Aligning Text Structure with Author's Purpose

Looking back at my past six years teaching I have spent a lot of time taking my kiddos through different units that focus on informational and narrative writing. We wrote all about books, how-tos, narrative nonfiction, recipes, letters, fairy tales, and LOTS of small moment stories. But as my school begins implementing Lucy Calkin’s Units of Study in Writer’s Workshop along with the new expectations in the Core, I began reflecting and realized I have never explicitly taught opinion writing or asked my students to take a position on something and support that claim.

So to get my students thinking about this new text type, I decide to implement some close reading strategies to really look at how author’s structure their writing and what they tells us about this purpose. So here’s my first lesson on text structure as evidence for author’s purpose.

I began by telling my students that today we were going to be detectives, which naturally they totally bought into. I passed out their “close reading” hand lens and asked them to help me collect clues. I explained that we were looking for clues that would help us determine why the author wrote the text.  We reviewed the 3 purposes that we learned earlier in the year – Persuade, Inform, Entertain. But this time I explained that usually when the author’s purpose is to entertain, they are writing a narrative (narrate) and when they are persuading they are trying to get someone to believe their opinion.

We then looked a couple of books that we had just finished reading and talked about how the book was organized. In  Three Billy Goats Gruff we collected clues that lead us to see that it had a BME structure while the book Sharks had a table of contents and subtopics (or parts) that told about the big topic of sharks. We charted this information:

Then I asked students to think about the writing we have done so far this year – I asked them to study it closely and decide where it would go on our chart. They deduced that our small moments were narratives and our chapter books and all about books were informative. Now they were ready for the really gritty stuff!

I introduced a new text: I Wanna Iguana By:Karen Kaufman Orloff  and read the first letter that Alex wrote to his mom in the book. I asked students to turn and talk about why they think the boy was writing to his mom. What was his purpose? Was he trying to entertain her? inform her? or persuade her to do something? The very quickly where able to tell me he was persuading, so then we started to discussing how the text was organized. I asked them to find the sentence where the boy said what he wanted. We wrote that as our claim and continued reading charting all the reasons why he gave to support his opinion.

After reading the book we went back to our chart and added this new text structure as claim and reasons. I encouraged students to look for text structure when they are reading to determine the author’s purpose and to think about their purpose as writers and be sure that they structure their writing appropriately.  

Comprehension Strategies: Visualizing Part 2 - Taking it to the Text

So my last post was all about making visualizing a concrete experience that students could understand. This post will focus on how I take the skill into texts with first graders. It is easy to just ask students to "draw what they see" but I really want my students to be able to cite the text evidence that accompanies their mental images, so you will see that every time I ask my students record their mental image I also require them to include words from the text in their work.

We begin with an idea from Strategies that Work. We read the wordless picture book Good Boy Carl by: Alexandra Day, a story of a dog who is left in charge of watching the baby while mom does some errands. We stop midway through on a double spread that shows Carl and the baby in front of a laundry shoot on one side and then Carl racing down the stairs on the other side. I ask students to visualize what is happening between the pages.

They draw their ideas and then write to explain what is happening to the baby.

Then we move into some poetry. The short text and break in stanzas is a great way for students to track their images and see that as the text changes so does our mental images. The first poem we use is Under the Bed By: Penny Tarznka.

 

Some other great poems are Rock and Roll Band By: Shel Silverstein and I Bought Our Cat a Jet Pack from the book The Tighty-Whitey Spider. 

Next we do a mini author study using Mercer Mayer's There's Something There! Collection. Each time students record the words they hear in the text and then illustrate their mental image.

From There's a Nightmare in My Closet: 

This time we really focused on using the words to help us determine and visualize the setting. From There's an Alligator Under My Bed: 

And then we finished up There's Something in the Attic.

Then we begin discussing specific types of words (nouns and verbs) and how they effect our visualizing. We went through the GRR model using the book Zoo At Night By: Martha Robinson and Antonio Frasconi. First we tapped into our schema charting animals we see at the zoo and what they do. I explained these words as nouns and verbs.  I then modeled finding the nouns and verbs using the hippo page and used those words to create a picture. Then students worked in small groups to do the same thing using the eagle, tortoise, alligator, and monkey pages. Each group highlighted the nouns and verbs, created a picture, and then presented to the class. Finally they choose a passage (either the jaguars and bats or the tigers and raccoons) and completed the same work on their own.  I didn't catch their group work on film, but here are their independent pages.

We continued this work adding adjectives to the mix using the books: 

Like Butter On Pancakes By Jonathan London and G. Brian Karas

Fireflies By: Julie Brinckloe

Night Sounds, Morning Colors By: Rosemary Wells

Where the Wild Things Are By:

The Salamander Room By: Anne Mazer

In the Tall, Tall, Grass By: Maurice Sendak

Night in the Country By: Cynthia Rylant

Here is our final bulletin board. You can't see the whole thing, but it has the red curtains on each side to resemble a theater. Each student has one piece of work displayed and it reads:

Our Mind Movies

We added words from the text to our schema to create mental images

We call this Visualizing

I hope you found some strategies or book choices that you can use as you lead your students through visualizing in your room. If you have a great idea that I need to try in my room, please share it in the comments!  Happy Visualizing! 

