Weeks 4 and 5 - Close Reading, Context Clues and Text Structure

Over the past four classes, the group has been reading and analyzing passages closely. This is referred to as "close reading." (See the Week 2 post for a link to close reading).

When they practice close reading, students reread a section of text and then answer a question that is generated from the passage read. Students make inferences and draw conclusions to find an answer that uses details from the read passage. In a sense, the passage being read is "closed" to outside information. This is a different type of reading comprehension strategy than making connections (text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world). All of these strategies have their place at certain times. It is important that we emphasize the importance of using the text to find the answers with the children.

The group continues to examine text structure. This week, we discovered the author uses setting and character description at the beginning of each chapter. We also looked at the ends of chapters. We found that often times Ruth Stiles Gannett ends with a piece of foreshadowing to hook the reader into the next chapter. 

We look forward to reading chapters five and six next week.