Teaching Common Core English Language Arts Standards. Patricia M. Cunningham
on the page, but if you look for clues, you can figure out the answer. Today, we are going to use our Find It or Figure It Out strategies to answer some questions about .”
2.Have students read each question chorally with you and build meanings for key vocabulary. Having students tell you what they think the important vocabulary is will help them learn how to identify key vocabulary. Seize every opportunity to point out morphological relations among words. Make sure students can pronounce all words, and remind them of similar words that will help them pronounce difficult words.
3.Model for students what you want them to do by using the “I do, and you watch” phase for the first question. Read the pages aloud, answer the question, and show where you found the answer or clues to help you figure it out. Explain how you used your brain and the clues to figure out answers.
4.For the second question, use the “I do, and you help” phase. Have students read the text with you and locate where they found answers or clues and explain their thinking.
5.Have students work in trios to complete the remaining questions. Circulate among your students, and be sure they locate the evidence in the text that helps them determine the answers and explain their thinking. Have them use small sticky notes to mark the places where they found the answers and the clues they used to figure out answers. Eavesdrop on the trios’ interactions to make formative assessments of students’ ability to make inferences.
6.Gather your students and have them answer the questions and explain where they found answers and clues and how their brains used the clues to figure out the answers.
7.Have students write a new Find It question and a new Figure It Out question. Share some of these with the whole class as time permits.
Find It or Figure It Out Lessons Across the Year
In subsequent lessons, as students demonstrate their ability to answer literal and inferential questions and to support their answers with evidence from the text, you should fade your modeling and turn over the responsibility for all questions to the trios. Continue, however, to begin every lesson by having students read each statement chorally with you and providing instruction on word meanings and pronunciations. When your observations of each trio’s interactions indicate that most of your students have learned to make logical inferences and to support those inferences with evidence from the text, have students answer the questions independently (“You do, and I watch”). Use the assessment results to determine which students meet the standards and which need more work on that skill.
To help students apply their inferencing skills when reading on their own, remind students as they are about to begin their independent reading time to use clues to figure out things the author does not directly state. When independent reading time is over, take a few minutes to let students volunteer one clue they figured out, read the parts of the text that led them to the inference, and explain their thinking.
How Find It or Figure It Out Lessons Teach the Standards
Find It or Figure It Out lessons teach Reading anchor standard one (CCRA.R.1) because students learn how to make logical inferences and to cite textual evidence to support the inferences they make. The lesson framework teaches Speaking and Listening anchor standard one (CCRA.SL.1) as well, because students participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners both in their small groups and with the whole class. These lessons also teach Language anchor standard six (CCRA.L.6), because the statements include general academic and domain-specific words and phrases from the text, and the teacher builds meanings as students read these together before reading the text.
CCSS in a Question It Lesson
Question It is a lesson framework to use with a short, dense, and challenging text. When you lead students through this lesson several times and gradually release responsibility to them, you are helping them learn the reading, speaking and listening, and language 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 3
Question It
When most of us think of reading, we think of spending leisure time with a book, magazine, newspaper, or website for pleasure or self-improvement. There is, however, a specific type of reading that demands a different approach: short, dense, and challenging texts. Think of being faced with directions for electronics with “some assembly required,” a new and complicated recipe for a dish, a contract we fear to sign but must, or instructions for filling out taxes. We recognize the need to read these texts differently. We slow down, reading deliberately line by line, sentence by sentence, or sometimes even word by word. If we are not sure we understand a sentence, we reread it, possibly several times. We are alert for implications and do our best to read between the lines to draw any logical inferences we are justified in making. This close reading that brief but difficult texts require also has periodic applications in our more casual reading. When perusing a literary or informational text, we occasionally encounter a section we are interested in whose meaning initially eludes us. So we shift to a lower gear and read closely for a bit before returning to a more normal pace and state of attentiveness. In our experience, schools have worked hard to teach students how to do typical reading but have spent relatively little time or effort teaching them how to read closely. Question It is a comprehension lesson framework that teaches students how to do this close reading.
The major emphasis in Question It is teaching students to read closely until they have exhausted what a short, dense, and challenging text says explicitly or implicitly about a subject. Beginning in third grade, with Reading literature and informational text standards one (RL.3.1 and RI.3.1), students must be able to cite textual evidence to support the questions they pose when required to do so: “Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010, pp. 11, 14). In Question It, the teacher preteaches a few general academic and domain-specific words and phrases from the text to ensure students can read it closely with comprehension. Using the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction, Question It combines student trios and teacher-led collaborative conversations to discuss various aspects of the text’s content.
TIP
In most schools, Question It is a lesson framework students can be successful with beginning in the spring of second grade and moving on up through the grades.
A Sample Question It Lesson
This is the fourth Question It lesson Mrs. R.’s class has experienced. Because a handful of students still struggled with the lesson the last time she taught it, Mrs. R. continues with the full set of procedures from the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction in this lesson as she did in the first three lessons.