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

provide guidelines for moving students toward independence in close reading in a way that is interactive and fun.

      3. Teach close reading follow-up lessons to build skills.

      Of course, there are limits to how much any of us can get from a text the first time around. Even for mature readers there may be particular complexities that confuse us, or perhaps we overlook nuances about a character or a theme. The need to go back to reread will be even greater for young children who are working hard to become skilled readers. So when we revisit texts, work on some of those comprehension skills.

      Strong comprehension skill lessons will be explicit. That means we provide

       A clear explanation of the skill objective—what we will get better at doing today—and what we need to do to meet this objective

       Brief modeling of the process, with one or two examples so students can see firsthand how to engage in this process themselves

       Time for guided practice so students can try it out

      Courtesy of Rick Harrington Photography

      Tips for Success

       Build in lots of opportunities for peer-to-peer practice so students don’t feel quite so alone at the early stages of learning a new skill. Note that this takes more than telling kids to turn to a partner to talk. Without building a culture of collaboration, you don’t get accountable talk; you get anarchy! You might need to practice the process of working with a partner with role-play scenarios: How can you invite a buddy to work with you if that person doesn’t have a partner? How can you get your partner back on track if the conversation strays from today’s task?

       To keep kids focused, I provide many sets of Active Reader Cards (see pages 25–88) that you can select for a specific purpose. For example, if students are working on story parts, you will want to use the Active Reader Cards for Summarizing. If you are working on retrieving evidence, you would choose the Active Reader Cards for Noticing Key Details. There are cards or charts for every comprehension skill in this book.

      How This Book Supports Follow-Up Skill Lessons

       Two explicit skill lessons are provided for each text that include an explanation or review of the skill, teacher modeling, and guided practice for students.

       The lessons represent twelve critical comprehension skills aligned to Common Core expectations for students in the primary grades.

       All lessons are designed to be highly interactive, with the use of “props” to keep kids focused: Active Reader Cards and charts.

       Optional formative assessments are provided for each skill that can inform teachers’ next steps in instruction. (See “Teaching and Assessing Students’ Comprehension” on page 13 for much more information about these assessments.)

      4. Assess close reading appropriately with formative assessments.

      Assessing comprehension in the primary grades is a dilemma. Summative assessment (such as high-stakes state tests) don’t work well. Children change so quickly in the primary grades that those scores become quickly outdated. Formative assessments make sense because they examine students’ day-to-day performance and guide our next instructional steps. However, even using these can get complicated. For example, asking students to do an oral retell is not really an authentic reader task. (How often do you retell a book blow-by-blow?) And to make it worse, for some published assessments, the criteria for success deliver data that are questionable in their alignment to new standards. On the other hand, we don’t want to thrust a pencil in students’ hands too soon and expect them to write extensively about their reading. Trust me, the outcome here is not great answers, but a lot of crying kids!

      Courtesy of Rick Harrington Photography

      So what’s the solution? As a first-grade teacher of many years, I heartily endorse classroom discussion as a window into students’ comprehension. Ask yourself: Who willingly responds when you pose questions? Are the responses accurate? Are they insightful? Can students elaborate on an answer with details from the text? Do they readily connect texts? These simple indicators are perhaps our best way to gauge students’ developing comprehension competencies.

      Tips for Success

       Be on the lookout for when your students are ready to move on to written response. Begin this transition when appropriate—probably mid-first grade. By mid-second grade nearly everyone should be on the road to writing about their reading.

       For written response without tears, consider providing some scaffolding to help students organize their thinking and to show them the kind of details that support different questions. The scaffolds in this book are Reader Response Frames that show students how to begin their response and also the types of evidence to provide; different questions call for different types of evidence. Use the rubric included in this book to score these responses in order to obtain the information you need about who needs help with what.

      How This Book Supports Formative Written Assessment

       For each of the twelve comprehension skills, there is a generic formative assessment that may be used following the skill lessons in this book or for any texts with which you teach these skills.

       Each assessment consists of a comprehension question aligned to the particular skill. For example, if the skill is identifying details that support a central idea, the question might be What is the central idea of this text? What details show this central idea? (Questions typically have two parts to reinforce the need for textual evidence.)

       All assessment questions build the skills students will need in later grades for Common Core assessments.

      5. Teach close reading using units so students can make connections between texts.

      Beware of random close reading lessons! It’s easy enough to locate appropriately challenging texts, even for the primary grades, and to use them here and there to teach the kind of thinking required by close reading. But is that all we want our close reading instruction to accomplish: building kids’ capacity to think more deeply about text? We can aim higher! We can help our students become close readers so they can use this thinking to build for themselves a more complex knowledge base across diverse areas of study—for example, science topics like the solar system and engineering, historical periods and cultures around the world, and themes such as the meaning of compassion or trouble with friends.

      Tips for Success

       Go within as well as across! Like doing a crossword puzzle, students’ knowledge base and “aha!” moments expand when they make connections across the curriculum—while at the same time, they are working “down, ” reading complementary texts that help them gain the disciplinary knowledge needed for more complex, global understandings. To get this rolling, we first need texts that work together. These text sets make it easier to build units that bring coherence along with complexity. Teaching with units is ideal for the primary grades because students can see how things fit together and why. Four-week units provide the space and time for authentic text-to-text connections, and they drive out the lackluster instruction that may build skills but leaves young learners with a school experience that is a string of isolated experiences without high value, like a strand of fake pearls.

       Model, look for, and celebrate exemplary text-to-text