Teaching Common Core English Language Arts Standards. Patricia M. Cunningham
you watch” and “I do, and you help” modeling. Later, when students do all of them in trios or individually, you may want to have fewer statements.
1.going to use the details from the text Tell students the purpose of the lesson: “Today we are going to use our close-reading skills to determine which statements are true and which are false, and we are going to use the details from the text to turn false statements into true statements.”
2.Have students read each statement with you, and ask students questions to build meaning for vocabulary. Point out morphemic connections students should understand. Help students use the context of the sentence to determine the appropriate meaning of multimeaning words, and help them clarify the meanings of homophones.
3.Have students use pencils to write a yes or no next to each statement to indicate their guesses. Assure them that they can erase any incorrect guesses and change them to correct guesses as they read.
4.Model (“I do, and you watch”), and then have students work with you (“I do, and you help”) to complete the first several statements. Be sure to locate evidence in the text to verify your answers.
5.Have students work in trios to read and decide whether each remaining statement is true or not. Have them turn the false statements into true statements without using the word not. Observe their interactions, and intervene and coach as necessary as the students work together (“You do it together, and I help”). Use your observations to formatively assess their close-reading and inferencing skills.
6.Gather your students and have them read each statement and share how their trios turned false statements into true statements. Have them read parts of the text that prove statements are false.
7.Have each student write one or two new sentences that are true or false. Let a few students share their sentences and call on other students to tell if they are true or false and to turn false statements into true statements.
Guess Yes or No Lessons Across the Year
In subsequent lessons as students demonstrate their ability to make predictions, to support and change their predictions based on information from the text, and to apply this strategy by creating one new true or false statement, you should fade teacher modeling and turn over the responsibility for all ten statements to the trios. Continue, however, to begin every lesson by having students read each statement chorally with you to build academic and subject-area vocabulary. When your observations of the group interaction indicate that most of your students can successfully complete most of the statements most of the time, have students do the lesson independently (“You do, and I watch”). Use the results of this assessment to determine which students can meet the standards and which students need continued work on that skill.
How Guess Yes or No Lessons Teach the Standards
Guess Yes or No lessons teach Reading anchor standard one (CCRA.R.1) because students learn to read closely to determine whether statements are true or false, to make logical inferences, and to cite textual evidence to support their responses. These lessons also teach Reading informational text and Language anchor standards four (RI.4, CCRA.L.4). Before students read, they read the statements together, and the teacher helps them use context and morphemic clues when appropriate to determine word meanings. The lessons teach Speaking and Listening anchor standard one (CCRA. SL.1), as well, because they use a combination of small-group (trios) and teacher-led collaborative conversations with diverse partners to discuss various aspects of the content of the text.
CCSS in a Find It or Figure It Out Lesson
Find It or Figure It Out is a lesson framework you can use with both informational and narrative text. When you lead students through this lesson several times and gradually release responsibility to them, you are helping them learn the reading and speaking and listening skills in the following standards.
Reading
CCRA.R.1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
Speaking and Listening
CCRA.SL.1: Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
Language
CCRA.L.6: Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression.
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, 2010, pp. 10, 22, 25.
CHAPTER 2
Find It or Figure It Out
Have you ever asked your students a question about something they read and had them respond, “I don’t know; it didn’t say”? Many students are literal when they read. They expect to find all the answers to questions directly in the text. In reality, most of the thinking you do as you read is not literal. Your brain puts information you read together with information you know and figures out many things that the text does not directly state. If you read the weather forecast, and the chances of rain are 100 percent, you figure out that you probably need to rethink your plans for a barbecue this weekend. Figuring out something based on information from the text is inferring. Find It or Figure It Out is a lesson framework you can employ to teach your students how to use the information in the text and their prior knowledge to figure things out. The major emphasis in Find It or Figure It Out lessons is teaching students how to make logical inferences and cite textual evidence to support them. Using the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction, Find It or Figure It Out combines student trios and teacher-led collaborative conversations to discuss various aspects of the text’s content.
A Sample Find It or Figure It Out Lesson
Mr. E. decides to use Find It or Figure It Out to teach his students how to make and support inferences as they read a section about tropical rain forests in their science texts. He reads the text and constructs prompts for each two-page spread in the book. He makes sure that the answers to the Find It questions are quite literal and that students can find them in the text in a sentence or two. His Figure It Out questions require students to make logical inferences. There are clues that help them figure out the answers.
This is the first Find It or Figure It Out lesson this class has experienced. Mr. E. follows the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction when teaching comprehension lessons. Working with the whole class, he establishes the purpose for the lesson, builds meaning for important vocabulary, and models how to answer one question. He then asks the whole class to help him answer the second question. Next, the class works in trios to answer the remaining questions. He has organized the trios so each has a range of reading levels and has also tried to put students together who like to work with one another.
TIP
Small groups in elementary classrooms work best if the group size is not too large. When working together in trios, all three students participate, and rarely does anyone sit on the sidelines.
Purpose Setting and Vocabulary Building
The lesson begins with the students gathering in their assigned trios. Mr. E. hands one copy of the Find It or Figure It Out: Tropical Rain Forests question sheet (see figure 2.1) to each trio, and the person who gets the sheet quickly positions him- or herself between the other two. He gives the other two students small sticky notes in two different