Main Ideas, Topics, and...Photographs?

    This week, I found that I could build visual skills, questioning, and inferring even with a very traditional topic/main idea activity.

    As you can see from these paragraphs, right now we are looking at topics and main ideas. These are not the same at the all. Topics are best expressed in just a few words. Main ideas express a main point about a topic, and are always in complete sentences.

    Readers need to see lots of different paragraph examples, with main ideas in different places. Looking at multiple paragraphs with related topics helps students to see how topics and main ideas can be expressed in different ways. In these paragraphs, students also saw how paragraphs can have a sentence that doesn't belong.

Photos, Close Reading, and Details

  Okay, this is all the basic stuff. Kids really do need to have these experiences with paragraphs, and they are meaningful. But the lesson didn't really get exciting until I started showing some skink photos from my personal archive.

   "Look carefully at this photograph. Based on evidence from the text, what inference can you make about this skink?" I asked students.

    I didn't have to beg or cajole them to look back--they were flipping through their pages, scanning the sentences, eagerly searching for the detail that they remembered. "It must be a young skink!" one student said. "Look, it says here in the text..."
    
    Oh, the explicit text reference--that's totally what I want to see and hear! In the next picture, students first had to use some clues to figure out if the skink was on a wall or on the ground. "As you can clearly see, this is a floor mat," one student said--he definitely has a future as a prosecutor! 

   We went on to look at more pictures of skinks, talking about how sentences from the text can explain or describe them. In this conversation, students were:

-Using close reading to find details
-Making inferences as they matched text details to visual details
-Asking questions

   It all shows how a simple lesson about main ideas and topics can become so much more! 

   You can easily do this with your own paragraphs and photos. Why not try some paragraphs about your school? Consider the animals that are popular in your classroom right now--or a question that came up in science class. 


The skink texts are available as part of this product.

PETE & C 2015

I'm excited to be presenting at PETE & C today! My weekdays usually consist of planning lessons, managing papers, listening to 15 stories at once*, watching birds, and resetting Wifi, so it's exciting to be at such a large and glittering conference. Look at the awesome room!

My presentation focuses on looking at digital AND traditional text. So much of the conversation lately has been exploring the rise of digital text and kids' expertise (or lack thereof) with it. In my classroom, though, I've discovered something interesting--kids don't learn best from either digital or traditional text, but from both. 

Link to Activity Spot app

I took the opportunity to play around with Google Slides. You can check out the presentation here:




If you're looking for some of my previous presentations, you can find them here:


Building Online Reading Comprehension

Building Online Reading Comprehension from Emily Kissner

 

Writing from Sources, Part 2 from Emily Kissner

*15 is an exaggeration. The most I have achieved is three. Three students, talking simultaneously, each telling a story, and I could understand them all! As my teen says, it's like I have superpowers, but they're not very useful.

Procedural Text: Following Directions vs. Answering Questions

I love procedural texts...and so do kids! Procedural texts guide us into learning new skills and making things. My kids at home pore carefully over the Lego guides to put together complicated structures. (Six bags of Legos! What a task!)

Why is it that the same kids who love to read and follow procedural texts struggle with questions about procedural text on standardized tests? 

As it happens, readers read differently depending on their purpose. A study of skilled readers found that reading directions with a goal of performance leads to better outcomes than reading directions with a goal of answering questions (Geiger and Millis, 2004).

Let me say that again--readers show better comprehension when they read directions with the goal of actually doing them, not just answering questions about them. Well, of course they do! Reading with the goal of just answering questions isn't kid's idea of a good time. 

Sadly, of course, their reading comprehension (and our skill as teachers) is measured by students' ability to answer questions. Here are some things that we can do to beat the odds and help readers succeed with both answering questions and performing tasks.

Helping students to read procedural texts goes beyond just assembling items in the classroom. Because our students will need to be able to answer questions about procedural texts, we have to help readers to go more deeply into the texts to answer questions.

Reference
Geiger, John, and Millis, Keith. 2004. “Assessing the Impact of Reading Goals and Text Structures on Comprehension.” Reading Psychology 25 93-110.

*Okay, the study gets even more interesting. When readers had to read to perform tasks, they actually showed the best comprehension with the narrative style directions--totally the opposite of the way that most directions are written! This sounds weird, but actually makes sense when you consider research that texts with low cohesion and out-of-order ideas actually seem to improve learning for skilled readers. 

You can find the fairy bread text here.

Digital Text Sets

This week, I finally started our Antarctica and expository text unit. One thing I love about this unit is that students learn so much by reading multiple texts on one topic. They see how authors can use different main ideas and text structures even when writing about the same topics.

