Teaching students to answer constructed response questions correctly and with sufficient text evidence can be quite the feat. A good starting point is to use an acronym such as RACE to help guide the students. But, that is just one part of instruction. The most difficult part is teaching students to find text evidence and then cite it appropriately to fully support their ... Read More
Close Reading Strategies – Overcoming Common Challenges
Close reading became the new buzz word in education with the coming of the common core standards and new rigorous high-stakes testing. It is an extremely effective strategy at helping students reach higher levels of text analysis, however it can also be challenging to implement (as with any strategy that promotes struggle and critical analysis). On this post, we will ... Read More
Annotating Tips for Close Reading
Have you seen that popular meme where the student highlights two entire pages of a text? It cracks me up every time I see it. One reason that meme resonates with teachers is because it is a very real struggle. Each year, it seems I have some students who annotate like crazy. Or the opposite and the students don't pick up a pencil or annotating tool the entire time they ... Read More
Close Reading Tips and Strategies for Upper Elementary
Close reading is a great way to get students to dig in and analyze a text. Close reading, when done right, allows for rich discussion and reflection while growing your students as critical, analytical readers. In this post, I will share close reading tips and strategies to help you implement this reading strategy into your instruction. Close Reading Tips and ... Read More
How to Implement Close Reading in Science {Free Resource}
Close reading is all the buzz in reading instruction these days. Did you know that you can implement close reading in science? This post will share details about close reading in science with ideas for implementation. The science close reading strategies that I am going to share would also work well with social studies. In addition to these strategies that I will share in ... Read More
How to Embed Close Reading in a Reading Lesson
I am taking a small break from my family on this holiday weekend to write a quick blog post about how I used close reading this past week in my CCSS aligned reading mini lessons. This post contains an Amazon affiliate link if you decide you want to purchase the book mentioned in this post. I was teaching the standard RL.5.3: which involves comparing and contrasting ... Read More
Close Reading Resources {Mega Kit}
Is everyone out for summer by now? I hope so! This summer one of my projects was to tackle close reading. I have done variations of close reading for awhile. But I really wanted something rigorous and aligned to the common core. So this was born: Close Reading Mega Kit for for Grades 4-6 and 3rd Grade. To read about how I use this close reading kit during a specific read ... Read More
