Sunday, July 9, 2023

Figurative Language in Expository Text

 Do your students struggle to analyze figurative language in expository text? Mine certainly do! For intermediate readers who are already having trouble with content-specific vocabulary and new concepts in expository text, analyzing figurative language is yet another big challenge. 


But being able to understand how and why authors are using this figurative language is vital for deeper comprehension. Often, a single simile is used to convey a big idea about a new topic. Examples of personification are used to show nuances. A pithy metaphor in the introduction pops up again in the conclusion. In all of these instances, being able to identify and understand the figurative language adds to the deeper meaning.

Sometimes, well-meaning teachers spend too much time in the identification phase and not enough time in the analysis phase. It's easy to see why! Struggling students can pick out the words "like" or "as" and say with confidence, "That's a simile." It feels like you are being successful. However, when asked to analyze similes, these same students might fall back on using the exact same words from the text instead of elaborating on the simile and putting it in the context of the key concepts from the text.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you plan to analyze figurative language in expository text.


And, if you'd like a ready-made resource perfect for sixth graders, try this: Figurative Language in Expository Text. Available as a printable and digital resource, this text includes practice with analysis, a fluency activity, and more. It is the perfect supplement to Wonders Sixth Grade Unit 1, Week 4.



Monday, September 5, 2022

Quick Reading Assessments

 


The start of the new school year is almost upon us! My classroom exists in a perpetual state of chaos and disorder!

While it's hard to leave those lazy mornings and sunny afternoons behind, it is exciting to think about preparing for my new group of students. Once I clear a space in my new (smallish) room and figure out my schedule, these are the go-to assessments that I will pull.

Summarizing Narratives

   Learning about how our students process and summarize narratives is a good first step. A student's summary yields a wealth of knowledge about how they approach reading stories, how they understand story structure, and whether they are reading at the local level (looking at individual sentences) or at a global level (thinking of the text as a whole). 

    The problem with student summaries is that they take a long time for students to write, and they take a long time for teachers to read! I've streamlined the process by creating a checklist with key events and ideas from the text. This checklist makes assessing summaries much easier...and makes it possible to share the task with a co-teacher or an instructional assistant. This year, I'm planning to use these tasks for progress monitoring with my enrichment students.

QRI

    I love using the QRI as a quick assessment! The flexibility of using narrative or expository text really adds to the picture of what a reader can do. If you're not familiar with the Qualitative Reading Inventory, the book is a series of short texts and questions for readers of different levels. First, use the word list to get an idea of how students read words out of context. Then, select a text for the student to read, doing a running record as you go, and then ask the student 6-8 questions about what they read. The questions are split into inferential and explicit questions, which adds another layer of nuance into the interpretation of results.

    Now...the manual has lots of directions for getting even more specific with your scoring, but I can do a quick version of the assessment in about 15 minutes. My trick is to split up the word reading and passage reading over multiple days. I have students read aloud from the word list on one day, then score and pull passages for the next day. This helps me to keep my file crate of materials in order! For many students, I skip the retelling portion (after all, I'm scoring summaries!) and set them up for look-backs from the start. Looking back to the text is a skill that I want to encourage, after all!

    The best part of the QRI is how knowledgeable you can sound when talking with other teachers and parents. "This student reads really well with words out of context, and shows a wide range of word-solving skills. When they're reading the text, however, they have trouble with word-solving," or "Wow! This reader does wonderfully with narrative passages that have familiar content. When faced with an unfamiliar topic, though, they have great difficulty, even when new concepts are explained in the text." This is actionable information obtained in a quick, positive session.


Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Reading Intervention for Fluency, Academic Vocabulary, and Nonfiction Text Structure

      This product has been a labor of love. Back in 2010, I wanted to put together a research-based set of activities for classroom teachers working with intermediate level readers. I wanted materials that would focus on academic vocabulary and nonfiction text structure, with lessons that were easy enough to add to an already full schedule and materials that were ready to be copied. Most importantly, I wanted to create something that would be inexpensive for classroom teachers. After months of work, I created this:

Reading Intervention for Fluency, Academic Vocabulary, and Nonfiction Text Structure.

     I worked this summer to freshen up the materials to make them even easier for classroom teachers, adding answer keys, PDFs, and better formatting. More than ten years after I wrote it, I'm still proud of the features!

