through this lesson several times and gradually release responsibility to them, you are helping them learn the reading and speaking and listening skills in the following standards.
Reading
CCRA.R.1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
Speaking and Listening
CCRA.SL.1: Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
Language
CCRA.L.6: Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression.
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, 2010, pp. 10, 22, 25.
CHAPTER 2
Find It or Figure It Out
Have you ever asked your students a question about something they read and had them respond, “I don’t know; it didn’t say”? Many students are literal when they read. They expect to find all the answers to questions directly in the text. In reality, most of the thinking you do as you read is not literal. Your brain puts information you read together with information you know and figures out many things that the text does not directly state. If you read the weather forecast, and the chances of rain are 100 percent, you figure out that you probably need to rethink your plans for a barbecue this weekend. Figuring out something based on information from the text is inferring. Find It or Figure It Out is a lesson framework you can employ to teach your students how to use the information in the text and their prior knowledge to figure things out. The major emphasis in Find It or Figure It Out lessons is teaching students how to make logical inferences and cite textual evidence to support them. Using the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction, Find It or Figure It Out combines student trios and teacher-led collaborative conversations to discuss various aspects of the text’s content.
A Sample Find It or Figure It Out Lesson
Mr. E. decides to use Find It or Figure It Out to teach his students how to make and support inferences as they read a section about tropical rain forests in their science texts. He reads the text and constructs prompts for each two-page spread in the book. He makes sure that the answers to the Find It questions are quite literal and that students can find them in the text in a sentence or two. His Figure It Out questions require students to make logical inferences. There are clues that help them figure out the answers.
This is the first Find It or Figure It Out lesson this class has experienced. Mr. E. follows the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction when teaching comprehension lessons. Working with the whole class, he establishes the purpose for the lesson, builds meaning for important vocabulary, and models how to answer one question. He then asks the whole class to help him answer the second question. Next, the class works in trios to answer the remaining questions. He has organized the trios so each has a range of reading levels and has also tried to put students together who like to work with one another.
TIP
Small groups in elementary classrooms work best if the group size is not too large. When working together in trios, all three students participate, and rarely does anyone sit on the sidelines.
Purpose Setting and Vocabulary Building
The lesson begins with the students gathering in their assigned trios. Mr. E. hands one copy of the Find It or Figure It Out: Tropical Rain Forests question sheet (see figure 2.1) to each trio, and the person who gets the sheet quickly positions him- or herself between the other two. He gives the other two students small sticky notes in two different colors. Next, he establishes the lesson purpose.
Figure 2.1: Sample Find It or Figure It Out: Tropical Rain Forests question sheet.
He says, “Shortly, I am going to give you a piece to read about tropical rain forests. As you read it, you are going to find the answers to some questions and figure out the answers to others. The answers to the Find It questions will be right there on the page. When you find these answers, you will put a green sticky note on them to show where you found them. The answers to the Figure It Out questions will not be right there on the page, but there will be clues in the text to help you figure them out. You are going to use the yellow sticky notes to mark the details from the text that are clues you used to answer the Figure It Out questions. Before we start reading about tropical rain forests, however, we need to use our collective class knowledge to build meanings for some key words. Read the first question with me, and tell me what you think the key vocabulary words are.”
The class reads the first sentence chorally: “Figure out if there are any rain forests in Africa and Australia.” The students decide that rain forests, Africa, and Australia are important vocabulary words. Mr. E. directs their attention to the world map, and the students identify Africa and Australia. He then tells them that a rain forest is a forest that gets a lot of rain. When Mr. E. asks if anyone has ever seen a rain forest, one student describes the movie FernGully: The Last Rainforest. Other students report having seen programs on the Discovery Channel about rain forests. Some suggest finding cool videos on YouTube, and Mr. E. says that is a good idea and he will investigate.
Next, the class reads the second sentence chorally: “Find out the average high and low temperatures in a tropical rain forest and the average amount of rain.” The students decide that high and low temperatures and tropical are important vocabulary words. Mr. E. leads them to talk about the high and low temperatures where they live and then writes the words tropics and tropical on the board. He asks students to tell how these words are related. Students volunteer that they think the tropics are a place where it gets very hot and that tropical describes a rain forest in the tropics that is probably very hot.
Together, the students read the remaining sentences. They jointly decide on key vocabulary words and share their collective knowledge. No one knows what epiphytes are, and Mr. E. says their reading will help them figure that out. He has the students pronounce the word epiphytes several times and points out that ph has the sound they know from words such as phone and elephant.
TIP
Seizing every opportunity to point out morphological relationships between words will help your students rapidly increase the size of their meaning vocabularies.
I Do, and You Watch
Once the students have read all the sentences chorally, and Mr. E. has developed meanings and pronunciations for vocabulary, he hands the text to the middle person in each trio.
He says, “Now, I am going to show you how I figure out the answer to the first question:
