Trade books and writing to learn

Chapter 11 of Content Area Reading talks about using trade books in teaching.  Trade books are typical books like biographies, story books, fiction books, histories and other types of books one would tend to find at a bookstore.  These are different from textbooks that one tends to find in schools. 

There are many benefits to using trade books versus only using text books.  For starters, text books are not always the best sources of information.  They tend to just mention important events and important people without going in to great deal.  This is because they have so much information to cover.  There is no room for depth in text books.   Text books can also be confusing for students and students can be intimidated by their size and style.  Trade books do not usually have these problems.  Trade books will go in to depth on a particular subject.  Thus students can both learn more about that subject and learn how to read about that subject.  Text books are sort of artificial in that, outside of school, people do not encounter them.  Thus, by using trade books in school, students learn how to read and learn from books they will continue to encounter throughout their lives. 

Trade books are also written in many different styles and levels of difficulty.  They also cover many different areas of interest.  Thus trade books have something for everyone so that all students can truly come to enjoy reading what they are assigned. 

As I will be teaching Social Studies, there will be a lot of different trade books I can use.  There are many biographies and histories written in many different styles and subjects.  My concern though is how these books can be obtained.  To have enough books for everyone and enough so that everyone has a selection to choose from would be expensive.  This is especially true if I were to plan to use trade books for multiple different units.  Since book budgets are spent on text books, I am not sure how it would be feasible to have an adequate collection of trade books.  The book suggests library sales and book fairs, but this seems unlikely to provide enough books for a cheap enough price. 

Chapter 2 of Content Area Writing introduces us to the idea of “writing to learn.”  The authors claim that much of the writing we do in daily life can be considered writing to learn.  They thus suggest that teachers should incorporate writing to learn in the classroom.  This type of writing is different than public writing.  Public writing is about writing papers and essays for an audience, whereas writing to learn is for the self.  Writing to learn is informal, and should be ungraded.  I look forward to the next couple of chapters of the book as they talk more about how to use writing to learn effectively in the classroom. 

The authors made a point in the chapter that I found interesting.  It was not the focus of the chapter, more of an aside, but was still interesting.  They stated that the intensive corrections of student papers by teachers do not make students better writers.  I do not know enough about this subject to disagree with them, but I am curious how students become better writers, if not through writing and seeing their mistakes corrected.