"Children who are avid readers co-research the processes central to their engagement as readers in creating, entering, and sustaining a story world" (Parsons, 2006, p. 492).
This week I will be talking about my Genre Presentation article that I read. The article was titled Visualizing Worlds from Words on a Page by Linda Parsons. This article was mostly about how children create a story world in their mind while they read. This article also mentioned strategies that children engage in while reading. The six themes or strategies that the children used while reading were connecting to characters, being in the book, experiencing emotions and physical reactions, wondering and predicting and visualizing. This article urged teachers to focus on the aesthetic stance versus the comprehension focus. The aesthetic stance focuses on the experience of reading, and the feelings, sensations and images that come to children while reading. Parsons and the co-researchers, who were the children, found that the aesthetic stance actually led to higher comprehension and interest in reading. One of the more prominent strategies or themes that came from this article is visualizing as you read. Descriptive language that authors and classmates writing includes will support children while they are reading to create stories in their minds.
This article has helped me in my classroom because the mindset of this article was to create lifelong readers and this is something that I feel strongly about doing. I think it is important to not just make sure that students understand what they are reading but also that they are enjoying what they are reading. This article also gave me some mini lesson ideas that can focus on visualization, connecting to characters, imagining yourself in the book, emotions and feelings about the book, and wondering and predicting while reading. I also gained knowledge about fostering hypothesizing and extending children's knowledge. I also gained more evidence as to why providing students choice in their books is important. I also liked reading about how teachers should also give students choice in their form of response. Now in my guided reading groups, I have been giving students 2 or 3 choices to respond to the book. I also have been using this knowledge in my writing workshop because I have been teaching students to write as if they are creating a story or write as if the reader can picture it in their head. I appreciated learning about how to teach children the way and reasons to read, not simply the way. I also appreciated how children were viewed as active engagers in the reading while they create, enter, and sustain the story world.
Parsons, Linda T. 2006. Visualizing Worlds From Words On a Page. Language Arts;
Urbana, 83(6), 492-500.
