For this blog, I chose to read “Instructional Scaffolding: Reading and Writing as Natural Language Activities” by Arthur N. Applebee and Judith A. Langer. This journal explains how to build up young readers and writers in a way that furthers their critical thinking and skills as readers and writers. Applebee and Langer explain how when we are young and learning to speak, adults slowly ask questions to improve a child’s vocabulary and language to help them communicate. For example, they will fill in words a child missed or point out objects and say its name to aid the child in communicating fully. This is based on an adult helping a child “complete a task” in order for them to eventually do it on their own. They are working to expand and recast a child’s efforts without fully correcting. Eventually, this is internalized by the child and they can carry on full conversations on their own. However, this practice of continually “building up” is lost when a child goes to school. The focus is on recall and memorization of lesson material, rather than understanding and learning of concepts and general knowledge. For example, children are asked to complete fill-in-the-blank worksheets to recall science terms, vocabulary, etc. The lessons and materials are not structured in a way for children to internalize skills and knowledge that they can eventually use without external support. These methods simply teaches children to recall specific information from a test. Lessons instead should be focused on being intentional, appropriate, structured, collaborative, and eventually internalized. For teachers to move away from a traditional, simply structured lesson, they must scaffold their lessons to build off previous knowledge and teach them skills to further their comprehension. Lessons based on this idea can be very simple in nature. They can include tasks such as, “prereading or prewriting activities, ‘guides’ to structure comprehension or writing, and discussion or revision sessions to expand upon and develop students’ initial work. This however, depends on the subject that is being taught. For example, if the students are conducting an experiment in science, instead of filling out a worksheet, they can answer questions that ask why something is occurring, what the procedure for the experiment is, describe what the reaction is, and explain the components of the experiment and why they were included. These are not simple memorization questions, but instead focus on broad comprehension and understanding of the experiment taking place. Then, to build on these skills, the students can learn how to turn that information into a properly formatted lab report. For language arts, this can look like a structured class discussion, such as a Lit Circle. These can be driven by a topic question or sentence that begins conversation. Then, asking students to explore themes, comparisons between other novels, the broader take aways of the novel, how it can be applied to their lives, etc. To summarize, scaffolding should aim at building upon skills and knowledge of students to acquire new skills and further comprehension and critical thinking skills. Then students are given an opportunity to express this knowledge and learn from their peers in a learning community. Rather than simple memorizing specific facts for a test.