Digital Brochure to Advance Student Literacy Development

Examining Texts Digital Brochure
Grade Level: First Grade
Content Area: English
The Importance of Multiple Texts for Teaching and Learning
Multiple texts are important to meeting the unique needs and abilities of all students by availing multiple viewpoints from which every student can rethink issues and events thereby deepening his or her knowledge of classroom content (Shedd). Engaging all students in a themed study is an instructional challenge that educators can resolve by employing multiple texts that align with students’ individual reading levels.
Reading multiple texts encourages students to construct meaning from various textual resources that present similar, componential, or conflicting viewpoints about a particular topic.
As students navigate multiple texts, they learn to notice and account for similar inferences and conflicting perspectives, thereby enhancing their capacity to synthesize information to come up with a profounder understanding of a topic or issue.
It is also therefore important for parents to provide their children with multiple types of texts in home settings since these bolsters the strategic processing capacities.
Two Fiction and Two Non-Fiction Texts That Will Be Implemented in the Content Area
Two examples of fiction that will be implemented in the content area are Diary of a Spider by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Harry Bliss along with Diary of a Worm, also by Doreen Cronin and illustration by Harry Bliss.
Diary of a Spider is a witty and entertaining picture book that tells the life of a spider that is not very much unlike the students themselves: he goes to school, plays with his friends, says the Pledge of Allegiance, besides spinning sticky webs and taking wind-catching lessons.
The humorous narration of Spider’s escapades is meant to help students see spiders as harmless, ordinary insects. More importantly, the book allows students to learn the differences between spiders and insects as well as the lifecycle of a spider in a fun and engaging manner.
The Diary of a Worm uses the same anthropomorphism strategy to teach themes of ecology and the environment from the perspective of a worm. Two examples of non-fiction that will be implemented in the content area are Spiders by Nic Bishop along with Wonderful Worms by Linda Glaser and illustrated by Loretta Krupinski. Spiders provides a more scholarly approach to understanding spiders, their bodies, behaviors, and life cycle. It is hoped that by reading Diary of a Spider and Spiders, students will be able to develop their strategic processing capacities and become more knowledgeable about the arachnids.
Similarly, Wonderful Worms is a more scholarly text that explains the vital role of worms in the planet’s ecosystem as well as their underground environment. Diary of a Worm and Wonderful Worms will provide multiple viewpoints from which students can rethink about the worms and their ...