Textmapping

Before I begin. . .  what a long week it was!  Sorry for the lack of posts this week.  I have been swimming in work and haven't had a moment to post anything.  In the past week, I have created and/or significantly revised 48 different literacy center activities, eight activities in six different literacy areas.  That means thinking of what I need them to be, then typing them up, putting them in folders, and listing all the extra materials and copies I need to gather in school to complete the centers. Of course, the type A in me also had to search Google for 48 different clip art images to make each one fun.  Creating these center activities also meant making and gluing 48 center names on 48 folders.  So, that's what I have been doing with my nights this week in addition to the regular classroom planning and grading. This job can be so consuming at times!  If you teach you know exactly what I'm talking about!

I'm posting today about an instructional technique I used in class this week with great success.  During the week, I will also be posting a few quick posts on some anchor charts my friends and I have created along with a couple of organizing tips.  But, on to today's topic. . .

Have you tried TEXTMAPPING? 

Here's some background info from The Textmapping Project explaining exactly what it is:
 (If you click on the the link above, it will take you to their site, which has a wealth of information.)

Overview of Textmapping

Textmapping is a graphic organizer technique that can be used to teach reading comprehension and writing skills, study skills, and course content. It is practiced on scrolls , which are an alternative environment to books. Textmapping and scrolls can be used strategically, but they are not strategies. They are enabling technologies - simple, basic tools which can be used for reading and classroom instruction. The same strategies that can be taught in books can be taught more clearly and explicitly by using scrolls  and mapping .

• Textmapping involves long paper scrolls, colored markers, and a spatially-descriptive form of marking called mapping.
• It has seven key instructional benefits
• It is easy to learn and easy to implement in the classroom.
• Implementation costs are very low.
• It has been used with mainstream, ESL, and special needs classes at all levels, from elementary through college.

Textmapping enables teachers to clearly and explicitly model reading comprehension, writing and study skills in the course of regular classroom instruction.
Textmapping shines a light on the pre-reading process. It focuses more attention on, and spends more time with, the text itself - lingering on the page, delaying abstraction, forcing readers to engage in a more careful in-context comprehension of both the big picture and the details, and enabling teachers to explicitly and systematically model comprehension processes.
It is low-tech, easy to learn, easy to teach, requires no special equipment, and can be adapted easily and inexpensively for use in the classroom. All you need is access to a copier, tape or glue-stick, and colored pencils, markers, or crayons.

Here's what it looked like in my classroom:

This was a literacy lesson in my reading class.  My objective was to teach features of non-fiction text.  I like to do a quick lesson on this at the beginning of the year because they do encounter this from day one.  If I waited until we do our non-fiction unit, a lot of learning would be lost.  For this lesson, I copied the next lesson we would be covering in our social studies class. 

I paired my friends, they taped together their scrolls, and we went to work.  I posted this on my Pro Board, and worked through it with them.

My friends really enjoyed this lesson.  First of all, it had them out of their seats and using highlighters!  More to the point, I liked the lesson for several reasons:

• I found having the entire lesson visible at the same time, rather than just two open book pages, allowed them to see and make connections across the lesson that they wouldn't usually make. 
• Highlighting and discussing the different text features really drew their attention to the set-up of non-fiction texts, particularly our social studies textbook since that is what we used.
• I totally killed two birds with one stone with this lesson.  The section of text I copied was the social studies lesson I was to read and teach the next day.  Because my friends had so much interaction with the text during mapping, I was able to skip the lesson part and jump right to the assessment which they did very well on.  Their comprehension was spot-on.

So, if you haven't tried text mapping, I would suggest visiting the site for The Textmapping Project and reading more about it.  I think you will like it.

By the way, they write it as one word: textmapping.  I'm thinking it should be two words: text mapping.  So, just to be fair I think I mixed it up in this post! Totally on purpose, of course! ;-P