Trade Books and Writing to Learn

Chapter 11 of Content Area Reading - Teaching with Trade Books

Many secondary teachers may find it difficult to teach their content in the course of a school year. How can we add more reading materials if we are already struggling to get through our texts? Chapter 11 of Content Area Reading gives many reasons as to why we will see a higher percentage of student sucesss when we incorporate trade books into our teaching, regardless of our discipline or student age level.

The increase of student engagement is one of the most immediate benefits of teaching with trade books. Standard text books often lack pictures that draw students' attention. Students also may immideately be turned away from reading them because they generally have the assumption that they will be "too difficult" to read. The colorful illustrations found in high quality trade books create an interest in reading for students and improves comprehension.
Another reason I plan to use trade books in my future Spanish classroom is to help differentiate instruction and support English Lanuage Learners. Tradebooks help to match students' abilities. I believe that this will advance their content knowledge and make it easier for them to use the required text.

Chapter 2 of Content Area Writing - Writing to Learn

This chapter of Content Area Writing stresses the importance of using writing to learn activities in the classroom, and also offers ideas of how to do so. Although we may not realize it, we are all writing to learn on a daily basis. Grocery lists, phone messages, e-mails, etc. are all activities that we do without thinking. Not only are we doing all of these activities, but are students are as well.  "Low-stakes" writing to learn activites should not take much time, and can help you to assess where your students are at in their learning.
They can also help students to process their learning and practice critical thinking. Some exaples of WTL activites that I plan to use in my future classroom are reflections, blogs, journals, and entry/exit slips.