It’s been a while since I felt like I’ve done anything new,
but spring is kind of here, and with it comes restlessness that needs novelty.
I don’t know if this counts as novelty, but I’ve been excited by the thinking I’ve
seen the last couple of days in my classes.
Our latest reading unit is on text structure, which, for
some reason, I just couldn’t get my head around. I understand that it is how
text is organized, and that there seem to be more text structures in nonfiction
than fiction, at least for fourth graders, but I don’t think I could really see
why spending a lot of time with this topic made sense. In order to try and get
more out of this, I reread the structure chapters in Falling in Love with
Close Reading, and I decided to make a checklist for my students to use. I
took an opinion piece about school uniforms that students were supposed to
read, and copied that piece along with a structure checklist, and gave it to my
students. Then we proceeded to read the text together.
As we went through the piece, students could see that the
point of the writing was to convince the reader that school uniforms were
great. Then we continued to read, finding examples of claims, counterpoints,
and descriptions. Finding and naming what the writer was really doing in the
piece was interesting to me; I’ve done similar things in the past, but I liked
breaking down the structure even more specifically. Students color-coded the
different structures, underlining each in a different color, so that when we finished, it was clear that in this
opinion piece, the writer used claims more than any other structure to get his
point across.
The past couple of days, we’ve spent reading a book called Farm
Workers Unite, which tells about Cesar Chavez and his work starting the
United Farm Workers union. We did the same thing with the structure checklist,
reading the introduction, and then a chapter about the life of migrant workers.
For that chapter, I had the kids work together to “code” the text structures. I
then asked them to identify the structure used the most often, and to tell why
they thought they writer used that the most for that chapter. It didn’t take
long for the kids to notice that it was almost all cause and effect writing.
The hard part (but for me, the most interesting part) was thinking about why the author used that
structure. One student pointed out that it was very different from the introduction,
which led us to chat more about why that would be. I pointed back to the title of the book, and then a number of
kids got more animated. “The writer has to show how bad it was for the migrant
workers, so that he can explain why they decided to unite and go on strike.”
I’m not going to read every nonfiction piece with a
structure checklist nearby. But as an adult reader, it’s made me more conscious
of looking at how writers organize their writing. Now my goal is to be more
purposeful in helping kids see why writers choose the structures they use to
best communicate their thinking, and maybe it will transfer over to student
writing. It’s worth a shot!
