter books. These strategies will enable you to use chapter books more easily as contexts when developing students’ sense of story and informational text structures with Mind Wing’s Story Grammar Marker® and Expository maps.

Naturally, we’d be conducting educationally relevant interventions even if we selected our own texts for lessons. For example, take this Common Core Standard for 5th Grade Reading:

The skills of describing how characters respond to challenges and summarizing a text are supported by the Critical Thinking Triangle® (see Critical Thinking Poster here) and use of a Complete Episode Poster or map, respectively, and can be addressed with texts of our own selection. However, isn’t it even more relevant if we can go the extra mile and use chapter books and texts that students are grappling with in their classroom, even if we don’t do so in their entirety?

The practice of aligning with both the necessary skill sets and the context of the classroom is not always an easy one. However, I am often inspired by the work in our field on contextually driven there.

Using actual curriculum texts in intervention, while avoiding the responsibility of “teaching” those particular texts, logically facilitates our students’ access to the content of the classroom while increasing the likelihood that they will generalize skills back there as well.

However, when it comes to chapter books that students may be reading (or the teacher reading to all) within the classroom, there are a few challenges. One of these is access: there may not be an extra copy available! The bigger challenge is time; chapter books are of course longer than picture books, and it is difficult for us to make the time to read them. What follows are a few tech tips to make this process easier, even if you just pick and choose a book or two for your students!

Utilize the power of your public library: The Overdrive app (free for virtually any type of device) gives you access to borrow Indian Classics Books and audio books for free from your public library. All you need is your library card number and PIN (obtained from your library) and you will have access to all of their offerings. Granted, you are at the mercy of availability, so think ahead or put yourself on hold lists to select a few chapter books you might “follow along with” for a given group of students, even if you only do so for a few chapters. Once you have the context, however, constructing lessons in narrative and expository mapping is a snap.

Audiobooks, mentioned above, are a really great way to become better-versed in classroom contexts such as picture books. An advantage of these is that you can often get the information you need (plot, characters, story and information structures) while multitasking. Reclaim your long commute time or even time spent working out by listening to a book at the same time. A disadvantage is the high cost of audiobooks.

[Source: http://mindwingconcepts.com/blogs/news/86767361-opening-a-new-chapter-strategies-for-getting-the-context-of-curriculum-chapter-books]

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