Christina Chester EPS 541 Planning Paper with Concept Map Reading Comprehension/Close Reading

In beginning to organize my mind for this assignment, I knew that I wanted to take the approach of a learning topic that was meaningful to my students and pushing the rigor for their instruction. Being in the First grade content level, the main focus of the curriculum is improving their reading and understanding reading comprehension. Those are two very big and broad topics but they are the foundation of my students education

potential. There are two Common Core Standards that drive the entire formation of reading comprehension and they are: CCSS.ELALiteracy.RL.1.5 CCSS.ELALiteracy.RI.1.5 Explain major differences between books that tell stories and books that give information, drawing on a wide reading of a range of text types.

Know and use various text features (e.g., headings, tables of contents, glossaries, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or information in a text. Through the unpacking of these standards, I am able to develop my students into strong critical readers of nonfiction texts. Drawing from my own content knowledge, I understand the power of nonfiction and its connection to higher level thinking. The use of nonfiction provides the students an opportunity to connect to materials and topics that may not be representative to their daily lives. It allows them to explore other aspects of the world and to use books to learn new information. Through the direction of my mentor teacher, we have begun to introduce the concepts of reading comprehension through the introducing different topics and texts through close reading. The process of close reading is by the words of Dr. Douglas Fisher: A close reading is a careful and purposeful reading. Actually, its rereading. Its a careful and purposeful rereading of a text. Its an encounter with the text where students really focus on what the author had to say, what the authors purpose was, what the words mean, and what the structure of the text tells us. As I feel like my concept map illustrates the importance of the following concepts that close reading addresses and accomplishes for reading comprehension.

The concepts are:

understanding your purpose in reading understanding the authors purpose in writing seeing ideas in a text as being interconnected looking for and understanding systems of meaning engaging a text while reading reading for a determined purpose formulating questions and seeking answers to those questions while reading identifying the big picture within a text determining the key ideas within the text early on scaffolding thoughts that connects all the ideas within the text developing reading skills specific to reading certain kinds of texts like textbooks, newspaper articles and editorials.

I understood that achieving all of these goals would be a challenge and would dont be provided for me in a put together form of curriculum. I knew that is would pose many different challenges and a vast amount of planning on my part. The challenges

that I faced was not having a baseline to compare my practice and strategies to, needing to be flexible with my planning and the flow of the lessons and being unsure if the students would be engaged in the way that I hoped that they would be. I understood that this would be a new territory of learning for both my students and myself. I had exposure to this level of learning in college and it was very inspiring to me because it involved me in the learning and made it relevant to me. I knew that my students deserved to experience learning in that format and not just rote memorization. I knew there would be some times of confusion and sorting the learning out. I was positive that getting exposure to close reading at such a young age would motivate my students into having a lifelong passion for reading, learning and becoming metacognitive in their learning. When beginning to plan for introducing close reading to the students, I had to consider what we were already accustomed to working with in our classroom. As far as reading in general is concerned, my class is all reading at or above the 1 st grade reading level and are accustomed to having discussions with each other about the content from the classroom. My students are able to gather evidence from their reading. They understood the concepts of connection to texts, inferences, compare/contrasting, main idea and authors purpose in isolation but the concept of close reading would have them to push their understanding to the point of pulling all of those concepts together with evaluating their thoughts about the text as well. With having this understanding of my students, I knew that they could handle the concept but I knew that it would need to be very engaging and they had to be completely invested from the beginning for their attentions would sustain through the learning segment. Close reading would require

them to comprehend information from a variety of creditable sources, think critically about the information; organize the information that has an importance to them as an individual and lastly synthetize their new findings in a way to express their understanding to someone else. Before planning for the students, I took a vote from them about a list of topics that they would be interested in learning more about. So as a class, we went on the National Geographic kids website and we picked out a variety of nonfiction books that we were interested in. I went to pick up the books from Barnes and Noble for the students to explore the variety of text and topics. For the next two days, I allowed and encouraged the students to explore the books and to write down on post its what their favorite topic was. I had the students to post their choices on the board and it gave me a wealth of knowledge into which direction to lead them into the concept of close reading. From their days of exploration, I learned that majority of the class was interested and intrigued by sharks. I now knew where to begin planning. In my planning, I pulled a variety of primary and secondary resources to share with the students as we closely read the nonfiction text about sharks. I pulled videos that actually showed the movement of the sharks that was described in the nonfiction text. I found interesting shark artifacts to share with the students and for them to actually feel as we read the pages of the book. I introduced the concept of keeping track of their thinking in their thinking log journal that was provided to them to feel inspired to ask questions about what they were experiencing. As a class, it took us a little bit longer than 2 weeks to read the 14 page reader book. To assess my students comprehension of the text, I was able to do it in more

than one way because of the format of close reading. I was able to read their thoughts daily and read about their individual connections to the text and the connections they were making with the world. I was able to listen to individual students as they reflected on the pages we read each day and the interactions they had with real artifacts to enhance their learning of the content within their literature circle group meeting each day after our reading. As an ending assessment, I asked the students to create their own nonfiction text about sharks complete with nonfiction text features and detailed information. I was astonished by the work that the students created. They were all unique and differentiated by themselves. They all had a different perspective on the topic of sharks but overall it was a great authentic assessment tool because it showed their individual authentic learning. It showed their transfer of knowledge into their current state of knowledge as well as the magnitude of their enthusiasm for the content. Overall, the main point of reading comprehension is to deeply relate to and understand what you are reading. Close Reading about sharks with my students went beyond just restating facts but took the reading to a metacognitive level for first graders.