“I underlined all the words! They’re all important!”
Posted on October 12, 2016Share This Content
text-dependent questions
Are your students’ minds wandering while they read?
Posted on October 6, 2016When I ask students if they ever think about lunch or something else while they are reading, most give me a thumbs up! After we get past the “shocked teacher” look, I talk to them about the importance of staying focused and monitoring for whether they are understanding the content in the source. Then I …Read more
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Critical thinking across multiple texts – Part I
Posted on June 3, 2016In a 7th grade social studies class I visited a few weeks ago, the students used an evolving definition of “honorable” as a lens for reading multiple texts on warriors – ancient and modern. In the image below, the blue text was our original definition. As the students engaged in discussions about what it means …Read more
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Creative Responses Analyzed – Persuasive Letter from the Roots to the Plant
Posted on May 3, 2016A 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
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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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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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Teaching Main Idea and Details with Photos: Sample Lesson
Posted on September 17, 2015A 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
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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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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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When annotating, do your students underline most of what they’ve read because they think “it’s all important”? Maybe they’ve underlined that much because they don’t know how to determine what is important? Below are a few tips and photos from a demo lesson I gave to tackle this issue. And, yes, I used the pasta …Read more