Conley's Chapter 5

In Chapter 5, the most important thing I read was using different text while teaching our students. Not only confiding ourselves just to text that comes form the textbooks, but also, web pages, trade books, music, movies, and other media, magazines, and newspapers. Incorporating these things into our lessons leads the students to a better understanding in the content areas. We are to also use the text to motivate the students to overcome problems they are currently facing in life.
The different types of text Conley elaborated on are: informational, narrative, and digital text.

• Informational text are our textbooks which can appear on billboards, lists, graphics, and logos on food packages, and traffic and road signs. One other type of informational text is documents, which include forms, schedules, indexes, tables, charts, checks, deposit slips, labels, music transcriptions. They are consistent and their message is purposeful.
  
• Narrative text represent varied worlds, cultures, values, and beliefs. This type of text invite students to compare their experiences with characters and situations reflected in the text. When the students reflect, they gain knowledge about themselves and the people and world around them.
  
• Digital text this was my favorite, and most interesting. I includes photographs, the media(television, electronic newspapers, and cartoons), movies, and Internet images. All of the digital text has its own creative language. It allows the students to encounter experiences with literacy.

Before we as teacher are about to choose text for our students. We are to find out the student learning needs. The text offered creating a BIG IDEA chart, which I thought would be very useful. Creating this chart gives the students their options of what they can learn due to their knowledge and practices.
By doing these we are able to see what the students need to learn and from there we are able to select the appropriate literature to incorporate into our lessons by using useful strategies.