Unless…

“I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” – The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

I have been thinking about the Lorax a lot lately. It is my son’s current favorite movie, and while he enjoys the music and finds humor throughout, I find myself mulling around the inherent messages of the movie (and the book) and how it could be used in the classroom. I love the complexity of the Once-ler in the movie.  As we watch the film, my son wonders if the Once-ler is bad. In the book, that seems a little more clear cut, but the movie offers background information of the Once-ler as a dreamer, a victim of his family, and one who endures despite the odds. However, he does indeed become “bad” as he become engulfed in the greed of money. Through contrition he sees redemption. We are also offered the comparison character of Mr. O’Hare, who creates an entire city deprived of the most essential element of life, air, so that he can profit. How do we define evil? When does someone cross the line? Can someone be both good and evil? How would you characterize the Once-ler in the movie vs. the book? Why do these perspectives vary? One of the greatest goals of Common Core is to get students to think deeply and analyze from multiple perspectives. Why not use movies to support this goal? I am not saying most lessons should entail film clips, but they are an engaging way of drawing students into the world of cognition. And, while we need to consider complex texts, the use of the arts (including paintings and music) can be equally intriguing. It seems to me that the appeal of the movie could work at multiple levels.

“Which way does a tree fall? A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.”
– The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

“Are they sad?” This is the question my three-year old consistently asks as the animals and the Lorax mourn the loss of the tree that the Once-ler just cut down. Although he can’t articulate how he knows they are sad, older students (such as first and second graders) can. As the Once-ler hums along pulling the tufts off the tree, lying about his acts, it is clear that he feels very differently than the animals. What clues do we see and hear that tell us how the different characters feel about the first Truffula Tree being cut down? (Text-dependent question) How and why do their points of view vary? (Understanding Point of View RL 6) How does your point of view of an event affect how you behave? (Big Idea Question) In the movie, the dialogue, music, and words used to convey their thoughts reveal how each character feels. This small five-minute clip could easily be viewed several times to analyze these questions from multiple perspectives. (Close Reading)

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

Contemplate this quote for a moment. What do you connect it to? What are your thoughts? What comes to your mind that needs change? How does this relate to our daily lives? Our current climate? How does this relate to history? Who do we know that worked to make “it” better?  The Lorax provides a lens for upper grades and beyond to delve into big ideas about change and making a difference.  What historical figures cared about transformation? How did they show that they cared? Does caring always lead to improvement? (What about those who care about negative changes?) How will you make a difference now? What issues affect your current lives that you can make better or change? (Bullying?) What are the consequences of not getting involved?

Before I exit my post for the week, I would like to leave you with one last quote to think about Common Core and –  in the spirit of The Lorax – our lives: “It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.” 

Using Close Reading and Questioning

Earlier in the year I wrote about the importance of close readings and what they entailed. As close readings are an essential part of Common Core standards, teachers will need to rethink how they spend their shared reading time block. Teachers accustomed to using textbook models are comfortable with following the steps outlined in the text for a single reading of the story. Some teachers may have extended the reading a second time. Teachers familiar with comprehension strategy instruction may spend several days or a week on one story to focus on a specific comprehension strategy. Lifting the text and examining the text for evidence may be a norm. However, close reading goes beyond both of those. It certainly has elements of comprehension strategy instruction, but demands more time on text, and certainly more student time with challenging texts. Teachers may read the same text for 1-2 weeks for a variety of purposes, sometimes as a whole, other times in small parts. Teachers will need to strategically map out this time, selecting texts with depth, and focusing lessons around content that students need to understand. For example, if a third grade teacher was focusing on the comprehension strategy of questioning, with the objectives of readers ask questions about unknown words, parts, and key details, as well as readers find answer to their questions using the text, background knowledge, inferring, or outside source (with some questions being unanswered), a close reading of The Princess and the Beggar by Anne Sibley O’Brien may look like the following:

