Literacy

Coming from a math background I found this article to be filled with tons of useful information because I never knew a lot of it.  It is funny how as we are reading we take advantage of some things that authors intend to put on the page or not.  After reading through everything the one thing that really stuck with me was the structural changes of text in children's books.  I was amazed to read about the child that could figure out that the mom or women was screaming in the book merely because of the font size chosen by the author.  Font size, colors, and even shapes have such a big impact on children when reading.  This makes me want to think about all of these things while writing my children's book for this class.  It also appeals to me because of the importance of pictures and other graphics.  When making notes for my students in math I am going to include way more pictures in order to facilitate what is being communicated to the children.  When students are being read to I feel they should be able to communicate what is on their mind but to a certain extent.  Sometimes when you are being read to you create this imagery in your mind of what you think the scenario looks or feels like, but once a fellow classmates calls out, this may change or ruin your imagery of the topic.  I think a better method would be to give students a pad of paper to write or draw illustrations that come to their mind when they are being read to.  I definitely see a great benefit to having students participate when being read to, but there are other ways than having them call out or even raise their hand and maybe change a story for someone else.  Just some food for thought.