Nothing is more exciting than seeing kids "transfer and apply." This is a great phrase that I learned from Shana Frazin, a staff developer at Teachers College. My interpretation of this phrase is: taking something that you have learned and transferring and applying it to another piece of work, subject area, or another part of your life.
As a lover of literacy, I am always excited when kids can transfer and apply between reading and writing. Very often, I will try to make these connections and applications explicit for them (demonstrating reading-writing reciprocity), but the most exciting moments are when kids do this work on their own.
Quick example from the trenches:
I have been working with the 3rd grade classes in my school on a character unit of study in reading workshop. Recently, we have been working on using sophisticated vocabulary words to describe the changing feelings that characters have across texts.
Today, one of the 3rd grade teachers told me that suddenly, all of his students are "overjoyed" in their personal narrative pieces in writing workshop. We laughed because this is one of the feeling words that we are encouraging students to use in lieu of "happy" during reading workshop. Even though, "overjoyed" might be a bit dramatic for some of their small moments, how wonderful that his students demonstrated a form of reading-writing reciprocity..."transfer and apply" at it's finest!
What are your thoughts?
Please comment below to share instances in which you have seen your students "transfer and apply" either within or across subject areas. Or feel free to share ways that you are now thinking you could teach them to do so!
Seeing kids transfer what is learned into their writing is always so exciting! The program my district uses is called Reading Wonders and it has a very robust vocabulary component. Each lesson (6 days), all of the texts we read contain the week's vocabulary words. The kids love to point them out and talk about them. Little by little, I see the words appearing in their writing, as if the words are naturally part of their vocabulary. The best part is, my at-risk students are thriving! Words like scurried, peered, remarkable, and fond are regular words in class now. :) Great post!
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