Day	Lesson	Charting/Activity	Standards Addressed
1	Read story aloud with students. Stop and pause throughout the reading.	Students write questions on post-it notes throughout the reading, including unknown words and phrases. Have students share and chart their deepest question.	RL 1, RL 4
2	Classifying questions: What type of questions do we ask? (e.g. clarifying, character motives/traits, unknown words or phrases (vocabulary), predicting etc.)	Analyze the questions from day one for how they relate. Group questions and determine categories. Have students work in collaborative groups to determine how they can categorize their questions. As a class discuss questions that didn’t fit into your categories and create any new ones that they may need.	RL 1
3-4	Chart story elements students remember from the day before. Read story aloud again. Discuss the categories from the day before. Tell them today they will examine the category for character traits/motives. As we reread the story, we will examine how the princess, the king, and the beggar think, speak, and behave. Then we will revisit those questions	BEFORE READING: Chart story elements (characters, setting, major events). Chart questions students have about the three different characters. DURING READING: Chart character traits’ motives along with the evidence from the text. Examine how those traits relate to the sequence of events. Revisit questions throughout the reading as they are answered. AFTER READING: Examine which questions were not answered. Can we answer them now? If not, why? Which questions seemed to get at the heart of our characters? Which types of questions got us deeper into understanding the characters? (For example, how and why vs. who)	RL 3
5	Examine just the poem within the story. What is the poem about? Pull the poem apart to determine meaning and infer the point/lesson of the poem. What does this poem reveal about the princess?	Have the poem written up separately from the story so you can pull it apart and discuss meaning as it unfolds and how it relates to the story as a whole. Include questions they have about the poem, and work to find the answers through pulling it apart. Examine the literal and nonliteral language within the poem.	RL 4, RL 5
6	New Words and Phrases: Examine their questions that related to vocabulary. Take words/phrases from day 1 that have not been addressed. Students should have text so they can look closely for evidence.	CHART: Write the new words/phrases, evidence or clues for determining meaning, and images to help us remember the meaning. Give students their own chart too. As the class discusses the words, they should write their thinking on their page and share out. For words without context, provide context (either sentences or pictures) for them to help support inferring for word meaning.	L4
7	Shared Inquiry: Examine a specific text-dependent question, such as, “How does pride play a role in the princess’s decisions?”	Students brainstorm their thinking first, citing text evidence for their answers. Class discussion starts with this question, but then probes beyond based on the conversation. Students have text to use for evidence. Ultimately, the class examines the data of their discussion and revisits their answers from before.	RL 1
8	Revisit Questions from Day 1: Answer and Sort	Whole Class: Examine some questions from day 1: Discuss the questions and their answers, citing evidence. Sort questions by the types of answers (Text, Background Knowledge, Infer, Outside Source/Unanswered)	RL 1
9	Answering Questions and Sorting by T, BK, I, and U/OS	Students work in collaborative groups to find the answers to the questions they sorted on day 2. Where did their answers come from? Cite evidence when answering and sort questions in the end by the categories from day 8.	RL 1
10	Recount	Students write a recount of the story using the brainstorm organizer. Students also determine the lesson of the story. Students share recount with a partner.	RL 2
11	Lesson Discussion	Examine the lessons students wrote from the day before. Organize by teams of similar thinking. Have them get into groups and develop an argument as to why that lesson matches the story. Have a class debate.	RL 2, W 1

Effective close reading should draw students deeper into the nuances of the text. Students should feel empowered and develop a greater understanding of the importance of exploring texts. Close readings should build students’ stamina and drive, and ultimately build a passion for reading, which is one of our foundational goals to begin with.

Answering the Question: Common Core

It’s time again to revisit the ELA Common Core standards. In case you haven’t spent much time yet exploring the standards, let me clarify its organization. There are six categories of language arts standards: Literature, Informational Text,  Foundational Skills, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. Unpacking the Common Core standards is continuing to prove to be a complex feat. When unpacking a standard, I  examine it from Kindergarten-5th grade. Since the standards build upon each other by grade level, I must really examine what the purpose of the standard is at each level, and how that builds toward upper grade.

This week, I decided to explore the literature and informational text standard 1 about questions, answers, and key details. This standard seemed straightforward at first, but since it is in two types of genres, I soon realized there was a lot that needed to be clarified. For this standard, students need to understand the difference between narrative and expository text, be able to identify features and structures of the text, determine importance in order to identify key details, and develop their questioning strategy. Furthermore, students need to understand the difference between topics and main ideas, and how main ideas vary by genre. Also, as you explore the category of key ideas and details, the standards delve further into features and structure.  Although this seemed very convoluted at first, I slowly dug my way out of the abyss to find some clarity. Below is one way you could map out this unit using a whole-part-whole philosophy. This unit will imbed a variety of reading standards and two comprehension strategies (determining importance and questioning).

