Children's Book Review:

"Stellaluna" by Janell Cannon is about how a mother fruit bat loves her baby, Stellaluna, very much and would not let anything happen to her. Until one night, an owl attacks the bats, knocking Stellaluna out of her mother's safe embrace, and she falls into the forest. One morning she wakes up and is in a sparrow's nest filled with three baby birds named Pip, Flitter, and Flap. The mother sparrow will only let Stellaluna stay with them if she only ate bugs, doesn't hang by her feet and sleeps at night. She did her best but she couldn't help wanting to fly at night or hang upside down to sleep. Then one day, Stellaluna was separated from her bird family and was discovered sleeping with her head up by a very surprised bat. The other bats came to see this bat sleeping with her head up and she is happily reunited with her mother. When her bird family comes to visit, they discovered the being bat-like is just as hard for baby birds as being bird-like was for her.

I chose this book because I think that it exemplifies how even though we are different in our own ways we as humans or animals are so much alike. This book values the importance of finding our own identity, why people make and break promises, and what makes up a family. This is one of my many favorite books that I have read to my children at my internship last spring semester and they would always ask me to read it everyday.

Chapter 7: Writing Online

In this book, Chapter 7 is called, "Writing Online." This chapter focuses on the main idea of "digital writing," which is defined as "compositions created with, and oftentimes for reading or viewing on a computer or other devices that is connected to the Internet." While reading further into this chapter, it also discusses the different types of online blogs that may be used that is occurring in technology now. From my experiences with writing blogs and reading different blogs they are usually intended to comment, review or critique different works of literature as well as other things such as movies, music, social issues and etc. The book then states a great insight on the strategies on writing blogs such as, "showing an awareness of audience, especially a worldwide audience, synthesizing information across multiple sources, evaluating the relevance of connections, and evaluating the relevance of additional images and media." This definitely was an eye opener when writing blogs.

During my college career, I have taken online courses where we had to use Blackboard, for example. Blackboard is an online source where college students and the teachers can communicate with eachother and students can submit in their work. There has been times where the professor has taken a day off, for personal reasons, and because she didn't want us to get behind in our school work, she would make us go online and post something about what we were talking about. She would post some ideas and each one of us would go after that idea and elaborate our own interpretation of the idea and from there we can comment on each others ideas. Online blogging and commenting is such a resourceful took because students can then share their own information and interpretations, which is basically what this chapter is touching base on. 

One of the techniques that the chapter talks about is using the anchor charts. When reading this section, I found it to be very resourceful as the anchor chart is an effective scaffold for students' to learn during modeled lessons. Anchor charts are created by both teachers and students who are meant to highlight specific guidelines or behaviors for performing a particular strategy. I personally have never seen an anchor chart before but by reading the section for it I believe that it will be effective to use in the classroom. I would love to use something like this in the future! 

Chapter 6: Using E-Tools to Scaffold Comprehension of E-Literature

The next chapter that was assigned was chapter 6, "Using E-Tools to Scaffold Comprehension of E-Literature." This chapter was very informative because it introduced the different tools and comprehension strategies for when using digital texts. In this text, there were different step by step information listed for bother the younger and older children the comprehension strategies for when they are reading digital texts and this seemed to be useful for when teachers want to use it in their classroom.

One of the strategies that they talked about was the online annotations. As a student in college, I tend to use a lot of sticky notes. Every time I have something to read for class, I grab my pack of sticky notes and a pen and when I come notice something important I would write it down and stick it to the page. I use this method so I wouldn't forget what the important fact is for the page. One semester, I was reading a story and I have at least two sticky note on each page because the story had a lot of facts and details that I didn't want to forget about when having a class discussion the next day. When reading this selection of "Online Annotations," I learned that there is an online way to use sticky notes. The book states, "Sticky notes have become a popular tool to assist students with monitoring comprehension, as students use them to write thoughts, questions, or unknown words while reading independently" (89). One of the websites that the book provides and gets in depth with is WebNotes, which is a downloaded to the computer, and a toolbar appears below the address bar of the browser. The sticky notes that are now on your computer can also be highlighted and you can put them in folders on your computer. I believe this strategy can help students especially when they are reading something online and they don't understand what a word means. Also, whether they want to be someone like me and write down the facts and little details that may be important later on in the reading. This chapter talked about so much more digital texts. For example, the author visits, Google Lit trips, book talks and book trailers. These activities would be so much fun for kids to do in the classroom and I know just like them I will be very excited to use it in my classroom. Reading this chapters and learning about the different digital texts that we as teachers may use in our classrooms makes me so excited and has opened my eyes to all the different strategies.