More Close Reading

October was a busy book-buying month for me; I purchased three teaching books, which is way more than I usually buy, considering that I’ve vowed to quit buying books. But all of them have information that I felt I needed, so my collection grew. The one I am currently loving is brand new: Falling in Love with Close Reading, by Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts. Close reading is the current big thing in reading, and there are a huge variety of resources to clarify how to do it. I really like this book because it boils down close reading to three steps: read through a lens, such as word choice or text structure. Then use that lens to find patterns in the text. Finally, think about those patterns to help you develop a new understanding of the text. I think using close reading this way fits in with other close reading techniques, like using the signposts in fiction I talked about in a previous blog. I think it also might be easier to teach these strategies to readers of all levels in the hopes that they will transfer them to their own independent reading.

Here is one thing I’ve tried from the book (since I just got it this week). I used the lens of structure when reading an article about the changes in school food with my students. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what exactly do we mean by text structure, and this has helped me clarify it even more in my mind. I asked the students to think about how the text was organized, and then I made a chart that looked like this:

Did the author

describe something,

tell a cause and effect,

compare things,

or make a claim?  

I used a different color for each idea so that when I asked them to think about the purpose, they could match up the purpose with the structure.

What is the purpose for that organization:
To give more information.

to tell why something happened,

to show how things are the same and different,

or to tell the author’s opinion about a topic?

In the article we read, you could make the case for several different text structures, which is a bit messy, but also realistic when reading articles. Authors often use several structures when writing. We didn’t do much with talking about patterns, since it was our first time with this, but here is what I found: when asking students to summarize this article, using structure is a great way to write their gist (or main idea) sentence.  For example, students could have written, “This article is about the reasons why school lunch menus have changed”, and then gone on to give examples of that (using the structure of cause and effect).  Or they could have said, “This article tells why it is better that school lunch menus have changed from the old menus”, using the structure of the author’s opinion.  (As an aside, this also gave us the opportunity to discuss why summarizing an article is different than what you think about an article, since most kids would love to go back to the salty, fatty foods they used to get in the cafeteria.)

I highly recommend this book to all teachers – the examples the authors give include many texts that are for high school students, so this isn’t just for elementary kids. I have already found myself thinking more in my own reading about patterns I’m seeing.  As the year goes on and I try more of the strategies they suggest, I hope to see changes in my students and their reading.