"To scaffold students' capacity to ask questions within the context of academic content, teachers must first engage and motivate students with content, sparking curiosity to pose questions that prompt deeper thinking" (pg. 121).
Chapter 8 talks about the important of critical thinking and developing informative and essential questions that relate to the text that the child may be reading. In the classroom, the teacher's influence on the student's learning is very important. As teachers, it is important when we organize the student's thoughts and guide them through their reading. The book mentions the importance of making textual connections based on the student's personal and past experiences. In another course I took last semester, we went over the importance of the student's connection with the text. Just like this chapter, it talked about the important of the text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. It is important for students to make these connections because then they can create their own meaning of text based on their own emotions, concerns, life experiences and what they are reading.
While reading more into this chapter, it presented other information such as the use of the media and the Internet to find good sources to analyze while researching a text. This chapter gives a lot of critical thinking questions that our students should ask themselves while looking into a particular topic that they are researching. The book gave some questions such as: What am I trying t find out about my topic? What do I want to know or solve? What key words should I use in my search query? What kind of information am I looking for? (pg. 124). As we all know Google is the first search engine that we go to when researching something that we want to know more information about. The book talks about a site called Gooru (www.goolearning.org) which is a great search engine to use for this particular search. One of the citation services that was mentioned in the chapter was Easybib. As a English major, Easybib was my best friend because all I had to do was plug everything in and they would do the citation for me. It's easy to use and very helpful when trying to make citations for a paper.
Hey Kayla! I really enjoyed this chapter because it continues to talk about the different types of tools that teachers can use in a classroom that will benefit their students needs. I really like the importance of connecting to the text by text-to-text, text-to-world, and text-to-self. It is good for children to use their previous background knowledge to relate to a text. I also used Easy bib because it is such an easy tool for students to use if they are unfamiliar with how to cite texts.
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