WHOLE: Genres
Narrative vs. Expository: The depth of this lesson would depend on the grade level. Perhaps K-2 would just define the difference as stories and informational text, and further define narratives by their story elements and expository by topic and key details. In this lesson, teachers would examine short pieces of both types of text and chart similarities and differences. This could be through modeling, or textual analysis as a class. Students may need repeated experiences with this lesson.

PART: Narrative Structure & Features & Author’s Study

Make a unit chart to add on to for each book that you read. On this chart include: title, genre, structure, features, main idea, and key details. The structure and features will repeat as long as you are in narrative, but this repetition is intentional for students to notice what changes and what does not.

• Author Exploration: Choose an author or two to study. Explore the author. Choose resources about the author for the students to get to know the author and what motivates that author as a writer. (Tie in with Point of View standard as well.)

• Determining Importance: Key Details vs. Minor Details – Use the comprehension strategy of determining importance to help decide what is most important in the story and what is not. You can story map each narrative on your unit chart in the structure & features column. When you get to the events parts, stop and examine key vs. minor details. One way of approaching this is to have the students retell the story and you type down each sentence. In collaborative groups or as a class, you can sort the details as key or minor. As you are building this sort examine what each detail tells us about the story. How do we know if this detail is important or not? What is important in the story? I read online that a student once likened determining importance to a pot of pasta. When you strain the noodles (or the details), all the water goes through (the minor details), and what is left is the pasta (key details). Another comprehension strategy that I strongly encourage you to embed and read up about it synthesizing. Elements of synthesizing require determining importance and lead to inferential thinking about the text. Debbie Miller discusses synthesizing in Reading with Meaning and Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis discuss synthesizing in Strategies That Work.

• Other Story Elements: Each grade level has increasing complexity of examining story elements in Literature Standard 3, from  simply identifying characters, setting, and major events (K-1)  to  examining the interaction between the characters and the events (2-3), to deeper examination of these elements (4th), and comparison among texts (5th). You can also embed Literature Standard 2, which is related to themes. I recommend using the same text for a week or two to explore in depth. Therefore, you may spend 2-3 days on determining importance, and then further explore that text for the story elements, mapping out their thinking based upon your grade level standard.

• Main Idea: For 3rd grade on up, examine the main idea of narrative. This is the point of the story. Often determining who, did what, and how or why that was important and summing that up in one sentence, will offer the gist of the story. This is important for developing summaries as the children get older. It also serves as a platform for comparing main idea in expository text.

PART: Expository Structure & Features

Continue your unit chart from earlier to add-on to for each book that you read. As students progress through the grades, the type of  text structure should change so students become familiar with the six formats (Description, Sequence, Compare/Contrast, Cause & Effect, Problem/Solution, and Question & Answer).

• Text Selection: Some possible resources for this section include your social studies or science texts,  guided reading books, content readers, and/or primary sources.

• Text Structure & Features of Text: Examine text such as Time for Kids. How is this structure e a narrative? How do we need to prepare our brains differently? Where do we start? Does it matter? Identify features of expository text (headings, subheadings, captions, illustrations, photos etc).

• Determining Importance: How are these key details going to be different from in narratives? Think about organization (structure) of the text. We are looking for a topic and supporting key details. If you are familiar with step-up to writing, I have used this in the past to break down expository text. If not, model how you would determine the topic and key details. Examine key vs. minor details. How do we determine what is most important. Think about the hierarchical organization of the text.  Here is a great resource for lessons I found online for examining different types of expository text and determining importance.

PART: QUESTIONING

• Based on your grade level’s standard and objectives, scaffold lessons to teach the strategy of questioning. Follow the gradual release of responsibility. Use both narrative and expository texts. Focus on asking relevant questions about key details and finding the answers to their questions.
  

WHOLE: REVISITING CONCEPTS

• Reexamine and chart what they have learned about the difference between narrative and expository, their structures and features, how they as readers approach each text, how they determine importance, and questioning. Reexamine how the approach to reading is both similar and different for the two genres.

Teaching with the Common Core standards is much like teaching with differentiation. You don’t throw out everything you know, but rather, carefully examine what students need to know, be able to do, and understand. Then look at your resources to determine next best steps, and research new resources for what you don’t have. Instead of starting with your  planning time with lesson plans and files, you finish with them.