Kuunari

A year ago I read the book A Close Look at Close Reading: Teaching Students to Analyze Complex Texts, Grades K-5 by Barbara Moss, Diane Lapp, and Maria Grant. This book was disappointing, never naming race or rarely discussing multilingual learners. It did explain what close reading is clearly, and as a tool, it has it’s place in a complete language arts classroom. I’ll be posting the essays for the next 11 weeks on Tuesday.

The role of the reader is the most important part of the close reading process. Teachers can create what seem to be great lessons, but if the students are not at the center of each and everything lesson, the learning will go nowhere. The authors of A Close Look At Close Reading introduce four roles for students in close reading: code breaker, meaning maker, text user, and text critic. In my fourth grade classroom, students are given many opportunities to critically evaluate a text, but I hope to increase those opportunities moving forward. 

The four roles can be broken into two groups. The first group is the reader as code breaker and meaning maker. Both focus on students developing their ability to read fluently and identify explicit meaning in their texts. These roles have become second nature for most of my fourth graders. They are transitioning to identifying implicit meaning in their texts.

We do significant work in these areas, particularly through our curriculum Making Meaning. We do close readings of every story or text we read, rereading the text multiple times to gain more insight into the meaning of this text. 

The second group is where the students start to delve deeper into their understanding of the text. These are the reader as text user and text critic. Most fourth graders want to read texts at this level, whether they have the reading fluency to be able to or not. They like understanding text at a deeper level.

Their assigned work during independent directed reading as well as in the reading curriculum Making Meaning frequently has them thinking about and discussing texts at this deeper level. When the authors mention some self-reflection questions to ask yourself to check engagement in a text they mirror closely the self-monitoring questions of Making Meaning. 

The area of growth for myself as a reading instructor is in providing my students with more time to grapple with the text independently. The text in Making Meaning is frequently read and reread to the students. While this helps every student engage with the text, it means that students are not having as many opportunities to struggle with the text first before I provide support to the students to help them deconstruct the meaning of the text. 

Moving forward, I will be providing my students with more opportunities to close read short sections of books and articles. I want them to grapple with the text, and then have opportunities to look deeper into the text upon rereading the text and using guiding questions provided by myself. I also will encourage the students to help create those deeper, guiding questions for close reading. I find that fourth graders come up with deep, meaningful questions that pull out meaning from text that I might not have predicted.

We’ve read short stories on occasion this year, and I have the students create questions that then both guide our discussion of the text and their rereading of the text. I look forward to utilizing this strategy on shorter, non-fiction texts as I had great success with it with fiction texts.