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Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading/Writing Workshop Journal

Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli also posts a weekly journal entry from her reading/writing classroom.

This year, Juli will focus on her efforts to integrate subject matter into her reading and writing workshop approach. In her first journal of the year, she explains the rationale behind this move and some of her thinking about how she hopes to accomplish this goal.

Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing 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.

If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals, find out how here.

2003-04 Reading/Writing
Workshop Journal
Week #03

Building a Scaffold
Around Informational Text

Before there were web quests, online research projects, microfiche, Internet websites, homework hotlines, and ezines (internet magazines), there were textbooks.

They were impressive and thick, and we knew just enough about how to take care of them that we covered them with homemade brown paper book covers. They filled our book bags and backpacks and weighed us down as we walked and biked and bused around. They went with us to the library on study dates, and they told us everything we needed to know about history, science, English, and math. You only had to do math problems or read the chapters and answer the study guide questions to learn what you needed to know.

But times have changed. Information is growing at an astounding rate, and there are a multitude of new sources for learning about things. Informational text is all around us.

The first unit of study on our Curriculum Map for Content Literacy is "Learning to Read Informational Text." We teach this to support content literacy. Since much of what kids read in school is fiction, we provide scaffolding as they take on the challenges of newspapers, flyers, applications, menus, magazines, announcements, graphs, charts and maps, as well as textbooks. Yes, textbooks are still with us. In our state there's a new law that every classroom must have one book per subject for each student. But now they are not the only source of information.

So why do we use scaffolding? Isn't that something you do when you're constructing a building? Bruner (1978) explains the term scaffolding as "the steps taken to reduce the degrees of freedom in carrying out some tasks so that the child can concentrate on the difficult skill she is in the process of acquiring." In other words, scaffolding is all about assisting students as they learn and become more and more able to complete a task independently. According to Vygotsky, "what a child can do with support today, she or he can do alone tomorrow."

While we read informational text in class, I use "teaching the features of text" as one way of scaffolding the work. We focus on these features of text:

--Labels
--Photographs
--Captions (a particularly tricky one for our kids)
--Comparisons
--Cutaways
--Maps
--Types of print (fonts)
--Close-ups
--Table of contents
--Index
--Glossary
--Tables

First, I teach kids about the different features of text by using examples of different types of informational text, including our science textbook. Then kids work in pairs to explore a variety of sources looking for certain text features. Finally, everyone makes his or her own "Nonfiction Conventions Book."

The Mosaic of Thought listserv has a Tools page with a wonderful example for this activity, and we're using it with our kids. (Click on the link for the Tools page, scroll down to Worksheets/Reporting Forms and look for the Nonfiction Conventions Notebook.)

Each student gets a set of pages, front and back, with a place for them to draw, sketch, or otherwise represent each of these text features, or nonfiction conventions. There's also a definition of each text feature on the appropriate page.

This isn't the only time we've done this activity. I've taught this before during our study of the reading comprehension strategy, "Determining Importance in Text." In Reading Workshop Journal #33, "Confessions of a Non-Nonfiction Teacher," I wrote about our first effort:

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.

By teaching kids about text features to scaffold the reading of informational text, we hope to make it possible for our kids to read all kinds of information sources with understanding in order to learn new content, not just the textbook. As information continues to increase in our world, kids need strategies to read a wide variety of texts. It's definitely the way to go.

Working my way through this unit of study, I remember something I read in the book, Exploring Informational Texts, From Theory to Practice by Holt, Mooney, and Parkes. Although written primarily for elementary school, it has a lot to tell us about teaching in grades 4 through 8.

"When we only teach the topic of the text, it leads students to be dependent. When we teach the reader of the text, it leads to independence with any text." (From "Navigating Through Informational Texts" by Janine Batzle, p. 98)

Or another way to say it: "Give someone a fish and you will feed them for a day. Teach someone to fish and you will feed them for a lifetime."

So let's go fishing!


References for Scaffolding Learning

Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning, Teaching Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom by Pauline Gibbons (Heinemann, 2002)

"Scaffolding Learning" (online article). Adapted from Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy by Jeffrey Wilhelm, Tanya Baker, and Julie Dube (Heinemann, 2001)

Scaffolding Young Writers, A Writers' Workshop Approach by Dorn and Soffos. While it's directed at young writers (grades 1 to 3), this book contains valuable insights for working with older struggling writers. The first chapter is available for reading online. (Stenhouse, 2001)


Download Juli's curriculum plan for content literacy

SEE Juli's Curriculum Map for Content Literacy - Unit One

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