Core Reading with Struggling Readers

Early October brings a mix of emotions in the classroom. On the one hand, there is the elation of feeling that we have finally come together as a class. The mix of personalities has settled into a cohesive culture with its own inside jokes, traditions, and routines. (My class this year has taken to making up imaginary students to sit at the empty desks, complete with name labels and supposed personalities. And they have taken on the stuffed toy lobster, which has sat unnoticed on the shelf for years, as a special mascot. I just love to watch these things happen.)

But by early October, I also have a very clear picture of the task that I must accomplish by the end of the year. Looking at the DRA scores of my struggling readers, it was easy to feel daunted by the expectations of the Common Core to get these readers into grade-level reading selections. "How can I do this?" I asked my husband. "How can I get someone at a DRA 18 into a level 40 book?"

My husband, who teaches third grade, was a little calmer than I was. He also has a longer memory. He said, "Didn't you write a whole chapter about that in your book?"

"But it's--" I started, ready to argue, and then I stopped because I realized that he was right. There it was, in The Forest and the Trees, a long section about giving different kinds of support to readers as they work with grade level text. Right.

So I do know how to do this, I thought. As I planned for the upcoming weeks of instruction, I considered my readers carefully. The notion of before, during, and after has helped me to frame my lessons.

Before Reading: Building Automaticity
To build automaticity with the words in the grade level text, I've been making speed drills, flash cards, and word sorts. These look different depending on the text and the groups.

For Weslandia, I pulled out one and two-syllable words. One group focused on the one-syllable words. Words like loom, built, and wove are a real challenge for them. With another group, I worked on syllabication strategies. We worked on words from the text like civilization, innovation, and devise. With each of these lessons, I focused on using a decoding strategy that wouldn't just help students with words from this text, but would help them to decode words in future texts as well.

For Molly's Pilgrim, I pulled out all of the compound words. I made cards by separating them (school/yard) and then we put them back together. In this case, I focused on understanding the compound words. Many students had never heard of a "schoolyard" before, so we talked about making sense of the compound word by putting together the meanings of the other words. I included some other words on the speed drill as well, organized by the number of syllables, so that it was easy to listen to tailor the list for different readers and listen to them read the words over multiple days.

With each of these activities, I also used the words that we practiced to build predictions for the text. "In the text we'll read next week, Molly has trouble reading the word Thanksgiving. Why do you think this might be?" Then we shared our thoughts about why this might happen in the story.

Before Reading: Building Background
It's also important to build background knowledge for all readers. While we were working with Weslandia, I wrote a short little passage about the Roman civilization for students to read as their homework fluency practice. This passage got them to say the word "civilization" repeatedly throughout the week. Because we are also starting our study of Greek and Latin roots, this text built some instant connections between our reading and word study.

During Reading: Strong Sustaining Strategies
I am also working this year to give every reader the chance to independently interact with grade level or approaching grade level text. To make this successful, I have to think very carefully about the sustaining strategies that they will use. Where will they have difficulty? What can I do to support them?

The syllabication strategies we practiced before reading become very important here, as readers have to try to figure out words on their own. This goes hand in hand with the "clicks and clunks" that we've already practiced. Identifying where meaning breaks down is a necessary step to better comprehension. If struggling readers aren't aware of what difficulties they are having, they can't utilize better strategies! After we spend time reading silently, we can talk about where those clunks occurred and how we can fix them.

During Reading: Embedded Questions and Reading Road Maps
I also like to use these activities to help readers make meaning in a text. Embedded questions are simply questions that you insert into the main body of the text. They are a wonderful scaffold for helping readers to make inferences as they read. Think about the key ideas that a reader will need to gather from a section, and then write a question that cues them to think about those ideas.

Reading road maps are similar. They are based in the idea that reading is like a journey. Sometimes they are organized as before, during, and after, as this example. I've stopped trying to make mine "cute" and use a simple table design.

After Reading: Notebook Resources
After students have read the text and we've talked about our clicks and clunks, we go deeper into analyzing the story. Struggling readers and ELL students really benefit from having a notebook full of resources to help them answer questions.