Comprehension Strategies: Launching Visualizing Part 1

" . . to read a book is to create a book. To read a book is to listen, to visualize, to see. If the readers, child or adult, cannot create the book along with the writer, the book is stillborn." - Madeleine L'Engle 

Why teach children to visualize?  As Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis say in their book Strategies that Work "(it) brings joy to reading." How many of you have sat through the movie release of your favorite book just to find that it falls flat in comparison? The beloved protagonist is missing their allure or that one moment from the book that you replayed in your head a dozen times is missing the setting, smells, and feelings that were evoked in your mind as you read. When we visualize we are creating our own mental movie and it is often the reason we connect to the stories - sometimes crying and laughing along side the characters. We see what they see and feel what they feel. And then - since it's in our mind- we have the freedom to add to that image to make it even more personal. Maybe a soundtrack accompanies the words, or perhaps that hero evolves into having the disheveled hair of your spouse, or perhaps the vengeance you feel towards a grade school bully is directed towards the villain.

When readers visualize they use words from the text, add it to their schema, and then create a mental image in their head. Visualizing, like inferring, asks readers to combine text evidence with their prior knowledge. Many students do not realize that they are in fact making inferences when they visualize. I teach visualizing before inferring, as I think it is a good stepping stone to the work I will ask them to do in that next unit. When I teach my students about making mental images I am always asking them to bring it back to the text and cite the evidence that influenced their mental images. When students are visualizing, their mental images are concrete and they are taking the "right there" information to make their pictures, whereas when we start inferring I expect them to go beyond the text. 

So, as with all my units I start by having my students explore the strategy through some of the concrete ideas presented in Tanny McGregor's book Comprehension Connections. As the students walk in on our first day with this new strategy they are greeted by an assortment of "out of place" objects. Seashells, an apple, a sand pail, some mittens . . . 

Then I provide each student with a "visualizing tube." I ask them to zoom in on one of the objects and look at it closely. As they are viewing it's details, I probe students to image it in the context of where it belongs. What would they see, smell, and hear near it? Then I ask them to record this mental image.

After visualizing, I group students who have chosen the same object. They compare their drawings, noticing how even though they all picked the same object they saw it in a different context.  For example some students were picking apples off a tree while others were handing it to their teacher as a gift. This is our first realization that our schema influences our mental images. 

Finally we end this lesson by connecting it to our work in reading. Here are the words Tanny McGregor suggests using with the kids: "Sometimes when you read, the writing helps you focus on something. Your brain can see it clearly, as if you were right there. Not only can you see with your mind, but sometimes you can smell, taste, hear and feel as well. We call this visualizing, or making a mental or sensory image. We have the ability to create these sensations in our heads, just be reading the print on the page. It's like magic! Being able to visualize makes reading so much more fun. Turn and talk to a friend about a time when you read something or someone read to you, and you could actually see or feel what was going on in the text." (Connections, 93)

Next, we begin discussing how words influence our mental images.  I launch this through music. First, I play Let It Snow. As the music plays, I ask students to close their eyes and listen. As they listen I ask them to shout out words they are hearing that they are also seeing in their heads. I try to catch what they say in a quick sketch. Once the song ends, students open their eyes and look at what I captured based on what they said. We go through the picture and talk about what words they heard and label those items in the picture (storm, snow, fire, corn (for popping), me, you). We also talk about why we included things that weren't in the song (snowman, Christmas tree, icicles, stockings, moon). We realize that our mental images are made up of not only the words we hear, but also what we have in our schema (i.e students know this is a Christmas Carol, so they inferred the setting - Christmas time - and what they would see during that time of year. I do not explain that they are inferring yet. I just want them to realize that visualizing happens when we add text clues to our schema to make a mental image. 

Finally, students practice on their own with another song. We listen to the song twice. On the first listen students simply draw. On the second listen I ask them to label the words they heard that they drew into their picture. Some songs I use are: Under the Boardwalk, Under the Sea, Over the Rainbow, Zip a Dee Doo Dah, and Monster Mash.

Check back soon to see how we take this into text! 

Character and Setting Using Text Evidence

So, as I began writing my first fiction unit for the new year, and planning for my first observation with a new principal, I really wanted to make sure I highlighted the CCSS and our school goal, differentiation.

For this lesson I focused the standard on RL.1.3 describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.

I was finding that most of the students are relying heavily on their schema when answer questions about key details in the text, rather than specific text evidence. To tackle this problem I decided I would provide my students with text statements and they would then sort those words based on whether they were describing the characters or the setting.

I chose to use a listed exemplar from the appendix within CCSS - Over in the Meadow. I spread this lesson over three days.  Below is the visual from Houghton Mifflin Treasure's series. This is the version I used with my students.

Day 1 : We read the first 3 stanzas of the poem and discussed the change of setting through out the poem - how the characters all were in the meadow, but in different areas of the meadow. We sorted our evidence by what we saw (picture clues) and what we heard (text clues) to help us decide where and when the different parts of the poems where taking place. Below is a picture of the anchor chart I used.

Day 2:  We reread the same 3 stanzas, this time I had written words from the text on the post-its and purposely distributed words to students. They walked to enlarged posters of the three stanzas and placed their post-it either on the setting or the character, based on which it was describing.  For example, slow would have been placed on the picture of the turtle (character) or night would be placed in the sky (setting) of the owl stanza. We did this lesson again focusing on how we can infer more about the characters and setting. The green post-its are from the text, the blue ones are inferential descriptive words.

Day 3: This time other stanzas were selected for independent practice. I also D.I'ed these by having some student's using rebus readers and other using ones that had no picture clues. They read their stanza and then sorted words from the text under the titles - character and setting.

You can pick up a copy of the three different student formative sheets at my TPT store for FREE.