Teaching Main Idea and Details with Photos: Sample Lesson
Posted on September 17, 2015Share This Content
teaching with informational texts
Complex sources? Give students a head start with THIEVES
Posted on September 5, 2015Teaching students to use the mnemonic THIEVES (Manz, 2002) to preview a text is an easy way to nurture students’ sense of agency as they tackle feature-dense nonfiction sources. The poster below (created by a colleague!) reveals the details of this strategy–students preview, predict & then summarize their predictions. A FEW TIPS Create THIEVES bookmarks …Read more
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Quick way to review text & content before close reading
Posted on May 9, 2015I tried something new–I provided a list of “key details” from a section of text as a way for students to review content before engaging in close reading of a more difficult section of the text. During a previous lesson, the 3rd grade students had read an article about Dolores Huerta (in the McGraw-Hill Wonders …Read more
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Analysis of Responses to 8th Grade Text Set & Prompt, Part 2
Posted on April 27, 2015In the last blog entry, I shared a rigorous text set and prompt developed by an middle school ELA team. The team and I met (via Webinex) to discuss the students’ written responses. First we look at the strengths of each student’s analytic essay; then we discuss the students’ needs as writers. Integrated into this …Read more
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8th Grade Text Set & Prompt for Written Response, Part 1
Posted on April 27, 2015Kudos to my ELA colleagues in a middle school who developed this appropriately rigorous text set and prompt for their 8th grade students studying the Holocaust. Together with the 6th and 7th grade teams, we analyzed several students’ written responses to this prompt. More on that in the next post 🙂 TEXTS: Source A (entire …Read more
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Guided writing lesson – a productive struggle
Posted on April 18, 2015I had the honor of teaching a small 2nd grade group of students a guided writing lesson after we had done a guided reading lesson with an excerpt from an A to Z text, George Washington Carver, Level O. In a previous post, I wrote about the first lesson – close reading of an excerpt …Read more
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Tips for using ‘Reading A to Z’ texts for close reading
Posted on April 8, 2015Reading A to Z is a common classroom resource for leveled informational texts. There are some good texts in this collection – I would just be cautious, read for quality, and choose with clear objectives or text-dependent questions in mind. Below I describe how a group of teachers and I chose excerpts from Reading A …Read more
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Easier Main Ideas – Think Traits of Historical Figures
Posted on March 13, 2015I’ve been thinking about how we can help students identifying multiple main/central ideas in a text. Traditionally we’ve focused on identifying one main idea, but beginning in 5th grade (and continuing in 6th and 7th), the Common Core Standards for Reading Informational Texts expect students to be able to “determine two or more main ideas …Read more
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Is “text evidence” becoming a fill-in-the-blank?
Posted on February 18, 2015A few weeks ago I had the honor of working with a class of students who were writing an analytic essay in response to a text about Frederick Douglass. During this lesson, I’d posed a text-dependent question and we’d carefully read the article and taken notes. When we moved from taking notes to using those …Read more
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Teach “example” as a type of detail info text authors use
Posted on January 9, 2015Take a moment to read the following text excerpt. Where does the author include examples of a concept? Why is that helpful to readers? Look closely and you will see. Magnets can be found on a can opener. The magnet attracts, or pulls, a lid off of a soup can. A push or a pull …Read more
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A simple way to start talking with students about “main ideas” and “supporting details” is to use a photo as a “text.” When you use a photo as a text, you take away the cognitive load of reading and provide more mental space for students to grapple with concepts like “main idea” and “supporting details.” …Read more