The "Real" Deahl

Analyzing a Character with The Five Facts of Fiction

One of the first strategies I use to help students focus their reading is The Five Facts of Fiction. Throughout the year, it's a strategy I expose my students to several times over to analyze works of fiction.

With The Five Facts of Fiction, students can follow how an author develops a character over the course of a text. This strategy allows students to keep track of a character's physical and emotional traits, what his/her motivations are, and whether or not this character's motivations allow him/her to change. We  also use it to pay close attention to plot, theme, and setting.

Reading Strategy and Prewriting Tool

Before I introduce my students to this stragey, they must read about a quarter of their books (or more) to be able to answer the first two Facts of Fiction. Somewhere between pages 25 and 30 it's time to start putting this strategy to work for us.

The C-P-A: My Go-To Research Strategy

Once my students and I have narrowed our research topics to a manageable size, it's time to start thinking about our research in more detail. To do this, I introduce them to our next prewriting strategy: Content-Purpose-Audience (C-P-A).

I quickly explain that we're going to use the C-P-A to help organize our research. I provide each of my students with a copy of a sample completed C-P-A on one side and a blank C-P-A chart on the other side. Eventually, they will fill this in for their own topics.

We then read the sample together. As we do, I point out that the Content boxes include Main Idea and Key Details, the Purpose boxes include Think/Do, and the Audience boxes include People and Questions. Once my students have an overview of what the C-P-A is, it's time to put this strategy into action.

Know Who Your Audience Is

For many students, this is their first experience writing a research paper in MLA Format for someone other than their classmates or their teacher. Knowing who they're writing to helps them further focus their research (and take it seriously). We start in the bottom boxes by determining who our Audience is and what Questions these People might have about the research topics we've chosen.

Choosing Solid Research Topics

My students and I began our research project a little over a week ago. On the first day of this unit, I gave each student a manila file folder for this project. On the tab, students write their first and last names and class period. I then briefly explain that our research folders will do the following:

• keep us organized (we keep handouts, notes on research terms, etc. within it)

• make it easy to locate our research

• help us with our prewriting, note taking, and citations 

Getting Started 

To help guide my students into choosing solid research topics, I model how I want them to begin this process by dividing the front exterior side of the folder into four squares. Then we label each square in this order:

• Things I Like
• Things I Do for Fun
• Things I Care About
  
• Things I'm Interested In (or Things I Want to Know More About)
  

Once we have each box labeled, I create lists under each box. As I write my own lists, I ask my students to watch first. When I finish, I give them the opportunity to write theirs (we go one box at a time and share out ideas as we write them). I try to avoid giving them a number of "things" but, inevitably, someone always asks, so I ask for a minimum of 5-7 things in each list (of course they can add more).

An Approach for Better Writing AND Better Feedback: The Five BIG Questions

Last week we worked on writing Odes. As we moved into revising and editing our poems, I realized many students weren't doing a solid job identifying where their Odes needed improvement. We'd invested a lot of time writing them, and I didn't want to abandon the hard work we'd accomplished thus far, but I also knew that I needed to tweak my approach to these phases in the writing process, or we would all feel discouraged about the work we'd done. 

Enter The Five BIG Questions

After providing each student with a formal copy, I introduced The Five BIG Questions. I explained that I knew they were struggling with making improvements to their Odes, and we needed a different approach in addition to the Tell-Show, which we'd already tried using without a lot of success. Those students who had shared with the entire class weren't receiving helpful feedback.

The previous week we'd read several sample Odes, which we analyzed carefully for: imagery, figurative language, organization, format, etc. to establish some criteria for what makes a well-written Ode. Using a student-written sample from this same collection, I asked for a volunteer to read it aloud.

 

 

Identifying and Connecting with Character Feelings

This week, my students and I have been practicing Reading with Expression, which is one of the easiest ways that I can determine if a student is comprehending what he/she is reading. As we've been practicing whole class readings with excerpts from our books; however, I've noticed that some students are continuing to read without any emotion. To help alleviate this issue, I've centered our reading and journal entries on identifying character's feelings in our texts.

Focus on Feelings

As I normally do on reading days, I give my students 15-20 minutes of reading time with books they've chosen to read (in my class, our reading days are on Thursdays and Fridays). Once their reading time is up, I explain to them that we need to work on improving our Expressive Reading because we're missing the FEELING part in our whole class reading practice.

