Hello and happy Friday!
I'm writing to let you know some exciting news: I have begun a new blogging adventure, called Teaching For the Whole Story, hosted by Education Week. There, I will write about many aspects of education (as I have done at On the Shoulders of Giants), but I will be focusing especially on issues and practices related to the teaching of reading and writing.
So far, I have two posts:
In the first one, Why I'm Teaching For the Whole Story, I try to apply the whole novels concept to life beyond literature and explain what I mean by teaching for the whole story. It's a post that was not easy to write and took me back to some pieces of my own history that led me to teach.
This week, in Helping Students Toward Reading More Complex Students Independently: No More Training Wheels!, I tried to answer the question of how we should approach teaching students to read complex texts independently, since there is so much pressure to increase the Lexile levels in our text selections. I find some answers to this question in a story involving bicycles.
I hope you'll check these out! I will continue to post updates here about all things whole novels, and more.