Paraphrasing Progress

Upon our return from the break, I've been teaching paraphrasing. Of course, in fourth grade, paraphrasing has a very different meaning from what high school teachers hope to see. Not quite ready for locating and citing sources, we talk over and over about how paraphrasing means putting ideas into your own words.

Pictures were a great way for us to begin. We looked at a picture, read a sentence that described the picture, and then tried to write our own sentences to show the same idea in different words.

Students have made some great progress with choosing synonyms that closely relate to the meaning of the original text. Consider this sentence:

Dark clouds filled the sky.

As students worked with a partner to try to paraphrase the sentence, I heard some great conversations. "What's another word for dark?" one asked. "Mrs. Kissner, could we use 'de-exposed' instead of filled?" The room filled with talk about which words could be replaced, and which words needed to stay the same. One student said, "We could call them 'puffy white things in the sky', but that would just be too many words. I think we should keep the word 'clouds'."

But they are still very much clinging to the original structure of the sentences that we talk about. For example, students worked on this sentence:

In the field, the horses grew nervous and restless at the coming storm.

Of course, to a skilled adult, the phrase "in the field" is a perfect candidate for moving around. "The approaching storm made the horses in the field skittish" or something along those lines would be fine. But my fourth graders kept on wanting to begin with "In the ....", and trying to replace "field" with "meadow". Which isn't bad--I'm glad that they know what a meadow is! But understanding how to move ideas around in a sentence is really a key to strong paraphrasing, and my students just aren't there.

I thought that some cross-genre paraphrasing would help them to break free of this pattern. With new partners, students tried to paraphrase a nursery rhyme. I modeled this by showing students how to visualize what is described in the nursery rhyme, and then describe their mental images. (We used "Little Boy Blue", which worked pretty well. Narrative nursery rhymes work best for this--the ones that tell stories instead of just repeating lots of lines.) Even as students tried to move across genres, they still stuck with the structure of the original. "It's really raining, the old man was snoozing..."

So we will keep going. Reading several books on the same topic is a slow but powerful way to help students see how the same ideas are expressed in different ways. We just read three books about puffins, and are now starting several about turtles. One Tiny Turtle by Nicola Davies worked wonderfully...her text is a lovely description of a sea turtle's life, and students found it easy to paraphrase ideas from several pages.

All of this underscores the truly hard work of paraphrasing. In fourth grade, I only want my students to be able to paraphrase from one given text, and use their paraphrased ideas to answer questions. In just a few short years, however, students will be expected to:

1. Find a text
2. Read and understand the information
3. Paraphrase the text
4. Accurately cite the source
5. Interweave ideas from multiple sources to support a thesis

Wow! We have a long way to go. For now, though, we'll keep trying to find synonyms and looking for ways to rearrange ideas.

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!

Reading Procedural Text

This year, I decided to spend some extra time with procedural text. How-to texts, directions, instructions, whatever you want to call them--these are going to be the backbone of students' future reading lives. Not all of my students will pick up novels to read for pleasure when they are adults. But they will all need to read and understand directions in one form or another.

So, for the past week, my students have been immersed in how-to text. I've gone to tic-tac-toe choice menus for reading homework, and one of the favorite activities was to make a recipe with a parent and bring in the recipe to share. (Not the food, I emphasized to the students. The recipe!) We've looked at their similarities and differences, and students shared their experiences. I'm trying to be more conscious about bridging home reading and school reading, and I wanted students to recognize the wealth of reading opportunities they had at home. We heard some beautiful stories of parents taking the time to put treasured recipes on paper--and other stories of students who reminded their parents of the need to follow the recipe!

We also tried to follow directions together--with mixed results. Let me just say that origami is not my strong suit. I found these directions and printed them out for students to try. I wanted to draw students' attention to the features of how-to text: a list of materials, pictures, steps. Then, I thought, we could all have beautiful snowflakes to share.

Well, it didn't turn out that way. As it happens, Step 5 in the directions is tricky--so tricky, in fact, that we just couldn't do it. And what started as a reading lesson turned into a writing lesson. How did the writer let us down? What information did we need that we did not have? It also underscored an important lesson of procedural text. While directions may look dull and boring, they have an unseen drama that only unfolds when the reader jumps in and tries to carry them out. Will this turn out the way it is supposed to turn out? (If you're looking for a good set of directions, try these. They are similar to the first set, but have slightly different steps.)

Because I wanted students to try their hand at narrative directions, we also read a text about how to make a lay-up, and then went to the gym to try it out. I knew that the students would have more trouble with the narrative directions, directions that were organized as a paragraph instead of a numbered list.

I was right! They didn't read these directions as closely as they should. But what makes a better life lesson? Not reading the directions well and answering some questions wrong, or not reading the directions well and failing to complete the task? Well, judging from the expressions of my students, they learned more from realizing that they needed to read the lay-up directions with more care. Tomorrow, they'll have the chance to translate the narrative directions into steps and try again. They are excited to be working with how-to text...and I am excited to see their learning!

