Graves Ch. 6 VS. Adolescents Ch. 2

After reading both of the chapters, I feel that they were both similar in some ways, but  mostly different. They were similar due to the fact that they both gave strategies to use in the classroom. This was helpful and insightful, but only targeted specific groups for each book.

In Graves, the focus was on younger students, specifically kindergarten and first grade. Reading this chapter was really interesting to me because I understood how teachers go about teaching kids to learn how to read. Before starting this class (and reading this chapter), I was intimidated about how teachers do this. I feel that it is such a complex concept that I am not sure how teachers get through to everyone. I loved that this chapter really cleared things up for me. All of the different strategies and activities seemed really helpful and perfect for teaching the students. It was neat to see the break-down of all of the different concepts to teach and ways to teach them. I also enjoyed how they added a kindergarten day schedule with specifics to see how a teacher manages everything. Although I liked reading this chapter a lot, I could not relate to it. Wanting to teach middle school math does not involve teaching the alphabet and phonics, but I did like how this chapter helped me understand how students start off learning to read.

In "Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents", strategies were also a main concept of the chapter. I did find this text more helpful to my area of study than the Graves chapter, but I also felt that some parts were very irrelevant. I thought the story about Abdurashid was so fascinating! The fact that he learned so much  material while learning English in such a short amount of time is crazy to me. I also loved how Herbert Hoover High School really made big improvements in their school by creating common strategies to teach/learn by. I really liked the anticipatory activities because I feel that it is very important to truly engage your students and make them want to learn! Being a future math teacher, I also loved the graphic organizers. I know I will be working a lot with graphs and charts, so this section was very helpful to me. However, the five page description on vocabulary instruction did not seem very relevant to me.

The two chapters related in the sense that good strategies were explained in great detail. Yet the two chapters focused on completely different age groups, and therefore did not have a lot of connections. Overall, I enjoyed the Graves chapter better just because it made the concept of teaching how to read clearer to me.