Check-In RL 4.1 Turn and Talk – Use Accountable Talk Stems Standard RL4.1 is all about having students refer to details in a text to support their thinking. Have students turn and talk about the characters and themes during close reading, interactive read aloud, and guided reading instruction. Use questions and prompts such as the ones below to help move your students’ understanding from character attributes to theme and begin to support their thinking using text-based evidence: What is your evidence to support the theme ______ in the story? What is the theme of 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. Character Evidence Tracking what characters think, say, do… Events that impact the character. My Thinking and Questions My theories of possible themes Some themes that may emerge are: poverty, oppression, hope, discrimination, acceptance, perseverance, loss, etc. Stop and Jot/Sketch Reading Response Journal After reading the initial chapter of a narrative piece or if the setting changes, prompt students to stop and jot or sketch what they notice about the details in the setting. How does the setting help the reader understand the characters and theme in the text? 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 Check-In RL 4.1 “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: Evidence Lens English Text: Atlantic Crossing Spanish Text: El cruce del Atlantico Instructional Focus: Evidence of hardships to understand characters’ reasoning. Introduce Text Close Reading Close Reading Close Reading Assessment: Vocabulary 1. Read through 2. Look For 3. Developing Narrative or Development a lens. Patterns a new Expository understanding Writing Task Check-In RL 4.1 Identify Genre: Text Structure: Read Aloud and scaffold vocabulary. Read Aloud Book 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? Have students in pairs reread the section titled: Leaving Dublin Bay (pp. 4-7) Have students highlight evidence in the text that supports the hardships that the characters faced. Chart student responses in the first column of an anchor chart. In small groups or pairs reread the passage and the evidence from yesterday. Have students work in pairs and find which pieces of evidence fit together. Ask students to reread the passage to themselves. Review anchor chart evidence and patterns. Turn and Talk about noticing’s. Chart the patterns you find in the second column of your anchor chart. Journaling and Discussion Questions: Compare and Contrast Ireland and America. Discuss how the evidence influenced your thinking about Patrick’s reasons for coming to America. Explain why Patrick’s family thought they would have a chance at a better life in America. Use details from the text to support your thinking.