Learn About Light

Last year, our state science tests fell before our science teacher was able to teach her Light unit. She was worried that students would not know the words transparent, translucent, and opaque. I saw the opportunity to use this concept in reading class as a way to reinforce summarizing and teach students how to learn from nonfiction text.

Because I couldn't find any texts that suited my purposes, I wrote a short article to explain the concept. After we read it, students sorted ideas from the text as important or less important, and then used that sort to write a summary. It worked well! I decided to post it to help out those who are constantly scrounging for easy science text.

No homework here!

Essays are mostly finished! Several committed (and detail-oriented) students are putting together the fish pictures and essays so that we can publish our book to share.

The entire project took quite a while, even longer because we did all of the work in class. That's right, no writing homework. I've found that many of my students really need my constant support and intervention in order to create a quality product.

I learned this the hard way. I'd tell students, "Your final draft is due tomorrow!" And many of them would dutifully bring back their final draft. Unfortunately, the drafts would be riddled with errors. And I am so soft-hearted that I had a really hard time telling students that they had to start over. Even worse, some students would lose their rough drafts, or never turn in a final draft at all. I loathed having to track down students.

Now, I have a different approach. I know that some students will want to do their final drafts at home, and this is fine. Some parents enjoy this opportunity to sit down at the computer with their child and work on a product.

But all students have the option of working on their final drafts in class. This does present some management issues, as students finish at different times. However, thanks to the time that I spent developing journal writing at the start of the year, students are happy to settle back into their self-directed writing. Students have re-discovered stories, drafted holiday cards for friends and family, and even started writing plays. Students also had the opportunity to compare and contrast their fish and another student's. Even though everyone is working on different projects, writing is progressing nicely.

As students worked to finish final drafts, the classroom settled into a quiet, productive hum. Now that we have moved on to sentences, all but three of my 60 students have finished their essays. No homework, no lost papers, no tears, no parent phone calls. Pretty good!

Sentence Variety

December is a great time for focusing on sentences...they're short! I like to squeeze in some lessons about sentence variety in between the Santa's Workshop, choral concerts, sing alongs, and other holiday cheer.

When I teach about sentence variety, I start out by helping students to understand what the word variety means. A very tangible way to do this is to bring in a variety of something...whether it is a variety of candy, a variety of fruit, or a variety of toys, being able to experience variety helps students to understand why it is something they might want to use in their writing.

Once students understand what variety means, we look at how to add sentence variety to their writing. The best way that I have found to do this is to have students go back through their journals and find a piece that they have written. Then, they count the number of words in sentences and make a list of the first word in each sentence. I model how to use this information as a starting point for revising for sentence variety. What can we do if we find out that all of the sentences have the same number of words? How can we revise to use different sentence beginnings?

Students pick up on these ideas pretty quickly. Even struggling writers can notice that all of their sentences begin with the same words, and can find some ways to make improvements. For the weeks approaching the holiday break, this is about all that I can ask for!

Here's a link to a Sentence Variety Powerpoint that I just uploaded at Teachers Pay Teachers. (It's free, but you do have to register.)

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Sentence-Variety-Powerpoint

The Tedium of Final Drafts

I used to think that teaching writing was all about the big, important questions--how does a writer share an experience? Which details are most important? What brings a piece of writing to life?

But now I know that there are tedious, mundane questions that must be answered as well. Which is what led me to teach a lesson about notebook paper.

Why notebook paper? Well, there is not enough time before the holidays for every student to type their essays, so students are writing out their final drafts by hand. As they create final drafts, they need to understand how to use notebook paper.

When I first started teaching, I didn't really care much about how students created their final drafts. I didn't want to be as tyrannical as the teachers I had had growing up, who would get out the ruler to make sure that my title was precisely centered. But when I didn't take the time to build expectations for final drafts, I received--well, very interesting papers. Final drafts on the backs of notebook paper, pages with titles scrawled across the top, pages with food spots on them. This made the task of grading (which I hate anyway) even more depressing.

Now I realize that it is important for students to care about how their final drafts look. And I need to teach it! So we spent class time this week examining a piece of notebook paper. Where do the holes go? (My students don't use binders, so putting the holes on the left does not seem like a big deal to them.) What do those pink lines mean? Where should a title go? What do we do if we make a mistake?

"This is boring," one student sighed.

I have to agree. At the time of the final draft, all of the possibilities of the writing task have been narrowed into one and only one product. Whether you are typing or writing by hand, creating a final draft is tedious. It doesn't have the fresh sparkle or amazing possibilities of the composing process. Making a final draft to share requires intense focus and discipline.

But it is a step that cannot be forgotten or pushed to the side. Just as we have to answer the big, important questions of writing, we also need to answer the small and mundane ones. Like this:

"Mrs. Kissner?" a student whispered at my elbow. "Can you help me? I don't think I really know what indenting means."