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Synopsis of the Making Meaning Curriculum |
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| Middlebury Community Schools | ||
The Making Meaning program uses rich, authentic read-aloud books to explicitly teach reading comprehension in a social learning setting. There are common reading strategies that we all use when we are encountering new reading selections. If you have recently picked up a research article, or a more complex reading selection such as The Wall Street Journal, you probably slowed down and used more strategies to understand it than if you were reading a simple email from a colleague. These reading comprehension strategies are common to all levels of readers. Making Meaning teaches students to identify and use these strategies to make sense of their texts. The program also uses a framework that encourages students to be responsible partners who can support their own opinions and also respect the ideas of others.
The program is a K-6 curriculum that introduces basic skills at kindergarten and builds on those strategies as students mature as readers. The strategies that are used to make sense of text are:
- Retelling a story
- Making connections between the story and their own experience
- Visualizing the setting and action
- Wondering and asking oneself questions throughout the story
- Understanding text structures (Table of contents, captions, diagrams, etc.)
- Making inferences
- Determining important ideas
- Summarizing
- Synthesizing
As you can see there is a hierarchy of skill levels in this list, but once a strategy is introduced, it is elaborated on each subsequent year.
In addition to its strong comprehension instruction, Making Meaning also utilizes cooperative learning to further boost student learning. The National Reading Panel says it best, “Having peers instruct or interact over the use of reading strategies leads to an increase in the learning of the strategies, promotes intellectual discussion, and increases reading comprehension. This procedure saves on teacher time and gives the students more control over their learning and social interaction with peers.” Components of the social development piece are:
- Working together cooperatively
- Appreciating others’ ideas
- Discussing ethical issues in texts
- Disagreeing in a respectful way
- Asking clarifying questions
- Justifying opinions
- Taking responsibility for learning and behavior
A typical lesson would begin with the reading of a prescribed, authentic book. As the read aloud progresses, the teacher might stop several times and ask the students to turn to a partner and share, or write a brief response to a question in a journal. After the text, more discussion might occur as a whole group. The discussion uses one or more of the strategies being studied at the time. Charts are generated about good reading strategies that can be referred to as students read independently later.
The response to the Making Meaning program has been overwhelmingly positive. The teachers agree that it is good comprehension instruction. It guides the teacher in establishing a solid learning environment right from the beginning of the year, and it is user friendly. This curriculum will certainly help our students construct meaning as they read.