Lessons and Units for Closer Reading, Grades K-2. Nancy Boyles

for details that come directly from the text. Sometimes students sort of invent details. If they have background knowledge about a subject—for example, planets—they may tell you that a detail about Mars is that it’s known as the Red Planet, even though that particular detail was not in today’s article. We need to enforce early on that details must come from the text itself. This will save us lots of hand-wringing down the line when the stakes for written response are a lot higher.

      Reader Response Frame: Identifying Central Idea and Details

      Assessing Standard 3 (Relationship Among Text Elements)

       Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

       Identify character traits and feelings

       Identify cause and effect

      This standard focuses on text elements. In literature that means story parts, and in informational text it refers to main ideas and details. You may be thinking this sounds a lot like Standard 2, but in fact, the emphasis here is different. The key in Standard 3 is the relationship among text elements, how they interact over the course of a text—like How does the setting make a difference to the way the character solves a problem? In the primary grades, students can begin this analytic process by studying character traits and feelings as well as by examining the relationship among events: What is the cause? What is the effect?

      It is also important for students to be able to distinguish between a character trait and a character’s feelings. Explain that a trait is something that stays about the same throughout a story: If a character is kind, we will see that trait over and over in the way she or he responds to various situations. Sometimes a trait does change. For example, a character may be mean at the outset of a story but turn kind after seeing the error of her ways. A character may also exhibit multiple traits, such as determined