I mentioned in my post that Chris Lehman, author of the book, Falling in Love with Close Reading, presented at the Virginia State Reading Association conference which I attended, and his session was jam packed with teachers wanting to know more.  He modeled a Close Reading lesson using a song lyrics, so the presentation was quite engaging and lively.  If you haven’t read his book, you can check it out here.  It’s a great resource for getting started, especially for the Middle School and High School levels since he gives examples of texts that would be appealing to the “mature” reader.  

Freebie

The penguin set I put together includes a prereading activity to build schema and a copy of the article.  I set the article up with plans for my students annotate as they read.  If you notice, the students are given a specific purpose (or reading lens) to use. They are asked to identify the main topics and big ideas.

In the second reading, students begin connecting ideas and focus on using the information they’ve read.  They’re making inferences, comparisons, and thinking about author’s message, theme, and ways to use the new information.  They’re looking for the text evidence to support their thinking.  

The third reading of the text is used to gather information that will be used in deep discussion or expanded writing.  Students need to see the connection between reading and writing, how writing is organized (structure and purpose), and how we can use what we learn to support our thinking and opinions.  For this Close Read, I asked that students to find adaptations that help protect it from predators and describe what they’d do to protect the penguin, so the reader has to work at the upper level of Blooms to use the information and create something based upon their learning.

Remember to use a variety to texts.  I know with my students, 80-90% of their reading is fiction, so using other genres in instruction increases the likelihood that students will select other genres.  Plus, we work with genres differently.  We need to show our students how structures change.  

If your interested in looking at the other Close Reading sets I’ve completed, here are the preview files. Each is linked to the listing on TPT.  The structure of the sets are like the penguin freebie, but they do include an additional vocabulary page.  I also thought to have students color code information in the second reading, so that’s a slight difference.

Let me know if you have any questions.  I hope you’ll take the plunge and dive into Close Reading.