The texts

    In this set, the texts are science-based, with topics ranging from poison ivy to bluebirds to caverns. I worked with topics that are adjacent to key science topics, often inspired by my visits to area museums, science centers, and parks. 

Academic Vocabulary

     Academic vocabulary is essential for unlocking the meanings and nuances of nonfiction texts. In certain reading series, I've noticed that the vocabulary words are jammed into texts, resulting in some odd usages and questionable sentences. Instead of doing this, I wrote the texts, and then searched them for academic words from Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List and other academic word list sources. 

     Engaging students in learning academic vocabulary is important. In my experience, building playful experiences in which students use the words to answer questions works well! I created a PowerPoint presentation for each text in which the words are introduced. These presentations include photos and questions to help students interact with the words, see them repeatedly in print, and use them in sentences. 

Fluency

     Is fluency broken? I kind of think so. I'm not sure that it has the prediction power that it once held. (Read more here.) Nevertheless, I still value time spent in helping students to read aloud with accuracy and expression. Each text in this intervention set includes a phrase-cued text for students to read and a fluency progress monitoring page.

     I love phrase-cued texts because they help students to see how sentences can be chunked for easier reading. Phrase-cued texts also support students in understanding sentence chunks for my favorite grammar activity, sentence unscrambling

     Fluency readings are a great way to talk one-on-one with a student and get a better idea of how they are word-solving. When I do fluency readings with students, I emphasize that the timing is just one part of the reading, and that I also want to hear what they can do with expression and word-solving. At the end of the reading, I give the student a compliment ("I notice that you took the time to figure out the word vanished.") and choose a quick teaching point to discuss with the student. Sometimes we look at the pronunciation of a word, and sometimes we focus on expression within a sentence. The next time that I work with the student, we review what we talked about previously.

    I created fluency passages for each of the texts in this intervention. Fluency passages are also a great way to involve parent volunteers or instructional assistants in your reading intervention. Most adults enjoy the opportunity to work individually with students.

Nonfiction text structure

     Many readers in grades 4-6 are still reading at the "local level"--that is, they're focusing on individual words and sentences within a passage without building a model of the passage as a whole. Understanding text structure and using graphic organizers to represent details can help students to move beyond the local level and develop a global model of the text.

     Each text in this series includes a graphic organizer to represent the big ideas and important details in the text. Students can then use these graphic organizers to help them write a summary of the passage as a whole.

Multiple choice questions

      While these were not part of the original program, I decided to add them as I was using the program with my own students. Each passage has 4-5 questions, along with an open-ended response prompt. 


Working on this intervention has been a bit of a passion project for me, and it's been gratifying to see so many positive reviews. Here's to another 10 years of academic vocabulary, fluency, and text structure!



Friday, June 10, 2022

Learning with Macroinvertebrates: Activities, Resources, and Lessons

 


This spring I had the wonderful opportunity to take sixth grade classes out for field trips with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. They brought the canoes and took one class, while I took the other class to do a macroinvertebrate survey.

Which meant that I had to really brush up on my macros! Luckily, I've worked with these kinds of lessons in the past, and I've found and made plenty of resources to help me along.

Marvelous Macroinvertebrates


Because I'm teaching ELA and not science, I needed to make a strong connection to the ELA concepts and standards. Luckily, I was headed into argumentative text! Exploring an author's claims and how they support main ideas works wonderfully with a study of macroinvertebrates and their importance to streams. Several years ago, I wrote the resource "Marvelous Macroinvertebrates" as part of my Summary and Analysis series. This resource was just what I needed to start the course of study.

When I pulled it out of my filing cabinet I was happy to learn that I had been very smart once upon a time, and the vocabulary part of the article happened to match the vocabulary goals for the Wonders lessons I was replacing. Thank heavens for small mercies! We could look at the roots macro- and micro-, which was a nice vocabulary connection.


The lesson I wrote for the Summary and Analysis activity included taking notes from the text, which worked well for my students. Then, we examined the author's claim that macroinvertebrates "are a big deal for streams." How well is this supported in the text? What evidence is present? (These kinds of things are always a little tricky when I'm the author. Sometimes I tell students that I wrote the text, and sometimes I don't. In this case, I let the author remain anonymous!)

