Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading Workshop Journal

A MiddleWeb Listserv Project

Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are joining together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas about supporting young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli is also keeping a weekly journal of her own Reading Workshop initiative. Find out more about our project at our Reading Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here. Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.

Week #33
Confessions of a Non-
Non-Fiction Teacher


Well, excuse me for coming late to the party, but it took a reading strategy to seduce me.

Until recently, when the idea of teaching the strategy of determining importance in text came along, I was an "artful dodger" of the emphasis on teaching nonfiction -- a push that surfaced only a few years ago. Without ever having made sense of how to teach nonfiction, I decided it was too dense, contrived and boring.

I wish I could say I would have spent more time reading exciting nonfiction with my students and learning all sorts of new things, if I hadn't been stuck trying to finish all the unending paperwork. But, if truth be told, I didn't pay a lot of attention to nonfiction reading in the classroom.

So, I avoided it. Ensconced in great fiction, I carried on with narrative text. Then I discovered some great nonfiction books.

I'm especially drawn to reading that has a sense of humor and that's what Martin Jenkins writes. His Chameleons are Cool, Fly Traps! Plants That Bite Back, and Wings, Stings and Wriggly Things are terrific. Using the strategy of determining importance in text with these books won me over to the nonfiction side.

The truth about non-fiction in our classroom

Here's how we're teaching nonfiction in Reading Workshop. Strategies that Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding lays it out in an easy to understand format. "When we teach the strategy of determining importance, we often introduce it in nonfiction," Harvey and Goudvis write. "They go together. Nonfiction reading is reading to learn. Simply put, readers of nonfiction have to decide and remember what is important in the texts they read if they are going to learn anything from them." (P.118)

We began by doing Read Alouds and Shared Reading with volumes of nonfiction for several weeks. Our reading included magazine articles ("Wild Outdoor World" and "National Geographic World"), articles from the web (www.SIKids.com and www.Howstuffworks.com) and books. We find that this immersion in the genre really helps our kids know what nonfiction is about and how it works.

As we continued with the immersion (reading lots and lots of nonfiction), we started to teach Nonfiction Conventions (Strategies That Work, p. 122). We made Nonfiction Convention books using blank white paper and construction paper covers. Each day we taught a different nonfiction convention and the kids drew examples on a page in their book. The last several days they picked their own conventions. Making this book had a positive effect on their understanding of the conventions as well as developing their knowledge of the vocabulary, a piece that was missing up to this point.

Our books included these nonfiction conventions:
Labels
Graphs
Captions
Comparisons
Fonts and effects
Tables
Cross-sections
Overlays
Insets
Illustrations and photographs
Maps

Both Nonfiction Matters and Strategies That Work have lots of good ideas for how to teach Overviewing and Highlighting. These strategies for nonfiction assist in determining importance in text.

With Overviewing, we used their science textbooks. This way everyone had his or her own book. Mini-lessons on these topics from Strategies That Work, p. 119, helped them learn the process.
Activating prior knowledge
Noting characteristics of text length and structure
Noting important headings and subheadings
Determining what to pay careful attention to
Determining what to ignore
Deciding to quit because the text contains no relevant information
Deciding if the text is worth careful reading or just skimming

Teaching Highlighting was more of a challenge since we encountered a group of "overzealous highlighters." According to Strategies That Work, a reasonable goal for highlighting text is that highlighter will cover no more than 50% of the words, actually one-third of the text is even better. We're still working on this one!

Lots of texts

If it seems as if there's a nonfiction book for every taste, you're not far off. Surprisingly, overlap isn't a big issue. There are so many great topics that we made up some text sets for nonfiction reading. (These are listed at the end of the journal.) We're using them to do two parts of our April curriculum map we developed using Strategies That Work.
Acquiring information about an interesting topic, asking some questions, and designing pages based on authentic pages in nonfiction trade books

Becoming a specialist on a favorite topic, choosing what is important to include in a piece of writing, and writing informational teaching books

No one wants to speak against the status quo, but the sentiment in reading famously insisting "Read one book, read them all" in no way applies to the universe of nonfiction. Oh, my gosh, I thought. This is what nonfiction is all about -- a variety of texts, fascinating illustrations and lots of great information to learn. I was addicted too.

Our Nonfiction Text Sets

The Universe
The Illustrated World of Space, Nicolson
The Moon Book, Gibbons
Do Stars Have Points? Questions and Answers About Stars and Planets, Scholastic
The Universe, Simon
Our Solar System, Simon
Mercury, Simon
Venus, Simon
Mars, Simon
Jupiter, Simon
Saturn, Simon
Neptune, Simon
Uranus, Simon

Amazing Animals:
Do Tarantulas Have Teeth? Questions and Answers About Poisonous Creatures, Scholastic
Exploding Ants: Amazing Facts About How Animals Adapt, Settel
Animal Defenses: How Animals Protect Themselves, Kaner
Yuck! A big book of little horrors: Micromarvels in, on, and around you, Snedden
Animals Nobody Loves, Seymour Simon

Earth Science and Adventure
Spirit of Endurance, The True Story of the Shackleton Expedition to the Antarctic, Armstrong
The Top of the World, Climbing Mount Everest, Jenkins
Why Do Volcanoes Blow Their Tops? Questions and Answers About Volcanoes and Earthquakes, Scholastic
The Most Beautiful Roof in the World: Exploring the Rainforest Canopy, Lasky
Hottest, Coldest, Highest, Deepest, Jenkins
Reptiles and Amphibians
The Snake Scientist, Montgomery
Chameleons are Cool, Jenkins
Crocodiles and Alligators, Simon
Snake, Ling
Slinky, Scaly, Slithery Snakes, Hinshaw
Animals of Africa
Elephant Quest, Ted and Betsy Lewin
Gorilla Walk, Ted and Betsy Lewin
Safari, Robert Bateman
Gorillas, Simon
Big Cats, Simon
Ocean Life

What Makes an Ocean Wave? Question and Answers about Oceans and Ocean Life, Scholastic
Giant Squid, Mystery of the Deep, American Museum of Natural History
Whales: Killer Whales, Blue Whales and More, Hodge
Chelonia, Return of the Sea Turtle, Navarro, Snodgass, and Nichols
Outside and Inside Sharks, Markle
Gentle, Giant Octopus, Wallace
Oceans, Simon



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