Close Reading and a Choice: Laugh or Cry

     I have always had a love-hate relationship with Close Reading. I mean, it is a challenge (read: often impossible) to get struggling readers to read, much less have them read dreaded material more than once. I know, I know - the benefits are innumerable. The thinking is deep. The strategies that can be applied in these opportunities are endless. But - if you hate to read it the first time, how in the world am I going to get you to read it a second time? Well, I am working on the "hate to read" part. Work. In. Progress.
     I introduced Close Reading to them this past week and went ahead and acknowledged the groans when they saw the "reread" direction. I started simple with some whole group practice and then gave them a chance to try it independently with a paragraph I had selected for each of them based on their level.
     I need to write a disclaimer here.... Teaching high school is a trip. I love it. I laugh every single day. These kids are a riot. I adore them. In situations at school, I very often say: Laugh or Cry!. That stems from years of teaching EBD students and enduring situations in which the choice of what to do is unclear. I also say: I choose to laugh! Because I usually do. Not in a laughing at them way, but in a laughing with them way. Besides, I am an ugly crier and my Mary Kay would run. That's expensive. So - it is with laughter that I share with you this situation with the post today. My paragraph had the word dam in it because it talks about flooding. Well, since these 17 year olds are basically 8 year olds in bigger bodies, when I read the word, they all fell out laughing. "Ooooo! You said dam!" "I'm tellin' my mama!" "You mad, Miss? Why are you cussin' today?" So of course, every time I read the word dam, I read it with passion. And we laughed. I took my pictures of the lesson for the blog, and we moved on. Fast forward to this morning and I upload the pictures to the computer and guess what. Ya'll - one of my darlings changed the annotation in the margin of my lesson to damn rather than dam. My first thought: How proud I was that they knew how to spell it correctly to get the desired effect. And I laughed. My second thought: "OH MY GOOD LORD! I left that on the board over the weekend! People are going to see it and think I did that! We may even have a church that meets there. More fuel to the "public schools are corrupting our children" debate!!!" Whatever!! So, I am not going to change it and retake all the pictures. Instead, you will just have to see it and smile. Or laugh. I did. (PS: This is by far the most tame thing I have laughed at all week...)
     The paragraph we read together is an excerpt from an article off of the site Reading A-Z. Note the spelling of dam in the paragraph....

     I then shared the anchor chart I made for what to do in a Close Reading. I adapted it to fit my kids better from some of the charts I have seen. They copied it in their journals.

     We read the paragraph together, and then I modeled the steps one at a time with their help. The board ended up looking like this:

     We only briefly discussed how to summarize because I am focusing on that a lot next week. I also like how they used their schema to support their thinking. They were able to apply the strategy of using context clues to define the word levee. We learned that last week. They relied heavily on questioning for understanding which we also learned together. It's so nice when they actually use what I am teaching. Am I right?
     I then gave them each a paragraph I chose for them based on their level of reading. All of these are 1st to 4th grade level texts. The sticky notes have their names on them, but I folded them up to protect their privacy in the post picture.

     I then had them put the paragraphs in their journal and go through the procedures as we had done.

     I worked with this student. He hates to read. He refuses to read. He cannot read, so go figure! I did the writing in the beginning and he wrote the summary. We discussed this paragraph a lot.

     Another mini-lesson I did last week was on visualization. I gave them a paper folded into 8 squares. We defined visualization and discussed how everyone's unique schema forms the support for their visualization. I then gave them the words: sun, flower, dog, and car. They had to draw a picture of each of these in a square. Afterwards, we shared them ans discussed the similarities and why they occurred. We also discussed the variances. Only one sun had clouds. Two were drawn in the corner. All were round. I then read a 4 sentence paragraph aloud that described a bug that uses it's large pincers to get ants. They drew that and we compared the drawings. All were eerily similar. Then I read my favorite paragraph from Charlotte's Web. You know the one - where she describes the smells and sights in the barn for the first time. They drew the picture they created in their mind. All were very detailed. Myself and another student had pictures that were almost identical because we had seen a barn. Every one else relied on drawing the animals because that is what they knew, having never been to a barn. It was a great example of schema and how it helps with mental images and supports comprehension. Here are a few of the end products. 

      All in all, the week in Reading was a success. I was going to share one of the lessons I did in my EBD class, but this post got lengthy so I will save it. Never a shortage of information, always a shortage of time!

      Here is to a week of laughing and NOT EVER crying, friends! We have Spring Break the week after this one coming up. Five days until it's beach time! Happy teaching, learning, and laughing.
      Mrs. Beck