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 #34
A Road Map for Content-Area Reading

For months now, our Reading Workshop has been the place to be if you want to understand what you read. Since reading is all about understanding, this makes sense. With the nonfiction books coming fast and furious, it's really the kids' understanding growing out of their special interests, if you want to get technical about it.

But for all the talk of how this interest in nonfiction represents a new wave in the idea of reading, I see something different and much more old-fashioned happening. The real focus isn't only nonfiction. The real Hot Topic of 2002 is content area reading, a fresh twist on the venerable "reading to learn" philosophy.

So why this obsession with reading in the content areas? Sweeping conclusions are probably not in order. Some reading trends are the product of fluke and happenstance. But you could argue that content area literacy is the ultimate goal for our students in Reading Workshop. Whether they are reading in literature, math, science, history, physical education, art or any other content, we want our kids to read with understanding and learn from their reading. That's the nature of the game in middle and high school.

And what does our Reading Workshop have to do with reading in the content areas anyway? Well, it's all about reciprocal gains. That's when both Reading Workshop and content-area reading work together to improve learning "with understanding" for our kids.

A great new resource from NMSA

Since one of our goals in our Reading Workshop is to support kids as they take on textbook reading in content areas, we looked around for resources. Help came in the form of a book from the NMSA, Strategies for Integrating Reading and Writing in Middle and High School Classrooms by Wood and Harmon.

Chapter 10, "Helping Students Gain More Information from Textbooks," is full of great ideas for using study guides. At the beginning of the chapter, there's an easy-to-understand explanation of the research/theory/rational.
One way to use questions during the reading of a selection is to develop study guides to accompany difficult chapters in textbooks. Study guides enable teachers to reduce the amount of print students must deal with at a given time by using questions interspersed throughout the text. Additionally, these guides can be developed to aid students' metacognitive abilities while they read, helping students vary their reading rate, monitor their comprehension, and focus on the most significant information in the text.

The Reading Road Map, on pages 87-88, is our favorite study guide from this chapter. It carefully scaffolds the students' reading of textbook material.
While good readers subconsciously know when to skim over material that is not significant, less proficient readers tend to read all textual material at the same rate -- either too laboriously or too quickly and carelessly. By the use of 'road signs' to depict reading speed, the Reading Road Map can help students learn to adjust their reading rates based on the different purposes for reading a particular passage.

For the six years I taught reading in middle school, my kids told me repeatedly that the hardest reading was in History. That's why we put all our content area "apples" into the History "basket" and planned multiple mini-lessons based on History content. A brief outline follows:

A study of explorers and the nature
of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century exploration

Download our Reading Road Map for this study

Focus question:

How did the meeting of Christopher Columbus and the Taino people change the world?

"October 12, 1492. On this fall morning, three ships landed near a small island in the Western Hemisphere. The island was home to the Taino people. A sea captain named Christopher Columbus, who was sailing under the flag of Spain, waded ashore. Neither the Taino nor Columbus knew that their meeting would change the world." (p.132)

Texts:

Encounter by Jane Yolen

Where do you think you're going, Christopher Columbus? by Jean Fritz

History textbook, A New Nation, Adventure in Time and Place by McGraw-Hill

Primary Source, "The Log of Christopher Columbus" (in the textbook, p. 135)

Resources:

Strategies for Integrating Reading and Writing in Middle and High School Classrooms, Chapter 10, "Helping Students Gain More Information from Textbooks," pp. 87-89

Strategy Instruction in Action, VHS Tape 3: "Reading and Understanding Nonfiction"

Strategies That Work, pp. 114-115

Nonfiction Matters, pp. 80-82

You Gotta Be the Book, Jeffrey Wilhelm

Improving Comprehension With Think-Aloud Strategies, p. 41-66, Jeffrey Wilhelm

Objective:

Given a variety of texts to build prior knowledge about Columbus, students will demonstrate the ability to read the History textbook with understanding by using information from the textbook as they work in pairs to complete a Reading Road Map (p.88-89).

Mini lessons:

Day 1 - Using a Think Aloud (Journal #30) to model my own thinking about reading, I read excerpts from Where do you think you're going, Christopher Columbus? Students used post-its to indicate their connections, questions and responses to the text. We placed the post-its on a class chart.

Day 2 - During Shared Reading we read the Author's Note from the book, Encounter. Students circled the words they needed to clarify, and we discussed the meaning and importance of these words.

Words to clarify: San Salvador, landfall, claimed, uninhabited, Taino, Guanhani, iguanas, armbands, feast, tribespeople, coarse, portion, suffer, thread, darts, Venetian, natives, sources, various, colonized, religions, lifestyles, originally, encounter, actual, historical

Day 3 - We read aloud the book, Encounter. Students used post-its to respond to the text. They felt strongly that Columbus did not do the Taino any favors. They were distressed that within just fifty years, the population had gone from 300,000 to about 500. "How could they let this happen?" they asked.

Day 4 - We introduced the Reading Road Map. Using the History book (pp. 132-135) and the Reading Road Map, students worked in pairs, Traveling Partners, to complete the Before Reading and During Reading sections.

Day 5 - Traveling Partners used their Bookmarks for Guiding Questions (Journal #16) to discuss the reading and complete the After Reading section of the Reading Road Map. Then we shared. The class discussion centered on the feelings of the Taino toward Christopher Columbus and the comments in "The Log of Christopher Columbus" about the Taino. "They gave us gifts of everything they had they were so poor," he wrote.

Additional lessons - Reader's Theater, "Excerpt from a Reader's Theatre Script for Social Studies: The Early Explorers, Christopher Columbus Returns," Strategies for Integrating Reading and Writing in Middle and High School Classrooms, pp. 144-146.

These mini-lessons met with enthusiastic response from our students. "I really liked using the Reading Road Map," Sophalla commented. "It makes it easy to read the History book."

Who could ask for anything more?


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