I model this by reading a passage in monotone from my book The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon. I purposely choose a passage with narration and dialog to remind my students that our pitch should go up when characters are speaking and should drop during narration. In this excerpt, Brent's parents are driving him to a new rehabilitation center. As I read it, I read it in a monotone without any emotion.

Bridging Ideas Together, One Transition at a Time

This week, I'm teaching my students how to add transitions in their narratives. To begin my lesson, I pose these questions to my students:   

Can someone tell me what a transition is?

Can you think of some examples that you've used in your writing before?  

As writers, why do we need to use them?  

What do they help our readers do?

They come up with a variety of answers, that include:

• Tell us (readers) where we're at

• Like the time?

• Sequencing

• They keep our writing in order

Examples My Students Came Up With:

• To start, first, second, third, last, next, then, basically, finally, in conclusion

Their answers help me assess what they already know (prior knowledge), which gives us a foundation to build upon. It also helps me connect what I'm about to teach them to what they already know.

As I transition into my lesson, I add to what they've shared by having them write down these "guidelines" for using them in our writing (we title them Transitions Notes):

• A transition moves one idea (or one part of a story) to the next

• Transitions help us organize our ideas.

• Sometimes transitions come at the beginning of a sentence (or paragraph), in the middle, or at the end.

• You don't need a transition for every idea/event in your story.

We then talk about how different types of writing call for different types of transitions. I go back to the list they generated and explain that the majority of the transitions they came up with work best with essay writing. Since, we're working on narratives, we need a different set of transitions altogether.

Questioning the Texts We Read

As readers, one of the most important things we can do to increase our understanding of the texts we read is ask questions about what we're reading. But what makes a good question? And, what do we do with those questions once we've asked them?

When teaching students the importance of questioning the texts we read, these are the challenges I face. For many students, engaging with text beyond what is happening is something they simply don't have a lot of practice in. Instead, they've had a lot of practice in answering the questions a teacher has created for them in a study guide, or the questions associated at the end of a piece of literature in a textbook. While there is nothing wrong with these approaches, I believe that students will have more "buy in", engagement, and better comprehension if they create their own questions. Asking Good Questions will set them up for making solid inferences and allow them to gain a deeper understanding of what they're reading.

Grading Student Writing...Simplified

The end of the semester is the time that I dread most. Regardless of how many "creative" ways I've tried to catch up on all of my grading, there is still a stack that I could bury myself in for hours. But I've come up with a system that allows me to give my students the feedback they need to improve their writing, assess where they're at, and create a plan for where we need to go from here.

Deadlines, Gradebook Codes, and Late Work

Call me unconventional, but I don't give students points for everything I expect them to do. And, I don't spend hours on end updating my gradebook, calculating grades, or driving myself insane with numbers that my math colleagues can meddle with in their grading efforts. In fact, I don't use a point-based system at all.

When students submit their writing assignments to me, I collect the entire assignment as a whole. Often, I have a checklist with EVERY step we've gone over in class. On a deadline day, I use this checklist with my own writing piece and literally check off each step I expect to see. Then, I have my students do the same. 

A Cotextual Vocabulary Lesson

As my students and I tackled Book 1 of The Odyssey a couple of weeks ago, I realized we needed to have a quick vocabulary lesson about the Muse and her role in Book 1. We talked about how the Ancient Greeks directly speak to the Muse asking her to sing the story of Odysseus in lines 1-2:

Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

In our textbook, we're given an explanation that the Muse is Zeus's daughter, but even this didn't seem like enough "context" for my students. So, I asked if any of them were in theater or drama, many answered, "No." Then, I asked them if they'd read/heard of William Shakespeare before and many agreed they had. I asked them these questions to help give them some background information and then I requested they re-read these first two lines again and asked them:

Reading for a Writer's Main Idea in Informative Texts

Before we tackle Homer's The Odyssey, my students and I are  creating background knowledge about Ancient Greece. As we've embarked upon our own journey into our literature books with informative texts (far above most of their reading levels), we've been working together to increase our understanding of such texts. These texts have challenging words, lengthy sentences, and semi-vague ideas that, independently, many of my students would struggle with on their own. And, the ideas within these informative texts are essential in providing context for The Odyssey.

