Falling in Love...Chapter 2

Here comes Chapter to of the Falling in Love With Close Reading Book Study, hosted by Dianna from Sassy, Savvy, Simple Teaching's.

I. After reading the lessons in this chapter, what are your thoughts about teaching close reading?

My first thought about close reading, is that I don't close read. I'm a skimmer, I skim through books and will sometimes get to the end of the page and have no idea what I have read, which is so annoying that I have to go back and read it again. Descriptive paragraphs in novels! AHHHHH! I read the first couple of sentence and then skip to the next paragraph. Same thing, I find myself having to go back and reread because I will have missed something important or things won't make sense. But it's so boring to read every single word! Is anyone else like that or is it just me? 

So knowing that about myself, I think I have to work extra hard to teach close reading to my class.  I really have to look at the book or story that I'm reading and have a purpose, or decide on a lens.

What really stood out for me about this chapter was when they talked about they way or the reasons that we gather evidence.

I hate to say it but I'm kind of stuck with the old way. The student has an idea, and then they find the evidence in the text that supports the idea.

This year my focus will be to switch to the approach the authors suggest: first we gather the evidence, then develop the idea. Which really does make more sense. We shouldn't be forcing the evidence to fit into the mold or the idea that we already have.

2. What do you notice about the amount of student talk during the lessons? 

There is a lot of student talk. Lots of times to share their ideas and thoughts with their elbow partners. I really like how the authors suggest listening to what the students are saying and picking two or three ideas from them. I think it's a much nicer flow, then having everyone share their ideas.

I also noticed in the lesson that there was a strong sense of the readers voice in the students' writing. You could actually see their thought process as they gathered evidence and then created or changed their idea.

I'm really enjoying this book. It's making me think about my own practice. It's forcing me to "close read" it, since skimming an educational text will not work always work. Especially for this book. 

I love that they have included all kinds of examples. I would love to see more primary grade samples. I'm trying to envision what close reading would look like at the beginning of first grade. I think I will use a lot of rich text, read alouds and do a lot of modelling. I will also pull small groups for some of my higher readers.

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