I had the pleasure of pushing into a 5th grade classroom to try out a Close Reading lesson mimicking the ideas from, Falling in Love with Close Reading (see my previous post). I took the mini lessons that my colleagues and I brainstormed while in Cambridge and applied them in Reading Workshop. I used a common text that the class previously worked with through Focus Poetry, "The Abandoned Farmhouse," by Ted Kooser. (see Focus Poetry through Scholastic:
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2012/09/focus-poetry-create-poetry-pros-less-ten-minutes-day)
The first day's mini lesson: Readers notice how an author uses words and phrases to visualize a strong image. As a group, we went though the poem and annotated some of the strong images that we noticed while we were reading the poem. Students did a turn and talk to discuss with their partner what they noticed about the imagery. Then, we discussed as a group what we noticed.
Day 2: We quickly reviewed what we discussed the day prior. Today's mini lesson: Readers categorize strong images in order to find patterns. We read the poem again and started making lists of different images that we noticed and started putting them into categories. We started together with the first stanza about the man...making this our first category (we changed it later). Students did a turn and talk to discover other categories that they noticed. They came up with the house. Through discussion they noticed another category: outside. They also wrote down examples of the strong images that the author created for each category. Independently their job was to continue to add to their lists and come up with any other categories.
When we came together on day three and reviewed our categories, through conversations we added the category: images. We also decided that we wanted to rename our first category to: family. Students discussed their ideas and backed up their thinking with evidence from the text. This led to my mini lesson for the day: Readers consider the patterns to better understand the author's purpose of imagery. Again, we made a list of the categories and brainstormed what the author wanted us to take away from the poem. What was his purpose? What was his bigger message? Close Reading is all about digging deeper...and digging deep was exactly what we were doing. After a lot of brainstorming, I was very proud of these students because they decided that the author wanted us to infer how & why the farmhouse was abandoned through the use of the imagery. The class started making their own predictions of what may have happened based on evidence from the text.
(My charts aren't the neatest...)
Have you tried out any Close Reading lessons yet?