For example, consider character traits. A question might ask, "What trait of the main character helps her to resolve the conflict?" A student who needs help in reading will benefit tremendously from having a list of character traits to refer to while answering this question. This list will help the reader to be able to focus on gathering the text details to support an answer to this question. Lists of themes work in the same way. When a reader has a list of universal themes to refer to, identifying and supporting a theme becomes a much easier task.

Getting students who are reading significantly below grade level to comprehend grade level text is a tough task. By planning scaffolding before, during, and after reading, I can help to make the task a little easier.

A note on materials: I've created several Common Core friendly materials for Weslandia and Molly's Pilgrim...if you would like any, please write to me or leave a comment. (Make sure that you put your email address in the comment! If you don't, I don't have any way to reach you. )

Reading Folders

Today was the fifth day of school! For the first few days, I worked with the students to find "just-right" books. Now that they have settled into their books, the next challenge is to get them thinking about what they read.

Yesterday, we made a chart to show all of the different kinds of thinking that readers can do as they read. (This is based on the "Reading Is Thinking" chart in Guiding Readers and Writers by Fountas and Pinnell.) Each student received a sticky note, and wrote one kind of thinking that they do while they read. Some students had some great ideas, like "making pictures in my mind", while others drew a blank. Still others knew important words, like "schema", but weren't sure of how to put this as a kind of thinking. Students shared their sticky notes and grouped similar ones together.

After we talked about all of the different kinds of thinking that they can do while they read, I introduced the simple chart we'll use to keep track of our thinking. Then, I showed them how they can do this. Finally, they returned to their own books to try writing down at least one example of how they think while they read.

In past years, I've been very encouraging on the first day, accepting almost every approximation. Today, though, I was a little choosier. One student wrote, "I am wondering what will happen next."

Ah, the stand-by reading response! This fuzzy response plagues me every year. Not today, I decided! But it takes some work to help a reader figure out how to make this more specific.

I said, "Let's try to make this a little more specific. Why are you wondering what happens next?"

The student rattled off a pretty detailed explanation of the events of the page, so I knew he was following the story. (He was reading the second book of The Sisters Grimm--his third grade teacher had read the first book the previous year.) I said, "You just told me that Jack and Sabrina are fighting. Can you put that into a specific question about what will happen next?"

He thought for a few moments, then said, "Well, Sabrina has a sword, and I wonder if she's going to use it in the fight."

Much more specific thinking! I said, "Think about how much more detail you added! This really shows your thinking as a reader."

As I start routines, I am always thinking, "What will this look like months down the road?" It's important to make sure that students aim for specific thinking, each and every day.

Of course, today wasn't all about the winning. As the temperature climbed, I asked one reader to tell me what he was thinking. He looked at me, sighed, and said, "I was thinking about if you would let me go stand in front of the fan."

Teaching reading in August is always an adventure!

Text Structure Readers Theatre

So here is my problem with text structure. For some students, the mere mention of "cause and effect" is enough to get them to remember it. These students learn quickly and easily. A little bit of instruction goes a long way.

But for other students, text structure is a lot of content to learn. These students need repeated exposures to an idea in order to learn it. They need to hear the word, say the word, see the word, and act out the concept. They can't remember the difference between a cause and effect; they don't know how to pronounce the word "solution"; they get lost in the syllables of "chronological".

Readers Theatre is the perfect way to give students repeated exposure to these words. As students practice their lines, they are practicing the important words related to text structure. Over a snowy weekend, I created four scripts--one each for chronological order, cause and effect, problem and solution, and compare and contrast. Are the scripts a little silly? Of course! I want kids to enjoy performing them, so I tried to add in lots of action and some funny parts.

Text Structure Readers Theatre

I can see these being used in two different ways. In my classroom, groups of students are working on one script throughout the week, and will hopefully perform their work to another class of students. But it would be just as effective to put the scripts in a fluency center and have students cycle through practicing the different scripts.

