The COVID pandemic distance learning year (last school year) limited most teachers to using electronic texts, which proved to be a struggle for most students to navigate and comprehend. Multiple student surveys have indicated a want and a need for going back to physical books with pages students can physically turn and annotate. Even at the high school level, these visual aides are crucial for our young readers to be able to cohesively understand a story, especially for those with special needs and learning accommodations. The pandemic also resulted in lack of reading motivation for many students, who returned to in-person school this year feeling out of touch with the classroom and it's "old" core-literature (deemed uninteresting--sometimes even irrelevant--to our students, who coped with so many changes and emotional turmoil over the past year). This classroom library will be used to engage students, to pull their interest back toward reading and back toward classroom motivation. They will not only be used for independent reading & personal book choice, but also for group literature circles and discussions comparing and contrasting characters and themes.
In the high school English classroom, reading is a core content standard (RL 11-12), it's primary goal being: demonstrating comprehension of literature & nonfiction proficiently. These books will help students to practice independent reading skills (including summarizing, visualizing, predicting, making inferences, etc.) and comprehension skills focused on determining major concepts & themes, analyzing settings, & character complexities, interpreting figurative & connotative meanings, determining author’s purpose, and citing strong & thorough textual evidence.
About my class
The COVID pandemic distance learning year (last school year) limited most teachers to using electronic texts, which proved to be a struggle for most students to navigate and comprehend. Multiple student surveys have indicated a want and a need for going back to physical books with pages students can physically turn and annotate. Even at the high school level, these visual aides are crucial for our young readers to be able to cohesively understand a story, especially for those with special needs and learning accommodations. The pandemic also resulted in lack of reading motivation for many students, who returned to in-person school this year feeling out of touch with the classroom and it's "old" core-literature (deemed uninteresting--sometimes even irrelevant--to our students, who coped with so many changes and emotional turmoil over the past year). This classroom library will be used to engage students, to pull their interest back toward reading and back toward classroom motivation. They will not only be used for independent reading & personal book choice, but also for group literature circles and discussions comparing and contrasting characters and themes.
In the high school English classroom, reading is a core content standard (RL 11-12), it's primary goal being: demonstrating comprehension of literature & nonfiction proficiently. These books will help students to practice independent reading skills (including summarizing, visualizing, predicting, making inferences, etc.) and comprehension skills focused on determining major concepts & themes, analyzing settings, & character complexities, interpreting figurative & connotative meanings, determining author’s purpose, and citing strong & thorough textual evidence.
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