Preparation

Chapter 3

After reading this chapter it answered a question I had in my mind this whole time.  Why are there charts on the beginning of every chapter.  After reading the chapter and looking back at the charts they are great tools.  They layout the whole chapter and what will be covered.  To build off this, this chapter was about the preparation stage in PAR.  It started out with some interesting information that I felt was very important.  Even the smartest of people have a hard time reading things they are not interested in.  This fact made me feel a lot better.  I know that as a student it wasn’t ever that reading was too hard, I just didn’t find it interesting.  The book then describe how the process of learning is like a basketball game.  This was a great analogy, which is another tool they brought up, that could be used to help students understand the learning process.  After all this the reading began talking about prior knowledge.  We know that people learn better when they can apply it to something they already know, it can just be hard to do this in the classroom.  Teacher’s need to get creative to activate that prior knowledge to reading.  They talked about some examples to use to help active prior knowledge.  The examples they gave were; prelearning concept check, story impressions, K-W-L activity, WIKA, rewriting text, written previews, graphic organizers, anticipation guides, factstorming, prep strategy, and analogies.  I found a lot of these very good ways to help prepare for reading.  I really liked the analogies idea because it is a great way to try and connect the story to what students already know about.  I have to also say, I love how the book has an example of all the different ideas to get a sense of what it could look like.  I was a little confused before on what activities are done in the preparation stage but know I almost feel like an expert on ideas to use.