The authors' purpose was to convince the reader that there is power in approach. Creating a context that engages students and they still learn the importance of how, the application of how, that teaches transfer and gives students the opportunity for choice and discussion. Add the power of writing and powerful readers will surely develop.

This was a great book. I certainly appreciated their innovative approach to teaching literary elements. I hope to apply their methods in my classroom..

Helping Students Understand Point of View

This chapter goes into great depth telling how to educate ourselves and teach students about point of view.

One way to establish a "mindfulness" that will require students to reflect on inferred knowledge they would use in a dramatic activity. The authors promote using drama throughout the book, especially for learning characters, setting and point of view. Making sure that the drama activity encompasses anyone or some or one strategy from the list I wrote in my last blog.

Another way to effectively teach point of view is using simulated texts. Simulated texts are a useful tool because they provide repeated practice with a specific strategy. The authors refer to this as a "concentrated sample". They recommend doing simulated text lessons after introducing point of view and participating in a drama activity.

What would follow after simulated text lessons would be to use student writing. The authors encourage student writings to be used in a number of ways because it can be very powerful to help them understand what they need to do as readers. Requiring students to write a monologue of their own gives them the ability to write about a reliable or unreliable narrator. Have the students read their monologues out loud and after each reading have the rest of the class assess the narrator's reliability and discuss the clues that drew them to their final assessment.

Once you have progressed the class in their learning utilize popular cultural material. Films and television shows because many of them will tell stories from multiple perspectives. You can utilize the website www.cinemagora.co.uk/tag-7347-multiple-perspectives.html gives a list of the best multiple perspectives voted on by people who visit this website. Using television shows with multiple characters and having students tell the story from specific characters point of view.

Lastly, music. It is another way to help give students an understanding of point of view. Many songs feature dramatized narrators such as Randy Newman's "Short People". Many people interpreted this song at face value and took offence to it, while in reality it was an ironic monologue. Bruce Springsteen has written many monologues and there are countless others from many other artists for teachers to chose from.

Pondering Point of View

How the author conveys their point of view in a story is very important. The words that we use to examine stories isn't quite enough to truly examine the story. Meaning, we - ourselves are not understanding how important "point of view" is and that we because we don't have understanding AND vocabulary we don't transfer the learning to our students.

Point of view is collected from perspectives that the people presenting information to us take. The authors write about political ads, how some we agree with some and others we shake our heads at. TV news, we choose the stations based on how they connect to the stories of the day and how they report it to us. We chose newspaper articles much in the same way. We ask ourselves how the author is connected to the story and how do they present it to us. Do we like it? Do we disagree? Does the author always seem to be presenting from a negative stand point and maybe some of us like that so we watch and read. All the while still knowing that we cannot truly believe everything they tell us until we hear the other side. In literature and in life we "call" how a story is told through the writer's point of view, and in both arenas point of view is very important. And yet, as individuals we have an poor vocabulary to discuss point view and therefore we are not terribly equipped to really, really teach point-of-view.

The authors made these suggestions at the end of the chapter:

1. We have to be alert for the status of the narrator-that is, the extent to which the narrator is credible.
2. We have to be alert for how the narrator regards us.
3. if the narrator treats us as equals, we have to consider whether that's a club we want to be part of.
4. If the narrator seems to look up to or down on us, we have to ask how we feel about that.
5. We have to recognize when the narrator's judgments are explicit and when we have to infer them.
6. If the author seems to want us to believe the narrator, then we have to ascertain just how we feel about the narrator's
judgments; that is, we have to decide if we want to embrace or resist them.
7. If the narrator isn't credible, we have to reconstruct the narrative, basing our reconstruction on what's not under dispute in
the work and on our knowledge of the world.

Interpret and Create Setting

The authors list four challenges that seemed important to target and help teachers teach setting

1. Help students attend to the appropriate levels and dimensions
2. Help students realize the salient features of setting
3. Help students use their own experiences to figure out the rules of how these levels and dimensions work with text
4. Help students attend to the interplay of the dimensions and to make predictions and interpretations

It seemed like a lot to me to take in, but as I continued reading the author included a story and a making prediction questionnaire to help students begin to understand about setting. It certainly is a different approach, one I have not used, so I uploaded the story for all of you to read and then fill out the Making Predictions sheet. Try it, see what you learn from a learners point of view.

The Importance and Power of Context

This chapter is interesting and has quite a bit of information that is complicated to me. The jest is that setting is important and there are dimensions of settings. Some are overt and easy to identify and clues are embedded and we scan right past them. The author tells gives the following explanation to help us understand:

"Jeff is a passionate marathon cross-country skier. He knows that he must put his weight squarely on each ski to get the best glide. He has a mnemonic that acts as a conceptual tool to help him do so: "knees, nose, toes." The mnemonic reminds him how his head, knees and toes should line up, which in turn ensures that he has the proper bend in his ankle and knee to place his weight where it should go. If he can actually line up his body in this way, he has a procedural tool that he can put to use. And if he does so, his skis become physical tools that allow him to ski really fast! (Faster than he otherwise should have, anyway.) Obviously, these tools can only be developed and are only useful in a particular context: that of skiing on a cross-country ski trail."

The reason for the above explanation is to help us understand that students need the same tools that can be used for conceptual tools that assist in noticing and thinking and procedural tools that support interpretation and consequential actions. If students only learn definitions than they only have immobile pieces of information, they do not have tools that can be flexible and transferrable. How do we do give our students tools? By developing and teaching meaningful work that has purpose.

The author states we want to teach "toolish" not "schoolish"!

Character Response Sheet

here is the character response sheet I spoke about in my previous blog. This type of questionnaire finds purpose in any guided reading group or discussion teachers are having with their students about a book. I liked it when I used it this past week with one of my guided reading groups. I have six groups. All are reading a different book, it makes it difficult for me to come up with engaging questions with my students if I have not read with them. I found this questionnaire helpful striking a discussion and keeping the discussion going.

Chapter 4 - Teaching Character With Particular Units and Texts

This chapter is soooo good! I'm not sure what to write about. The authors argue that story specific questions do not help students understand the story they are reading. They present that a set of questions could apply across stories AND they accomplish much more AND the students develop an ability to transfer.

I liked the Character response sheet because I find myself sitting in a reading group trying to come up with questions to urge my students to begin a discussion. The one strategy I used from this book last week really got my students talking, they were laughing and sharing. I loved it! My students enjoyed discussing the character in their book and it sparked other discussions about the book that I don't think I could have created it. I will give the character response sheet a try this coming week!