Compose & Comprehend

How do we teach literacy? Should we break literacy into its components of reading, writing, and speaking? Reading plays a huge part in becoming literate. Reading used to be a class set of books. But we access reading material in many more ways now. Writing is more than adding marks to paper with a pen. Speaking brings with it a range of situations and circumstances.

Let’s clump things together:

Compose

Comprehend

Remember Gathering, Organising and Communicating? If you have forgotten or are unsure, you’ll find posts about them here.

Gathering and organising information need comprehension skills. Whether we read a text, listen to a podcast, or view a movie, we must understand what we’re gathering.

Decisions about what to keep or discard need to be made, facts checked, and summaries compiled. Can we explicitly teach the skills here? Of course, we can. Summarising information can be broken into tiny, teachable steps. And … summarising information points you straight at the main idea of the text, podcast, or movie.

Naturally, you adjust for the level of your learners. Kindergartners can summarise with assistance. They illustrate their understanding through speaking or drawing.

High school students will produce more sophisticated materials. Perhaps they demonstrate understanding through their own podcast or movie.

Communicating is where composing happens. You can’t host a podcast without a script. Similarly, without at least a rudimentary script, making a video won’t work either. Have you coached students to write a persuasive essay? Or a fantasy tale? Or a biographical recount? Of course, you have.

Teachable steps under the umbrella of compose and comprehend.