Still Learning to Read: Tracking Our Thinking in Read Aloud

This is one of a series of blog posts that continue the conversation around Still Learning to Read--teaching reading to students in grades 3-6.  This series will run on the blog on Tuesdays starting in August 2016 and continue through the school year.

I want my students to have experience with a variety of ways to track their thinking during reading.  There are so many tools and right now, I just want them to see how powerful it is to stop and notice your thinking. I want them to be able to choose tools that work for them and I use the first 6-8 weeks of school to make sure they have experience with several ways to annotate.  Since our focus is on the thinking and process, the tool is really up to the child once they see some  possibilities. So for read aloud this time, I chose the book Lucy by Randy Cecil.  This is a book that I fell in love with this summer.  I chose it for several reasons.

• The illustrations in this book are key. There is a black and white illustration on each page and I want my 3rd graders to talk around both words and pictures. I find that often, at this age, readers are more apt to talk about what they notice or wonder in a visual than in text so this combination seemed perfect. I also know they will naturally find evidence in the illustrations as they talk and the "What in the book makes you think that?" type of conversation will grow.
• I was able to get 12 copies of the book from our public library.  This makes it possible for groups of 2-3 to share a book. 
• I assigned them a Thinking Partner for this read aloud. So they share their book with the same person and will think through this book with one person. Thinking with the same person across a book is different than thinking with different people every day.  There are benefits to both but as we build relationships and conversation skills, having the same partner through the book is important.
• There are 3 characters in the book whose story lines come together--Eleanor, her father, and the dog, Lucy.  As readers begin to read more complex text, I want them to think about characters and how characters stories and relationships are often key to narrative.

So each pair of students was given a copy of the book and a stack of sticky notes and they have been jotting and talking every day before we come together and share thinking as a group. 

The book and conversation are inviting great talk and we are learning so much about tracking our thinking, backing our thinking with evidence in the text, character development and having good conversations. 

(You can follow the conversation using the hashtag #SLTRead or you can join us for a book chat on Facebook that began this week by joining our group here.)

Our new edition of Still Learning to Read was released last week!  You can order it online at Stenhouse!

Annotating A Wrinkle in Time

You might remember me mentioning that I am reading aloud A Wrinkle in Time (well, actually Madeline L'Engle is, through the magic of audio books...) and that we participated in the 50 Years, 50 Days, 50 Blogs blog tour for the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book.

Inspired by Monica Edinger's blog posts about annotating Charlotte's Web with her fourth graders, and fueled with a "worst they can do is say no" attitude, I asked the promoter of the blog tour if it would be possible to get a class set of A Wrinkle in Time so that my class could try annotating the book as we listened to it.

She (and Macmillan) said yes. When the books came, I had my copy from my 6th grade Scholastic book order on hand. I had already told them that A Wrinkle in Time had been a landmark book for me as a reader. Now they looked at my scuffed copy as they held their shiny new copies. I told them that I had kept that book for almost 40 years, and that they, too, might keep the book in their hands for 40 or more years. Someday when they were all grown up, they might tell their children (or even their students) about the difference that book had made in their lives. Ten year-olds can't usually imagine 40 years into the future, but I think a few of them had a glimmer of it for just a second there.

What kinds of things have we been noticing as we annotate and discuss the book?

• Words. Rich, rich vocabulary. And often words that relate to our word study focus, coming to life right there in the book!
• Connections. A geranium blooming on the windowsill of mother's lab -- just like the one in our classroom!
• Places in the story where Madeline L'Engle changed the mood of the story, or made us ask questions, or where we wrote, "Uh oh..."
• Symbolism -- dark is evil, light is good; evil is cold, good is warm.
• Who else has fought against the "shadow" on our planet? Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Ruby Bridges, Abe Lincoln, all the people who stop wars...
• Madeline L'Engle's use of similes, metaphors and idioms.
• The importance of freedom and individualism, family and friendship, love and trust.

Yesterday we watched the Wonderopolis episode on time travel. It was fun to wonder if time travel will be possible in their lifetimes, or if they might someday be part of a team of scientists who bring us closer to that reality.

We're not quite finished with the book. We have about 20 pages left, and I think I'm going to ask them to finish the book and annotate the last few chapters on their own over spring break. Then, when we come back together week after next, we can have the kind of discussion that Monica's classes have.

We're not quite finished with the book...I'm thinking about that phrase...and I'm realizing that my students will NEVER be quite finished with this book. Some of them, anyway. This will be a book that keeps sounding and resounding in their lives as they grow up with it, grow into it, grow away from it, and hopefully come back to it. This is a book that has potential to leave a never-ending ripple in their thinking and in their reading lives. It doesn't seem like enough to simply say Thank You to Macmillan for providing these books for my class. What I'm really thanking them for is helping me to change the lives of 24 children.