Since we've used The Idea-Details strategy as a prewriting and revising tool, modeling how we can also use it as a reading tool for informative texts seemed appropriate. This, combined with the background knowledge my students have about titles and subtitles, seemed like a natural way to help us comprehend this difficult reading task (see One BIG Change: From Drafting to Revising for a Title).

Editing for Better Words with the Tell-Show

As we moved into Editing our Opinion Essays last week, I realized my students and I needed to improve our word choice. Clearly, many of us had quickly drafted our essays using simplistic words that simply could be better. I chose a strategy that I typically show students when we need better details in our narratives, The Tell-Show. On a hunch, I thought this strategy would provide us with a quick fix for Better Words.

Ditch Those "Crappy" Words for Better Ones

I chose a paragraph from my draft and explained that I simply wasn't happy with some of the words I'd chosen to use in my first draft. I re-read one of my paragraphs and underlined the words that I knew could be better. Then, I picked one sentence in this paragraph, wrote it on the board, and labeled it Original Sentence:

Every summer, I remember Mom Mom (my grandmother) and Sugar (my grandfather) would get out of the heat and travel to places like Alaska, Colorado, or Oregon.

Main Idea + Details: Two Revisions Every Writer Must Make!

While my students drafted their opinion essays last week, I skimmed through the body paragraphs
they'd  written to evaluate what we would need to Revise. In doing so, I  looked for 2 areas that consistently make it into my lesson planning: Main Idea and Details. Right away, I noticed the following problems in their body paragraphs:

• Unclear Main Idea in paragraph.
• No Main Idea in paragraph.
• Main Idea doesn't fit with the Details in the paragraph.
• Details don't support the Main Idea in the paragraph.
• Not enough Details to support Main Idea.

With these problems in mind, today we tackled Revising for one Main Idea (M.I.) per paragraph with enough Details (Ds.) to support this idea. As writers, our responsibility is to make our ideas as clear as possible to our readers. For many young writers, though, the Revising phase is often murky, which requires some clarity and practice with a technique former students and I have had a lot of success with.

Writing Opinion Pieces with the What-Why-How

Before jumping into The Odyssey with my English 1 students this semester, I wanted to get an idea of what qualities they considered "heroic". I also need to prepare them for our district's end of the semester writing assessment, which requires students write an opinion essay. In order to accomplish both of these goals, I decided we should write a piece about a favorite Hero or a favorite Villain.

For prewriting, I always use a Topic T-Chart to help my students generate lists for ideas to write about. For this particular piece, we created a T-Chart with Heroes on one side and Villains on the other. I told my students that the Heroes and Villains they listed could be fictional, real, dead, or alive but the character/person they chose had to have appeared in a comic book, book, TV show, cartoon, movie, or had to be someone from their lives.

Creating "Student-Friendly" Language to Improve Student Writing

Last week my students and I began to establish the "language" we're going to use to talk about writing this year. After having written three different narratives together, it was time to begin talking about the quality of our writing. This work provided a thoughtful, yet productive way to end the quarter and will help us transition into working to improve our writing for next quarter.

Quality and Improvement

At the beginning of the lesson, I had my students create a T-Chart with Quality: What Makes This Good Writing? on one side and Improvements: What Would Make This Writing Better? on the other.  Prior to sharing a narrative I wrote with them during class, I directed their reading by saying, "As I read my story, I want you to look for at least 2-3 things that you believe makes my writing good and 2-3 things that you believe would make my story better."

The Tell-Show: A Revising Tool for Better Details

This week my students and I are working on writing narratives. Today we began drafting. After finishing part of my draft, I walked around the room to assess how my students' drafts sounded. While they were writing, I skimmed some and noticed that several students were using details that didn't really "show" what was happening. I also noticed that many of them were using a lot of generic words that could be improved (get, went, and saw to name a few). My drive home from school allowed me some time to process how to help them create better details to make their narratives more interesting. Here's what I've done in the past that I know will work for us as we move into Revising later this week...

Show, Don't Tell

I start my Revising lesson by sharing this with my students, "When I think about the parts in books I like best, the parts that hold my attention are the ones where the writing sounds poetic. There's a beauty to the writing that stands out more than other parts, and I can visualize what the writer is sharing with me. Today, I want to show you how to create details that sound as beautiful as the best details in the books we read."

Using Paraphrasing to Help Students Avoid Plagiarizing

For our research unit last spring, I had my students choose a narrow topic and create 7-10 solid research questions for that topic. We spent a great deal of time creating clear questions that readers would be interested in knowing the answers to. Once we had those questions in place, we conducted our research in the Library using a variety of databases that our Librarian showed us how to properly navigate.

With our research in hand, we headed back to the classroom to begin searching for the answers to our research questions. Once we began reading those articles, however, I found that many of my students wanted to give up. They quickly realized that reading these non-fiction texts was a lot of work. These articles were challenging and it took a lot of time to make sense of what they were reading. But it didn't have to be so overwhelming. To help them make sense of the articles they'd found, I taught them how to use some of the reading work we'd already done to help us build a new skill: paraphrasing.

Monitor Your Thinking with The 5 Big Questions

To round out my series on What Is Good Reading, I'd like to conclude with an area that ensures my students are actually Thinking throughout the reading process. Let's face it, many young readers will often read a text, determine what the text is about, and then leave the text without putting a great deal of thought into what they've read and others won't even put that much effort into reading.

But the readers I want are the ones who will actually think beyond what the words mean and what the text is about. I tell my students, "The more thought we put into what we've read, the more we get out of it." And then, I show them how to do just that.

Monitor Your Understanding: Start by Reading Like a Reader

One thing that makes reading instruction extremely complex is the fact that reading is typically seen a private activity. In my classroom, however, I want my students to feel comfortable talking about what they're reading, how well they're reading, and what problems they may face throughout the reading process.

In my four previous posts, I talked about how I work with  my students to better monitor their Speed, Accuracy, Phrasing, and Expression while they're reading. And, I've share how we keep the conversation "open" about What Makes Good Reading.

As we move into the multifaceted task of monitoring and measuring Understanding, we must have an "honest" conversation about the problems that many young readers face in this part of the reading process. This is one conversation that often makes students feel uncomfortable, ashamed, and even embarrassed as I unfold some difficult truths about their reading habits. I begin by asking my students these questions:

How do you know you Understand what you're reading?

How do you know you're "getting" it?

Monitor Your Expression: Put the FUN Back into Reading

One of the many joys that come with being able to read well is the ability to read with Expression. I remember listening to my mom read to me as a kid making her voice change between the characters speaking and the narrator telling the story. She was always so animated and convincing.

And then there were countless teachers who read to my classmates and I with so much feeling; we actually believed we were a part of the stories we were listening to. I have to credit these teachers for fostering my love for reading while they modeled the very things they wanted my classmates and I to adopt as developing readers.

When it comes to listening to my students read, my skilled readers read with Expression, but many students don't have any Expression at all. Instead, they read in monotones sounding "bored", "robotic", and clearly disconnected from the words on the page in front of them. Listening to them read aloud can be painful for their classmates and I, which causes much concern. I'm not sure when (or if) my students ever believed reading was fun, but it's time I teach them how to make it more enjoyable for all of us.

Monitor Your Fluency with Phrase Breaking

Early in my teaching career, I was baffled by the number of high school students who read text in large chunks clearly having no understanding of what they were reading. My students would read without paying any attention to the punctuation in sentences, paragraph breaks, or how texts were broken up into segments. And, as a secondary instructor with little training in reading instruction, I didn't know how to help them fix their problems with fluency.

A few years later, I earned my Reading Endorsement, which gave me some insight into the decoding and fluency problems my students were having. During my coursework, I tutored an ELL student who would enter high school in the fall. Our one-on-one sessions consisted of me listening to her read, identifying the problems in her reading and trying to figure out how to help her. Even with the training I was receiving and the vast amount of reading research I studied, I still didn't feel confident in the instruction I was giving this student. When our tutoring sessions ended, she entered high school still reading well below a 9th grade level, and I felt like there was still something missing in my reading instruction.

A few years after, a team of consultants earned a contract with my school district, and taught my colleagues and I about Phrase Breaking. I knew what Phrases were, but I'd never heard of Phrase Breaking before, at least not as it applied to reading. As these consultants trained us what to listen for, I began to understand how to better help my students by applying what they taught me.