Reading Like a Writer and Close Reading

Where Does Rigor Fit?
What is Close Reading?
Defining the Signposts
Explaining the Signposts
Wondrous Word: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom by Katie Wood Ray
Mini-lessons for Literature Circles by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

Say:
     The close reading section of readings all appeared to be from the same book, so I'm going to address them all pretty much together.  The first chapter that we read, Where Does Rigor Fit? was interesting to me because it addressed something that I had not put a lot of thought into before.  We often hear people discussing the benefits of a rigorous course, but we do not often see it actually defined.  I remember when I was in ninth grade, I had to read The Pear for summer reading.  I did not read it until the day before, and when I did read it, I thought that it was so dense and boring, that I didn't care about anything Steinbeck had to say.  I hated Steinbeck until a year later when we read Of Mice and Men.  For me, it seemed like the only reason that we had to read some of those books was because they were hard, and it was somewhat shocking for this article to confirm that for me.  I think that we need to challenge readers by maybe having them read above their grade level, but I do not think that they should be reading Ulysses because it is hard to read.  We should use rigor in a way that makes them think about texts and that makes them want to read more texts rigorously.  Close reading is something that I did all the time in my senior year of high school.  We would have assigned reading and the next day we would come in and talk about it.  Inevitably, at some point during this talk our teacher would bring our attention to a specific passage and we would go into deep detail.  This detail would be much through the lens of new criticism, but these close readings were probably one of the main reasons that I really started to enjoy analyzing texts and why I became an English major.  Now, I think that close readings would be a good way to bring in other theoretical perspectives.  Having close readings would be a great way to get deep into the text and start asking questions about different schools of thought.  The signpost ideas from these readings was presented in a way that I enjoyed.  I know that when reading we often tell students to think about different things, but these signposts give them an indication of important things from the text that they can begin talking about.
     The Katie Wood Ray chapters from Wondrous Word seemed to be something that we had already been aware of.  We are constantly being told that in order to be a writer you need to read more and write more.  It is no surprise then that Ray tells us that when reading as writers, we should be looking at how the author crafts the actual sentences and how he or she chooses words.  When reading, we need to be looking at what the writer does that seems to work so that we can try to use those things in our own writing, but we also need to be able to look at things that don't work in writing so that we know what to avoid.  Chapter two tells us that we need to look at the craft.  This is something that we hear a lot in English classes as well.  There is nothing written in a work that is not put there on purpose, but we need to look at some things that the author includes as the author employing a craft.
     This week in Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles we are given some ways that we can examine the author's craft in our classroom.  I like how these two writers give us a variety of ways that we can have students doing this, from classroom discussion supplemented by book clubs, to students acting out the verbs.  I think that having students act out verbs is particularly interesting because it connects to Wondrous Word in the way we are looking at craft.  Students can think about how important the words that the author chooses are because they need to understand the meaning fully to act the word out.

Do:
My Do for this week connects most directly to the close reading reading that we did for this week.  Right now, I am interning at Meadow Glen Middle school which has been an interesting placement because of their Expeditionary Learning.  The units are centered around expeditions, and there are premade lesson plans that the teachers teach.  These lessons make it so that all the teachers are doing the same thing each day.  This allows for teachers to have planning together each week to discuss where they are each at.  The lesson packet for the text requires that we often read aloud to the students which is as we know a good practice, but occasionally it will call for us to go back to specific sections of the text in order for us to do close reading activities with students.  For my Do, I am presenting one of the close reading activities that we did in class.  This activity takes place after we have already read the chapter.  We read the chapter, and then go back to the passage and talk about the questions presented about the reading.  I am including a lesson plan as well as artifacts with what the students actually did with the information they gained from close reading.

Lesson Plan

Anchor Chart