Greetings to all my colleagues on the Mosaic list serv:
I read a couple emails today from list serv members who are looking for questions to send home with parents and wanted to throw in a couple suggestions. I have reworked the old Major Point Interview for Readers from an appendix of Mosaic to essentially be used as questions for teachers' conferences with kids, but I think they may be useful to send home for parents as well. I'll send them as an attachment to Ginger and perhaps she'll be kind enough to post them for everyone. The questions are broken down by strategy and may be used for more formal assessment or woven into conferences during a comprehension strategy study. I do feel a little reluctance in sending these - I even felt a little reluctant in writing them - because I don't think comprehension can or should ever be boiled down to a pat set of questions teachers ask in conferences. I am also concerned that parents will try to "formalize" their time with their children and reading time will feel too much like school and not enough like taking the time to simply enjoy good books together. I recommend Susan Zimmermann and Chryse Hutchins' book 7 Keys to Comprehension for more on the parents' role and on that issue in particular. Finally, I wanted to let everyone know that Susan and I are in the final, final stages of re-drafting Mosaic of Thought and there is a TON of new material in it. We were going to add something like 20 - 30% new material, but found that basically you all have taught us so much about using the strategies in classrooms that most of the classroom examples had changed and we are including all new short literary and non-fiction pieces at the beginning of each chapter. It's been so much fun to rework it and it will be out by IRA in Toronto! Thanks so much for all your suggestions and support as we've been writing. We sincerely hope that it will be useful to all of you who are really breaking new ground each year in the teaching of comprehension. very best, ellin keene _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
