Creative Responses Analyzed – Persuasive Letter from the Roots to the Plant
Posted on May 3, 2016Share This Content
teaching with informational texts
Can your 6-8th grade students explain how two authors present the same info and reveal different points of view?
Posted on April 15, 2016Here’s a lesson for teaching students to analyze how two authors writing about the same topic may shape their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence or advancing different interpretations of the facts (Common Core Standard 7.9). Go to Science News for Students and locate an article that cites a study. Most of these …Read more
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Writing with Mentor Texts – App Reviews in Grades 6-8
Posted on March 20, 2016Is anybody else sick of the five-paragraph essay? The book Writing with Mentors (Marchetti & O’Dell, 2015) was so refreshing to read as I ponder how to keep students excited about reading and writing analytically. The authors provide insight into how we can engage students in writing for authentic purposes in a variety of non-five-paragraph …Read more
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Writing Authentic Letters as Reading Responses
Posted on February 26, 2016Are your students tired of writing analytical essays? I’m shaking up how students respond to informational texts. I’m experimenting with letters to real people that still nudge students to think about the big ideas in sources. With small groups of 4th and 5th grade students, I explored what writing letters might look like. Here’s the …Read more
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What about using the language of text structure to help students compare texts?
Posted on February 9, 2016Teaching the language of text structures can help students compare and contrast texts more easily. I gave a lesson to a 5th/6th grade class a few weeks ago with two current event articles on drones. The first article “How can you get a bird’s eye view?” from Wonderopolis is written in an enumerative (or descriptive) …Read more
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“Building” analogy to teach “text structure”
Posted on January 10, 2016How many of us hunt for the perfect texts to teach “text structure” and end up just banging our heads against the wall? It’s because texts are more complex than five simple structures. Below I describe an analogy I’ve started using with students to get beyond this problem. A building has a purpose (to be …Read more
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Types of Context Clues in Info Texts
Posted on January 3, 2016Ugh! Unfamiliar vocabulary in informational texts can be a huge stumbling block for our students. Below are several types of clues you can teach students based on the work of Baumann and colleagues. I’m not sure I’d give students this list. Instead I made a bookmark like the one below for a lesson with fourth …Read more
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The Coding Strategy – Helping Students Monitor for Meaning (Updated)
Posted on December 8, 2015Have you ever conferred with a student who had difficulty recalling what they’d read? Or who seemed to recall the “easy to understand” parts of a text but not the harder parts? These students may need instruction on monitoring for meaning. I use the Coding Strategy (Hoyt, 2008) to reinforce self-monitoring. After each sentence or …Read more
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The Pasta Analogy-Helping Students Determine What’s Important
Posted on November 12, 2015Do your students struggle with determining what is important when reading informational texts? Are they unsure of what to underline and annotate? I remember one fifth grade student saying, “Well, I underlined the whole text because it was all important!” Two suggestions. 1. Make sure there’s a VERY CLEAR PURPOSE for reading & determining what …Read more
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Liberate your students! In the beginning, give them the main idea!!!
Posted on September 25, 2015Do your students hesitate when you ask, “What is the main or central idea of this source?” Why? There may be a couple of reasons. Many students have not had enough experience with identifying main ideas to identify them easily. And they may have only a superficial understanding of key vocabulary in a main idea. …Read more
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A few posts ago I wrote about shaking up how we ask students to write in response to texts–creating hall of fame posters, designing two-page layouts for trade books, and writing letters. One of my colleagues in the field, Britany, a fifth grade teacher, gave this a go! She asked students who’d read the book …Read more