A New Look at an Old Resource
In English class, finding relevancy for student skill building has always been a task for teachers. When using resources, students don’t realize that many times the included information in the boxes, graphs, and photos may be even more relevant to the reader than the text itself.
This year I combined two resources that enabled students to “see” what they were missing, but more importantly, allowed them to gain better access to the material they needed to understand. Foldables and Scholastic magazines became my focus for relevancy while introducing context clues, idioms, and cause and effect.
Using a power point presentation, I introduced the terms. Nothing different or usual about that. With the goal of students seeing elements of non-fiction texts in a new mindset, I wanted them to understand why context clues were important in determining word meaning, how idioms make our language fun and colorful, and to determine the cause and effect that they see so frequently on the state assessments. Even better, I wanted them to see that you actually can achieve a positive outcome (effect) just by thinking ahead a little bit.
The addition of colorful foldables to record, and thus reinforce meaning of the terms proved interesting. We went over each term as a class, and once we finished, they were at last able to stash the foldables into their folder to forget forever, or so they thought.
When students came into the English class the next day, I announced that they would be using their foldables to identify and label the non-fiction features we previously covered. They were not thrilled, to say the least. But a surprise awaited them! Instead of using one of the heavy textbooks normally used in class, I offered the latest issues of a variety of Scholastic Magazines. As students leafed through the magazines, I could actually hear their tension ease. My students actually saw students in the magazine that looked like them, possibly sharing an experience similar to theirs, or maybe sharing a new discovery through words on a page, but in ways that they could relate. It was as if they had experienced it themselves. Hence, the relevancy had been a success!
Now, we moved on to the concepts required for their state assessments! Each student was given a short stack of sticky notes on which to write the name of the identified feature. At first, there was the expected moaning, but it amazingly changed to positive comments. As students recognized and identified the terms from their foldable and were correctly labeling features in this “cool” magazine, they became excited. One student even said, “it’s kinda like finding Easter eggs.”
Students focused, and realized that “hey, I actually know some of this stuff.” But the magic for me happened when my most non-willing students asked me, “You gonna let us do this again sometime?” With a big smile, I exclaimed, “I’ll get back to you on that.”
Jackie Holland, English Instructor
PRJDC