Over on Frolyc, I've put together several sets of texts on one topic. One set is focused on chinstrap penguins. Kids love reading about this little bird, and I've loved converting my paper lessons to digital format.

Chinstrap Penguins

Chinstrap Penguins: Sequence
Chinstrap Penguins: Cause and Effect

Another set is focused on peregrine falcons. It seems that students everywhere are fascinated by these birds!

What is a Peregrine Falcon?
Peregrine Falcons: Sequence
Falconry and the Peregrine Falcon
Peregrine Falcon Problems

Reading multiple texts on the same topic--and watching the carefully chosen videos--helps students to build connections and understand complex ideas.

Goldilocks Speed Drills

When I work with readers who are having trouble with word recognition and fluency, I like to preview words with a speed drill before they read a text. (This article from ldonline is a nice introduction to speed drills. ) 

To make a speed drill, I simply take a selection of words from a text and put them into a table. "But which words do you choose?" some teachers ask. My choices are partly intuitive, but I do use a rough formula:

• Words that need to be pronounced correctly
• Visually similar words
• Words with inflected endings
• Words which carry significant meaning in the text
• Words that are easy to say, but harder to define

Here is a speed drill that I made for a set of texts about landforms of the Northeast. I included the names of the states because, if nothing else, I want kids to be able to pronounce Connecticut!

The second speed drill, which I made for "Groundhog Day" by Lillian Moore, includes some words that are not in the original text. The group that I was working with was having trouble with visually similar words, and I wanted them to practice reading words with different endings.

Goldilocks Reading

Just reading the speed drill can be kind of monotonous. Luckily, my husband (who teaches third grade) taught me Goldilocks Readings. 

First read: Too slow
Second read: Too fast
Third read: Just right

It is so much fun, and so helpful for intermediate readers. Of course, during our slow reading of the words, I exaggerate the syllabication and the emphasis. It only takes one read-through for kids to pick up on this process and they enjoy slowing down their reading as well. 

After the Speed Drill

On some speed drills, I add questions to encourage students to make predictions. On others, I include questions about word awareness and vocabulary use (find the compound words, look for synonyms, etc.) But the speed drill doesn't become a long vocabulary task. Instead, we keep the focus on read the words with accuracy and getting ready for the real reading task--because that is where we are always, always going!

Lessons Learned: Teaching My Kid

This year, I am lucky enough to have my own son in reading class. I teach at a tiny school, with only two fourth grades. My wonderful colleague teaches both math classes, and I teach both reading classes.

It's been great to have my son in my class, and not only because at least one person will get my Dr. Who references. Seeing fourth grade through his eyes really helps me to see what works and what needs to change.

I negotiated approval to post this photo. Talks
were tense at first.

Independent reading
I had better not skip it. Ever!!! Or I will hear about it at home.

Predictable homework
Watching my fourth grader become responsible is such a joy...and having a predictable homework routine in the classroom really facilitates this. I like it as both a teacher and a parent.

Another side to assessment
Last week, students took an assessment with a passage-based essay. At dinner, my son asked, "Did you write the story for our test today?"

"Yes," I replied cautiously, ready for fourth grade criticism.

"Well, I think that if you added more to the end of the story, the essay would be easier. Like tell us more about how Casey feels at the end."

Critiquing test items--how awesome!

Taking one of my students home each day really helps me to see how all the little classroom practices fit together. It makes the pathway toward summer a little bittersweet, as I realize how soon he will be off to fifth grade. Luckily, the lessons I learn from him will last.

Context Clues and the Magic of the Comma

A few weeks ago, as I was reading aloud to students, I stumbled upon a kind of context clues that young readers often miss. Appositive context clues are very common in expository texts for young readers, and they are often misunderstood.

The sentence was constructed like this:

A skilled reader has no trouble matching the word phytoplankton with its definition. After all, the two ideas are right next to each other in the the sentence!

But what about less skilled readers? I know from watching my students try to copy text quotes that they often overlook pieces of punctuation. In fact, I learned that many of my students are reading the sentence as this:

Without the first comma, the meaning of the context clue is completely lost. Actually, it's worse than lost--by logical reasoning phytoplankton couldn't be tiny ocean plants. On a test question, students would confidently choose anything but "tiny ocean plants" as the meaning of phytoplankton, because by their reading the sentence clearly states that phytoplankton is something different from tiny ocean plants.

Once I realized that my students didn't know the meaning of the first comma, I knew what to do next. I had to show them lots and lots of examples of appositive context clues! I also had to make sure that they were carefully reading and attending to punctuation.

After just a few examples taken from our read alouds and written on the board, students were able to answer questions related to the context clues with confidence. They noticed the commas setting off the appositives as the important signposts that they are!