I am an instructional coach for literacy at Barnard Environmental Studies Magnet School. The self-contained class of fourth-grade students to whom I will be teaching this unit are a heterogeneous group with varying abilities in the ten-to-eleven age range and are primarily of African-American or Hispanic-American descent. Although I have designed this unit with them in mind, I am confident that it could easily be used by teachers in other intermediate grades as well. The focus in my curriculum unit will be on
literacy,
both reading and writing. The following 4th Generation CMT objectives will be our reading comprehension focus as students read, discuss, and write in their 'response journals':
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· Identify or infer important characters, settings, problems, events, relationships, and details within a text.
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· Use stated or implied evidence from the text to draw and/or support a conclusion.
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· Make connections between the text and outside experiences and knowledge.
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· Select and use relevant information from the text to summarize events and/or ideas in the text.
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· Select, synthesize, and/or use relevant information within a written work to write a personal response to text or to extend or evaluate the work
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· Demonstrate an awareness of a character's values, customs, and beliefs included the text.
In addition to these specific objectives for written response are the following unit objectives:
Unit Objectives
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· To learn about the lives and times of Elvis Presley, Malcolm X and Rachel Carson.
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· To learn about the specific features found in informational texts.
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· To gain practice in reading nonfiction texts where you will be called upon to use, understand, and interpret such features as the index, glossary, diagrams, charts, timelines, etc.
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· To learn about the literary elements found in the genre of biography: setting, characterization and theme.
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· To improve comprehension skills by responding to specific CMT strand questions in a response journal.
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· To learn to use a variety of graphic organizers to help organize and more clearly understand the reading content.
Strategies
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· To read grade-level appropriate biographies of Elvis Presley, Malcolm X and Rachel Carson in various settings: shared reading, guided reading and independent reading.
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· To regularly reflect on what you are reading and write down your responses to specific questions in a response journal.
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· To view exemplary journal responses written by students, analyzing and critiquing them in an effort to improve one's own writing.
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· To use a rubric of 0, 1, 2 to measure the quality of one's written response.
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· To use the comprehension strategies of guessing/ predicting, connecting, wondering, noticing, picturing/ visualizing, and figuring out in a 'before, during and after reading' framework.
While reading and discussing the biographies of the 3 key figures in the unit, we will consider the following 3 aspects of the subject's character and life: the subject as revolutionary, the plateaus the subject reached during his/her lifetime, the pivotal events that influenced his/her life.
There is a definite need for young students to read more nonfiction, which requires different comprehension strategies than fiction does. In order to help students improve their comprehension of informational texts, the teacher must provide enough comprehension strategy support
before, during and after
their reading. As Nancy N. Boyles suggests in her book,
Constructing Meaning Through Kid-Friendly Comprehension Strategy Instruction,
it is important for the teacher to present the reading material in chunks and to teach the students how to monitor their reading using comprehension strategies. The goal is to have actively engaged readers before and during their reading of nonfiction. The proof of their engagement will be shown in their improved comprehension after reading (pp.84-85).
To help students organize and better understand what they read, I will use 'thinking frames' (graphic organizers) as presented in Robert J. Marzano et. al.'s
Classroom Instruction that Works
such as webs, tree diagrams, matrixes and t-charts to compare and contrast the biographic subjects, their movements and their times.
I plan to teach this unit using the instructional model reflective of a balanced reading program (again as outlined by Nancy Boyles in the aforementioned book). I will thus be able to organize my variety of materials (big books, biographies, children's history texts, articles, etc.), and there are many, according to format and reading level. The components of this model are: shared reading, guided reading and independent reading.
Briefly, during shared reading the teacher works with the whole class and reads a text aloud with the students following along (in their own copies or from a visual displayed in the front of the room). The teacher models comprehension strategies and provides opportunities for students to think aloud too. The texts used may be beyond the students' instructional reading level.
During guided reading the teacher works with small groups and uses reading materials appropriate to that group's instructional reading level. During this time the teacher guides the students as they read limited amounts of text per day. Reading is followed by dialogue among the students in the group, working to establish a shared meaning of the text. It is during this time that the teacher can closely monitor students' progress in various reading skills and can provide opportunities for all members in the reading group to think critically.
Independent reading is done concurrently with guided reading and is a time where students read alone or in pairs. The texts need to be at their independent level--that is, at a level that they can read by themselves. After they have read the chapter or section, students will turn to their response journals and write a written response to that text, selecting from a number of possible questions reflective of the CMT (Connecticut Mastery Text) reading comprehension objectives. Some sample questions that I plan to include are:
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· If you wanted to describe how the figure in this story changed, which event would you write about?
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· Using information in the passage, write a paragraph that could have appeared in _____________'s journal.
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· Imagine that you are going to write a letter to the person you have been reading about. Write two questions you would ask that are not already answered in the story.
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· How did ________________'s beliefs guide his/her actions?
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· What type of person do you think ______________was? Use information from the story to explain your answer.
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· Imagine that you are going to give a talk to your class about ___________________. Using information from the story, write two important ideas that you would use in your speech.
The lessons in this unit will be introduced three to four times a week for a period of 45-60 minutes over a three-month period. My curriculum unit is divided into 4 sections:
Section I: Getting My Mind Ready to Read Nonfiction
Section II: Elvis Presley and the Rock and Roll Movement
Section: III: Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement
Section IV: Rachel Carson and the Environmental Movement