At this point, the concept of "macroinvertebrates" was still pretty fuzzy for my students. They knew about crayfish, but they couldn't really picture anything else. This video about stream surveys helped to make macroinvertebrates a bit more engaging for them...and it enabled us to hit my favorite standard, in which we compare a written text to a video text. 


Of course, I had to balance my desire to teach teach teach about macroinvertebrates with the needs of the ELA lessons that I was working on. We played some ID games on Quizlet to help students know the difference between a crayfish and a mayfly nymph, but we didn't get into many of the technical details of  the insect life cycles.

The Field Trip

My hope was that by the time we actually went on our field trip, students would know enough about macroinvertebrates to engage with the survey and get some good data.

It worked!

Even though two of our days were cold and rainy, the students were wonderful and spent time finding creatures, exploring the stream, and completing the biotic index. We found more mayfly nymphs than I have ever seen before!

The Follow Up

I collected the data from all of our trips, and we put it together into one huge list. Then, students had to make a claim about whether the creek we studied has good water quality, or not. It seems like a really easy question, right? But making a claim and using real facts from your own data to support it is the heart of science. Just getting students to write a paragraph based on this was a challenge!

Next Steps

On future trips, I want to make at least one student group in charge of photography, so that we can document what we find. I was too busy managing students and keeping an eye on the time and making sure that no one fell in (alas, they did!) to do many high quality photographs.

I've experimented with writing a formal field report based on this trip, and I'd like to consider this for next year as well. 

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Sentence Unscrambling: A Tool for Differentiated Grammar Instruction

 



     It's always tough to know how to start the year with a new group of writers...and this year brings more challenges than most. I'm planning to dust off a tried-and-true instructional technique that yields big benefits to both reading and writing: sentence unscrambling.

     Sentence unscrambling is just one of the four basic sentence composing techniques suggested by Don and Jenny Killgallon, authors of multiple texts and exercise books for teachers. When I use the technique in my classroom, I go a step further and use sentence composition activities to build reading comprehension skills as well as handwriting fluency.

    The great part about sentence unscrambling is that it can be tucked into small bits of the day, and it reinforces everything you want students to be noticing and thinking about as they write. Here's how I built an activity for my students as part of our first unit, in which we explore texts related to oceans.

Find or write a suitable sentence

     When selecting a sentence, think about constructs that students may find intriguing, but challenging. Sentences with capitalized words, interesting word choice, and multiple clauses make for good sentences at the sixth grade level. 


Break up the sentence into meaningful chunks

     These chunks will be what students unscramble. Keeping some words together helps students to see how sentences fit together and will help them in their next sentence composing activity, sentence imitating. 

    So how does this sentence split apart? Deep stays on its own, as an adverb showing location. Under the Pacific Ocean stays together, as a prepositional phrase. The main verb, lives, will be all on its own. Finally, the mysterious giant squid is a group of words that should remain together, as mysterious, giant, and the all modify the noun squid.



Scramble the sentence for students to analyze

     I always keep the first letter of the sentence capitalized, because this is a great clue for students to use as they analyze what could be going on. Otherwise, I try to just do a random scramble.



Analyzing the sentence

    When I introduce the sentence to students, I model how to read the different chunks and think about how the sentence could fit together. My sentence uses some inverted word order, so it adds a bit of a challenge. I encourage students to use a numbering scheme to keep track of their thinking instead of rushing to recopy the sentence. "Hm, which sentence chunk could be first? Ah, here is the one with the capital letter. Which could be next?"



Recopying the sentence

     This becomes a handwriting activity when students have to recopy the sentence correctly. Believe me, there will be some big surprises as you see how kids struggle with this! I always use lines that have a midline so that students can space uppercase and lowercase letters appropriately, and so that I can see who has a good handle on capitalization and who does not.

Differentiating

     Sentence unscrambling has so many differentiation possibilities! Of course you can have variations in the kinds of sentences that you offer. For example, in the above sentence, you could have some with the inverted subject-verb and some without, just to prompt a discussion about what's going on and why. You could also have some students create the sentences and do the chunking. 

     For students with OT concerns, I provide them with larger lines for recopying the sentences. Some students may also need to have the sentences cut up for them so that they can put them together.

