did you get from reading this book?)
• Keep a classroom chart of themes that students discover in texts (with love and understanding, families can overcome loss; accept who you are; bullies lose out; perseverance pays off, and so on).
• After skimming and scanning an informational text, ask students to generate all possible ideas and then determine which of them the text most fully develops.
• Turn topic statements into questions that spur students to read the section for answers (Grey Wolf Habitat to “What is the Grey Wolf’s habitat?”). This will help students learn to “add up” subtopics toward a main idea.
To explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text:
• Model for students how to code specific details in the text that support the central idea or theme.
• Model for students using a shared text which words, phrases, or images recur throughout the text that might signal they are the main idea or central message. Mark, highlight, or annotate these words. After modeling, have students work in groups or independently using the same strategy.
To recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths, from diverse cultures:
• As you read aloud, introduce students to different types of stories, such as realistic stories, adventure stories, fantasy, folktales, fables, and myths. Compare and contrast, and chart their attributes.
• Provide students with a variety of fables, folktales, and myths. Have students work in small groups to study a type in depth and share knowledge with class (e.g., Cinderella stories, Greek myths, American tall tales).
• Model how to recount the story. First, explain that a retell/recount involves an opening statement, followed by key events listed in sequential or chronological order, and a conclusion; have students recount stories to a partner or with the class.
To summarize the text:
• Create a shared summary with the class. Include an opening statement, key details in chronological order from the text, and a conclusion. Post on chart paper for students to refer to.
• Model explaining the story by writing a summary. Refer back to text to “lift” specific words, phrases, or sentences and embed these into the explanation.
• Have students write their own summaries, highlighting where they have used specific details and examples from the text.
To determine how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges, or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic:
• Have students use graphic organizers or flow charts to monitor how characters respond to challenges over the course of a text.
• Model reading poetry and think aloud how the narrator reflects on the topic. Highlight or annotate places in the text where that is supported.
• Have students practice by annotating poetry either on tablets or on photocopies or using sticky notes.
To help your English language learners, try this:
• Have students draw pictures to reinforce setting, characters, and plot. Make certain that students understand the meaning of the academic vocabulary you’re using, such as “main character” or “main idea.”
| Preparing to Teach: Reading Standard 2 |
Preparing the Classroom
Preparing the Texts to Use
Preparing the Mindset
Preparing to Differentiate
Connections to Other Standards:
Common Core Reading Standard 2
Academic Vocabulary: Key Words and Phrases
Analyze their development over the course of the text: Refers to the careful and close examination of the parts or elements from which something is made and how those parts affect or function within the whole to create meaning.
Central ideas or messages: Some ideas are more important to a work than others; these are the ideas you could not cut out without fundamentally changing the meaning or quality of the text. Think of the “central” ideas of a text as you would the beams in a building: They are the main elements that make up the text and that all the supporting details help to develop.
Characters respond to challenge: In literature, characters are faced with problems and they respond or react to these problems or challenges. The way they react moves the story along and adds to the event sequence.
Conveyed through particular details: This refers to the way authors might explore an idea (e.g., the sense of isolation that often appears throughout dystopian novels) by referring to it directly or indirectly through details that evoke the idea (such as isolation).
Determine central message: Some ideas are more important to a work than others; these are the ideas you could not cut out without fundamentally changing the meaning or quality of the text. Think of the “central message” of a text as you would the beams in a building: they are the main elements that make up the text and which all the supporting details help to develop.
Development: Think of a grain of rice added to others one at a time to form a pile; this is how writers develop their ideas — by adding imagery, details, examples, and other information over the course of a text. Thus when one “analyzes (the) development” of an idea or theme, for example, they look at how the author does this and what effect such development has on the meaning of the text.
Diverse cultures: The United Nations has defined cultural as follows: “Culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.” Taking that into account, diverse cultures are ones with cultural variety and cultural differences that exist throughout the world or within a society.
Fables:
