Check-In
RI 4.9
Turn and Talk – Use Accountable Talk Stems
Standard RI4.9 is all about identifying details in the text to support the authors’
claims and point of view and comparing it to another text. Have students turn and
talk about the details in the text that are similar. This helps students draw
conclusions about themes, authors’ claims, and central messages found in
informational text. Use open-ended text dependent questions to help your students
draw conclusions.
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Do you agree with the authors’ conclusions? Why or why not? Support your
claim with evidence from the text.
What is your evidence to support the theme ______ in the text?
What is the author’s point of view in this text? Can you give specific examples
from the text to support your thinking?
What big ideas and messages keep repeating in the text? How does that help
me draw conclusions about themes in the text?
Reading Response Journal
Use a three-column response to keep track of the evidence about your character and
how your thinking is changing or questions that you have.
Text 1 Evidence
Ideas or claims
Word Choice
Structure
My Thinking and Questions
My conclusions
Students will begin to draw
conclusions about themes,
central message, authors’
claims and biases found in
the text. They may also
start forming their own
arguments about the topic.
Text 2 Evidence
Ideas or claims
Word Choice
Structure
My Thinking and Questions
My conclusions
Students will begin to draw
conclusions about themes,
central message, authors’
claims and biases found in
the text. They may also
start forming their own
arguments about the topic.
Check-In
RI 4.9
Venn Diagrams – Graphic organizers to compare and contrast.
Close Reading
Getting Ready to Close Read for Text Evidence
Teaching students to read in a careful way involves helping them to
acquire the vocabulary for talking about text. The more specific your
language, the more you focus your attention and your thinking. We
often used to say to students, “Take your idea about the book,” say
“because the text says,” and then find a detail from the text to support
your thinking.” But, what we found was that students’ initial ideas
were overly simple, or too far removed from the text. As we studied this more
closely, it turned out that the issue was not whether they could cite text, the
challenge was how they constructed their ideas in the first place. What we came to
find is that helping students to develop clearer ideas often involves flipping the
steps around:
1) Now, students tend to: have an idea, then go find evidence.
2) Instead, we can teach: gather evidence, then develop an idea.
As you teach students to gather text evidence, analyze it, and develop new
understandings, plan to pay careful attention to what they produce when
working independently.
Close Reading teaches students to
1) Look at the text evidence.
2) Find patterns in the evidence and make inferences.
3) Develop and support your idea.
Close Reading Lens: Character Lens (What is she feeling/thinking?)
English Text: The Statue of Liberty (Guided Reading Level P)
Spanish Text: The Statue of Liberty (Guided Reading Level M) Although this text is
in English, it is provided at a 3rd grade level in order to provide support for English
Language Learners.
Instructional Focus: Understanding character to develop a theme
Paired Text: English Text: The New Colossus
Alternate Spanish Text: El Nuevo Colosso
Introduce
Text
Vocabulary
Development
Identify Genre:
Close
Reading
1. Read
through a
lens.
Reread the
Close
Reading
2. Look For
Patterns
Close Reading
3. Developing
a new
understanding
Assessment:
Narrative or
Expository
Writing Task
In small
Ask students to
After reading
Check-In
RI 4.9
Read Aloud
and scaffold
vocabulary.
Possible
Vocabulary:
Have students
identify 3-5
words using
the following
criteria.
What words do
you need to
learn? What
parts are you
having trouble
understanding?
What clues in
the book help
you determine
the meaning of
those words?
What is a
synonym for
the word?
passage
looking for
what the facts
say about the
Statue of
Liberty.
Have students
highlight text
evidence.
Chart student
responses in
the first
column of an
anchor chart.
groups reread
the passage
and the
evidence from
yesterday.
Have students
work in pairs
and find
which pieces
of evidence fit
together.
Chart the
patterns you
find in the
second
column of
your anchor
chart.
reread the
passage.
Review anchor
chart evidence
and patterns.
Turn and Talk
about
noticing’s.
Journaling and
Discussion
Questions
How do the
facts about the
Statue of
Liberty support
themes in the
text and
themes in the
unit on
Immigration?
What
conclusions can
we draw?
the Poem “The
New Colossus”
and the story
on the Statue
of Liberty,
how might the
Statue of
Liberty give
hope to people
moving to the
United States?
Provide
evidence to
support your
answer.