Flint Ch. 8

In this chapter, Flint talks a lot about developing vocabulary and one of the methods she presents is that of using graphic organizers. I really love to use graphic organizers as I know that they always really helped me when I was learning a new text. Reading and specifically reading comprehension is all about making connections, either to other ideas in the text or to experiences outside of the text. When you can make connections with the text, thats when you can really understand and make meaning in a text. Graphic organizers such as Venn diagrams, T-charts, and word webs, like Flint suggests are a way for students to visually map out their connections. In the video that we watched today in class, we saw that teacher use a graphic organizer which she called a "mind map" with her students to make connections and understand a new vocabulary word. The students all made different connections, using different clues from the text and relating them to different experiences and knowledge, but the graphic organizer allowed them all to come to an understanding of the unknown word.