Quote: "Students also locate "important" sentences in books they read; these sentences are worthy of examination because they contain figurative language, employ an interesting sentence structure, express a theme, or illustrate a character trait."
Comment: While I found a lot of very interesting and helpful material in this section of reading, I also disagreed with a few of the ideas. I understand that it is important for students to learn sentence structure, figurative language, and themes, but I'm not sure I would go about it in this way. I know for me, the last thing I think about while I'm reading a book is, "wow nice theme" or " that was awesome figurative language." I think it ruins the reading process to either chop up the reading into having to pause and think about sentence structure, or to have to go back and analyze what you just read. I personally think this deters from a real genuine love of reading that we are trying to foster in students. I think their are plenty other ways to teach these methods and get children familiar with the all the parts of a sentence.
Question: Do you agree or disagree with this idea in the book? If you were to disagree what would be some alternative ways of teaching sentence structure, themes, and figurative language?
I am right on the same page as you, Zaundra. I feel like a big part of my lack of love for reading stemmed from teaching strategies like this in late elementary and junior high. One thing that I do think could be useful by asking students to identify particular sentence structures, is that we really get to see application in the classroom. I think it might be helpful to identify sentence structure in books that kids choose. This way they're already engaged in the topic and might be able to relate/apply the information more quickly and more efficiently.
ReplyDeleteI think it is important that we include themes and sentence structure in our teaching because it's a necessary tool, but I think it's important to remember that there is also a time and a place for free reading without the worry of grammar and themes. I think as long as we distinctly separate the two, students can still foster their personal love of reading.