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

to authentic high-level questions about texts, we develop their ability to think strategically about any text’s content and ideas, and just as important, we develop their abilities to communicate their understandings effectively. And yes, I believe that these twelve concepts and skills are developmentally on target. It’s all in the scaffolding, in how we support different learners at different levels of development.

      The Twelve Skills in Focus

      I have organized the concepts and skills according to each comprehension anchor standard, technically identified by Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as the College and Career Readiness Standards for Reading. That way, we will know we are providing our youngest learners with some of the bottom-line essentials to get their literacy thinking off the ground in each of the targeted comprehension areas.

      Key Comprehension Skills and Concepts Aligned to Common Core State Standards

      Standard 1 (Textual Evidence): 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.

       Notice key details in a text

      Standard 2 (Development of Ideas): Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

       Summarize a story

       Identify details that support a central idea

      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

      Standard 4 (Vocabulary): Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

       Identify important word meanings including the word, phrase, or sentence that provides the clue to understanding the word

      Standard 5 (Text Structure and Features): Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.

       Identify the kind of information the author provides in this part of the text

       Identify the information that the text features provide

      Standard 6 (Purpose and Point of View): Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

       Determine the author’s purpose for writing

      Standard 7 (Different Text Formats): Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

       Interpret illustrations in a text

      Standard 8 (Critical Thinking): Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

       Determine supporting evidence

      Standard 9 (Text-to-Text Connections): Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

       Make text-to-text connections

      How the Assessments Are Embedded Across Books and Units

      If students are to become more proficient in their application of skills, they will need to practice and apply them over and over. Here are two chief ways I ensure your students get that practice:

       Guided by the complexities of each text, I have distributed the skills identified earlier over the twenty books included in the five units in this book.

       Every skill is represented at least three times, and there are even more lessons on the two skills that receive great emphasis on new standards-based high-stakes assessments: vocabulary and text-to-text connections.

      The text-to-text connections required by the standards are especially ambitious because readers must integrate and synthesize multiple texts—quite a challenge for young children whose reasoning is still more concrete than abstract. So please recognize that most students won’t get anywhere near “mastery”; college students are still getting the hang of text-to text analysis! Indeed, the best way to think about “meeting standards” is to remember that the described skill requirements increase from grade to grade, so what a child can do now will only graze the surface of what the same standard will demand later on.

      That said, the five units in this book, and the rigorous yet child-centered instruction they represent, give you one great running start! Students will gain a solid foundation for all the areas comprehension they will further develop in later grades.

      Distribution of Skill Assessments Across Books and Units

      

      How the Assessments Are Embedded in Weekly Instruction

      Effective teachers assess as they instruct. We continually watch for clues in our students’ literacy behaviors and performances that alert us to what our students know and are able to do. All of these observations, whether derived from students’ oral or written responses, become our data, the evidence we use to plan the teaching next steps. This is the essence of formative assessment: to inform. But data-driven instruction needs a coherent set of grade-level expectations, and here is where the English language arts (ELA) standards come in. The standards help us know what our goals are, the skills we are meant to be teaching, and they are a means of tracking students’ progress in the primary grades. By aligning the formative assessments in this book to standards, they become rooted in a more universal, research-based foundation.

      Courtesy of Rick Harrington Photography

      In kindergarten, first, and second grades our purpose is not to sum up students’ performance with a score but to build on what they can do right now to move them to the next level of achievement as efficiently as possible. Why are scores not particularly useful? Because young children’s cognitive capacities change so rapidly in the early grades that today’s score may be next week’s old news.

      Within each and every unit I offer two types of tools that can be used to inform instruction. These tools are most typically used in the close reading follow-up lessons on Days 3 and 4 of the weekly plan. This means a total of eight lessons per unit.

       During Reading: A card, a set of cards, or a chart helps students track their thinking using oral response during the lesson.

       After Reading: A Reader Response Frame guides written responses after reading.

      Under each standard, beginning on page 25, I explain how to use the particular card, set of cards, or chart to monitor your students’ understanding during