Today we worked on close reading using a lesson from Kylene Beer's book:
When Kids Can't Read.The excerpt is from the novel
Belle Prater's Boy. First,we discussed what a close read was, and then I had the students read the excerpt by themselves and try to decipher meaning. They found the excerpt very difficult to comprehend. Then I had them highlight the spots in the text where they got lost and any vocabulary words they didn't know. This gave the students a focus for the lesson ahead. I also had them write a few sentences (summary) about what they
thought the excerpt was about after a first read. Next, we moved on to the Smartboard.
Sentence by sentence we analyzed the text, taking notes as we went.
Much inferencing took place along with other reading strategies
such as visualizing and questioning. Later
, we wrote a 4-5 sentence summary of the excerpt
which showed the new learning that took place.
The final
piece to this lesson was a discussion on how close reading was different from every day reading
. Christine
