Using an Article to Improve Reading and Writing

This is a from a meeting in my department where we went over the article "You Can Go Home Again" by Karen Fingerman and discussed how we can use such an article to help students improve both their reading comprehension and writing abilities.  Although the meeting went over one hour, these video lessons are about 10 minutes each (totaling to approximately 30 minutes.)  I only included what I believe to be significant and I added some of my comments and interpretations (such as my simple way of interpreting the paragraph on statistics) not shared in the meeting.

Before proceeding to view the videos, please read the article at least once at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/opinion/the-parent-trap.html

Video one emphasizes how to get students to really get into each paragraph and how each one plays a specific role (which in some way directly or indirectly supports the main idea.)

Videos two and three presents how a paragraph full of statistics can be deciphered.

A print-out of the stats breakdown of paragraph 7 can be found at http://SpirFit.org/CUNY/Downloads/YouCanGoHomeAgain_P7_Stats.pdf






Video three ends with bringing out the key points (in the last three minutes).

A print-out of the stats breakdown of paragraph 7 can be found at http://SpirFit.org/CUNY/Downloads/YouCanGoHomeAgain_P7_Stats.pdf

For other academic lessons, feel free to go to: http://SpirFit.org/Academy