Falling in Love with Close Reading: Chapter 4

The end of the school year has come and gone....  Can you believe it?  I just finished my 7th... you read it, 7th year of teaching.  That's insane!  I will finish this Close Reading book because I have so many more I want to get into!  This is going to be a short post because I'm so far behind with my posts.  I am already on chapter 6, and I haven't even started the chapter 5 post.

Chapter 4 was actually very informative since this is one of our 5th grade reading standards.

Here are some ideas that I took away from it.

• Students should describe the author's organizing structure and describe the purpose of them.
• Students can then talk about the author's structure by describing the author's organizing choices and describing the purpose behind them (why did the author choose to use them?).
• Students should learn to see texts as having parts and knowing the language to describe the parts (genre, location of the parts in a larger text, techniques the author uses).
• STUDENTS SHOULD ALWAYS DESCRIBE THE PURPOSE OF EVERYTHING AN AUTHOR DOES!! (that was a HUGE concept that was mentioned over and over.)

The author then went into examples of structure terminology: dialogue, descriptions, flashbacks, definitions, purpose, etc...

I personally teach my text structures a little differently.  However, I am looking forward to incorporating some of the higher order skills like describing why an author would choose a particular structure in a certain section for next year.  You can read more about my text structures activity by clicking HERE.

The author then went into some specific examples like using video games and music videos to teach structure and using that information to help with plot understanding.

Chapter 4 was FULL of very useful information that it is nearly impossible to place into words.