Daily Sentence Writing

     If you would like a set of created activities, try Daily Sentence Writing!




Saturday, August 7, 2021

Returning to In-Person Instruction: Creating a positive environment

     Planning for this year is turning out to be especially challenging! Teachers will have students who haven't been in a classroom for over a year, students who have been in socially distant classrooms, and students new to the district....it's quite a range of situations.


     I've been thinking about the new challenges that we'll face and what kinds of resources will be best. From the first hour of the first day, my priority is creating a classroom where kids feel safe and valued. But this is easier said than done, and the work that gets us to that dream classroom is difficult and tedious in the first days.  

Low-risk activities

    An important way to frame these first days of school is to focus on activities that have a low social risk. None of us like sharing deep information about ourselves with an unfamiliar group of people! For many students, sharing their innermost hopes and dreams is a risky social move. It's much more approachable to talk about their favorite breakfast foods or what they like to do at recess. When I plan ice-breakers for the first week, I consider the social risks that students are taking, and make sure that I offer lots of low-stress, surface level activities. If you've ever asked students to share about their hopes and dreams and been met with absolute silence, you know what I'm talking about!

     As students walk into the classroom on that first day, I like to have a quiet, desk-based activity for them to do. Some years I make individualized name tags for students to color; in other years I have puzzle pieces that build to a group puzzle. Students can sit down and immediately do something while also checking out the room, their classmates, and the view to the window. 

     But I don't ask them to engage in academic work or anything that might make them feel anxious. I always have an inclusion classroom with students who have a wide range of abilities. I want to get past that first day with good feelings all around, and I don't want anyone to feel badly or worried about the upcoming year. 

Getting everyone talking

     The routine of "Greeting" from Responsive Classroom has become one of my go-to first day activities. Greeting everyone means that each child hears their name spoken, and everyone experiences a norm-building activity of greeting and acknowledging one another. (You can read more about this in the Morning Meeting Book.)  On the first day, we stand in a circle. Each person says their name, and then the whole class says, "Good morning, ____!" We talk about the power of making eye contact and how important it is. 

     On subsequent mornings, students greet each other in 3 minutes of smiling, laughing, and sharing. Each time, I begin by emphasizing the importance of taking time for each other, looking each other in the eyes, and letting our classmates know that we care for each other. By sixth grade, students can understand the distinction between being friends and being friendly. We don't expect our students to all be friends with one another, but our class functions much more smoothly when students are friendly with one another.

Books in hands

     My other big task for the first day is to get books in students' hands. I put together tubs of student-friendly, welcoming books, and set up a short period of time for silent reading. For more on this process, check out my resource "Start the Reading Year".

     The first reading session is short, breezy, and fun. It's meant to be exciting for students! I use sticky notes to put names on books, because I'm not yet ready for students to take books home. Some students want to read on, but others set their first choices aside for new ones on the second day. After we read, I have students share their recommendations and what they look for in books. I enjoy getting to hear from students!


    

     

         

     


Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Reading Survey for Students

This year will pose so many challenges for classroom teachers! Whether we are teaching remotely or (gulp) face to face, one of the more pleasant challenges will be how to get books in the hands of readers.

One of my favorite methods is to talk briefly with a student and then offer three books: one that is very similar to their previously read books; one that is similar, but in a different genre; and one that is a stretch book for the student.

Sadly, I can't use this method in the upcoming school year. So I decided to create a Google Form to help me learn about my students! 

This form includes three sections. Because it is a Google Form, you can always feel free to add your own questions! In a future post, I'll add some details about how to interpret results and how to match books to responses.

Genre Questions

I've noticed that the shift in state standards means that students aren't as familiar with the names of reading genres anymore. The questions in this section ask about the characteristics of genres instead of using the genre names themselves. Students may not say that they like reading biographies--but if they say that they enjoy books about real people and places, a biography might be a good choice for them!

Format Questions

Some students have very pronounced opinions about the style and format of the books they read. I included questions about graphic novels, picture books, and point of view in this section. 

Reading Attitude Questions

How do kids feel about reading? These questions help me to gain some insight into which kids are going to need some more helpful nudges...and which kids just need me to get out of their way!