We had so much fun doing these scripts yesterday and today! I got the big acting break that I've been waiting for...due to a student absence, I got to be the Writing Fairy. It was about as much fun as you can have on a snowy Tuesday afternoon.

Fun with Features

We're talking about text features! Today we started out by examining the word feature. I've noticed that students already know the term "text feature", but they tend to say it really fast, as all one word--textfeature.

But the word "feature" is a high utility word, one they will be able to use across disciplines and situations. I used a simplified definition for students, telling them that a feature is "a part that gets your attention." They did have experiences with the word, and we talked about a DVD's special features, their facial features, and a car's features.

Next came the fun part. I have two sons, so I have acquired a large quantity of Playmobil toys. I brought in five different boats. "These boats all have different features," I told students. Then, they got into small groups to examine the boats and label the features with notecards. The purpose here was twofold. I wanted students to practice looking closely at an object and analyzing the parts. I also wanted to look at how the different boats had different features. The fireboat, for example, has a hose, while the airboat has a fan.

It was so successful! Students were highly engaged in looking at the features, and they shared their knowledge. "I know a lot about boats, and this is a galley," one student told the others. Many of the students were familiar with a winch, but struggled with what to call the steering mechanism. Wheel? Joystick? Steering wheel? I just loved the conversation, because it really flowed from our work with paraphrasing. Students were working to name a concept and tossing out various words, judging them, and reshaping them.

Of course, I can't just teach about the features of boats. We had to apply this to text. "Just like the feature on a boat is something that gets your attention, something that makes it interesting, a text feature is something that gets your attention in text."

I had prepared envelopes with text features written on small cards. In new groups, students looked at high interest magazines and tried to match the cards to text features in the texts. "I don't know much about text features," one boy sighed. "I don't read those kinds of books." He stared down at the page of Kids Discover. "Are there any text features there?"

"Well, think about what you did with the boats," I coached. "You looked to see what got your attention. What gets your attention there?"

He looked down at the page. "An eel."

"Is an eel a text feature?" I asked, trying to get him to move beyond the image on the page to the name for the image.

"Well, I guess it's a picture," he said grudgingly, going to his envelope. "So that's a text feature?"

We had a great time with the text features, and students were more eager to learn about them than ever before. Starting out with the real, concrete features of the boats made everyone relaxed and interested. If you don't happen to have a fleet of plastic boats at home, this works just as well with other objects. A collection of coats would work, or holiday decorations, or really anything with lots of neat little parts.

Paraphrasing

It's hard to do, it's hard to teach. But paraphrasing is so important for our young readers. When students can put ideas into their own words, they can take notes, effectively answer questions, and summarize.

Today we embarked on a study of paraphrasing, preparation for future summarizing. And it was a tough go. Paraphrasing seems concrete, but is really a very abstract concept. Think about it--when we paraphrase, we take ideas and put them into our own words. So ideas exist outside of words.

This is pretty abstract for fourth graders. (Just today, one of them asked me if The Sorcerer's Apprentice was a true story. Sigh.) They equate words with ideas--the words that are used to explain an idea ARE that idea.

The challenge for teachers, then, is to help students recognize that ideas can exist without words. So I went back to visualizing. As we read original sentences, I encouraged students to visualize what the sentence was saying. Then, I had them keep the visual image, and try to write a new sentence to describe it.

Results were mixed. For some students, this strategy worked brilliantly, and they wrote really decent paraphrased versions of the sentence. But other students struggled with the need to come up with synonyms, or the need to rearrange the order of ideas. By the end of the class, everyone at least knew that paraphrasing is putting ideas into your own words...which was a start. Tomorrow, I want to try again, with more concrete, easily visualized sentences. The next step, then, is to take paraphrasing into authentic texts.

Here's a link to a Powerpoint that I made to use with students. Lots of snow pictures from Caledonia State Park!

Understanding Text Structure

Here is the link to the Text Structure slideshow on Slideshare.net:

http://www.slideshare.net/elkissn/understanding-text-structures