Catch of the Day - The Textmapping Project - 1 Oct 09

The Textmapping Project is today's unusually low-tech catch

The Textmapping Project is a free resource for teachers, homeschoolers, and education researchers. It is the original source for information about scrolls and textmapping. Dave Middlebrook, the Textmapping Project's founder, invented the textmapping method. Starting in 1990, he pioneered the use of scrolls and textmapping for classroom instruction.

Textmapping is a graphic organizer technique that can be used to teach reading comprehension and writing skills, study skills, and course content.

Textmapping enables teachers to clearly and explicitly model reading comprehension, writing and study skills in the course of regular classroom instruction. Textmapping highlights the pre-reading process, focusing more attention on, and spending more time with, the text itself enabling teachers to explicitly and systematically model comprehension processes.

There are seven key instructional benefits to scrolls and textmapping: Scrolls and textmapping …

1. are explicit.
2. teach students to be strategic readers.
3. encourage students to develop active reading skills.
4. enable comprehension to be linked directly, explicitly, and concretely to the text.
5. are a traceable visual record of an individual's thought process.
6. accommodate a wide range of learning styles.
7. can be particularly helpful to individuals who have learning disabilities or attention deficits.

Textmapping is low-tech, requires no special equipment, is easy to learn, is easy to teach, and can be applied easily and inexpensively for use in the classroom.

On the Textmapping Project site, you will find lesson guides, opportunities to network with other educators, links to research on reading comprehension skills instruction, and free teacher training resources for teacher-trainers and workshop presenters.


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