Starting the Year with Self-Monitoring

One of the main challenges of the beginning of the year for me is keeping my focus on reading and thinking. It is easy to get wrapped up in classroom decoration ("I must buy more sparkly fish!") and administrative details ("I must print out at least 10 class lists and set up my substitute folder and make a spreadsheet for intervention groups!").

But I make a conscious effort in these first few weeks to save two slots in my working memory. (It's hard!) One slot I reserve for students--for the kids who are in front of me, right now, at this time. The other slot I reserve for deeper thinking about what the kids are doing and how they are processing. What materials am I giving to students? What do these materials say about the classroom and the work that we will do here together?

So this year I want to begin with really strong instruction in self-monitoring. To me, self-monitoring is the heart of reading comprehension. I love to think about reading as world-building, with readers processing text at various levels--surface, textbase, and situation model--as they read.  (This view of reading is based on work by van Dijk and Kintsch--this website summarizes the theory and provides more references.)

The best way that I have found to help readers self-monitor is to use the "click" and "clunk" strategy. (Here is an article that explains it nicely.) This strategy is perfect for the start of the year because it focuses on micro-level understanding. Do I understand this sentence? If the answer is yes, the sentence "clicks". If the answer is no, it "clunks". Then, readers can try to put together the meaning of the entire passage.

Here is a little graphic organizer that I created to help students think about clicking and clunking. As you can see, every clunk leads to some kind of action on the part of the reader.

Click or clunk from Emily Kissner

The next step is to put this into action with a passage. This year I'd like to try to use the first few paragraphs of The Story of the Amulet by Edith Nesbit. (If you're not familiar with E. Nesbit, find her books online...they are over 100 years old, but so influential in the world of children's fantasy!) After students read it and monitor their clicks and clunks, they will draw and share pictures of the world that they built in their minds.

My husband, who teaches third grade, found the passage to be a little hard for his students, so I wrote a new passage for him. He has a robot/space theme going on in his classroom this year.

Whatever passage you choose, start with something that provides a bit of challenge for students. Talking about their clunks and how they solve they will help students to realize that reading takes risk--but that the risks can be rewarding.

Good luck as you start your school year! Wish me luck as I attend my first rounds of meetings and try to save slots for students and deeper thinking.

News and Notes
This week I finally finished a new September reading homework packet. Four more weeks for October are on their way.

For more texts that focus on visualizing, try out the Visualizing PowerPoint and Activities packet.

If you are finding that your readers are having lots of clunks, try out the Making Inferences with Transitional Readers packet for focused work on inferences and visualizing.

How are students using context clues?

Recently, I wrote about using a cloze to find out how students are using context. The results were so interesting! As I flipped through the student responses, it was easy to see what students were thinking as they read. Here are some things to look for as you score a cloze:

Global Reading: Younger readers tend to read sentence by sentence, linking each idea only to the one right before it and right after it. In a cloze, readers sometimes have to take ideas from one paragraph and connect them to ideas from another paragraph. In the salamander text, for example, students needed to remember the idea "rainy March nights" from the first paragraph to fill in a blank in the second paragraph.

By checking to see which readers were able to do this, I could learn a lot about my students.  Students who filled in "days" instead of "nights" had not made this connection between paragraphs. They might not be taking a global view as they read.

Going back: There are many readers for whom reading is a one-way activity. They go forward, and that's that. But skilled readers often will look back in the text, often to clear up a problem. Cloze activities are a perfect opportunity to model the benefits of looking back in a text. In the second paragraph of the salamander text, readers can use the given word "driving" to fill in the missing "roads" in a previous sentence. Some of my students were able to do this. Others did not. This gives me a good chance to model going back in a text to show that reading is not just a one-way street.

Tricky words: In the last paragraph, students had great difficulty with this sentence: "In one town, people have ___built a tunnel!" Only one student had it correct (even) while about four put in words like "actually" that would fit in the sentence. But many others left it blank.

This shows me that they probably need help with understanding and using adverbs. As fourth graders move into more academic text, adverbs are used more frequently. But can students understand them? If they can't come up with even or actually to fill in this sentence, a word like however is probably beyond them.

Cleverness: Okay, so this isn't a technical term. But three of my students had the most adorable response. They put the word "cloze" in a blank. At first this troubled me. Where was this coming from? Then I thought about it from a reader's perspective. The top of the page reads "Salamander Crossing Cloze." These students didn't realize that cloze was the name of the activity. Instead, they thought it had meaning for the text, and were wringing every clue they could from the title. Clearly a "cloze" must have something to do with the salamander crossing!

This is why I like looking at what students put in the blanks--each time, I can learn something new about my students and what they are thinking. The "Salamander Crossing" cloze is embedded below. Download it here to try with your students. 

Salamander Crossing Cloze

View more documents from Emily Kissner.

Context Clues and Cloze

How do readers understand context? If you really want to see what your students can do, try a simple cloze activity. Take 200 or so words from a text that you'll be reading together. Type that text, removing every 7th word. Then, ask students to read the text and fill in the missing words. What do they do? Watching the students and reading their responses is fascinating!

(If you don't want to type in the text, you can try this cloze generator tool. For more on cloze, read this article. If you'd like a cloze passage to try, write to me--I have several that go along with texts that I use.)

Being able to complete a cloze passage is all about understanding the context of words. As I teach about context, I know that I want students to understand the word context. I also want students to be able to generate the words to fill in blanks, like on a cloze assessment. But state tests are coming up, and I know that students will need to use context clues to answer synonym questions on the test.

That's a lot of instruction to remember! To help myself keep it all straight, I created this Powerpoint.

Context Clues

View more presentations from Emily Kissner.