Juli Kendall - Reading/Writing Workshop Journal

Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading/Writing Workshop Journal

A MiddleWeb Listserv Project

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 #06

A Closer Look at Guided Reading
With Informational Text

We live in Southern California. Here, surfing is one of those sports that consumes your life. You live it and breathe it. Maybe because it is so dependent on the swell and the tides, it seems to ebb and flow like the ocean itself.

I recently asked a friend who surfs if he wished he could predict good waves for days when he has extra time or takes a surf break from work or when there's a particularly big swell. "Surfing is a big time sport," he replied. "It's in your face and all about attitude. Part of the excitement and challenge of the sport is that you never know what to expect. Every wave is unique; a surfer connects individually with each one."

It's the same with guided reading.

According to Hoyt, Mooney, and Parkes in Exploring Informational Text, From Theory to Practice:

(G)uided reading is not a single approach for a certain period of the day. It's as much an attitude as a strategy-a belief that no one can make meaning for anyone else; the reader must be the one who connects with the author. (p. 60)

So the important thing about guided reading is that the reader connects to the meaning that the author conveys-just as in surfing where each rider connects to the wave.

Just what is guided reading? According to Fontas and Pinnell, "guided reading is a teaching approach designed to help individual students learn how to process a variety of increasingly challenging texts with understanding and fluency." (Guiding Readers and Writers: Grades 3 to 6, p. 193) Since reading is the way to access information, whatever the content, we're moving guided reading out of the "traditional" time for reading and into content areas, specifically informational text in science. That's our focus this year -- to help our kids develop content literacy.

As we explore our science curriculum, guided reading is one way of scaffolding the reading. Newspaper articles, magazine feature articles, informational books, and the science textbook provide different types of informational text to read. I do guided reading with groups of three to five students.

The "Framework for Guided Reading" from Guiding Readers and Writers, p. 208, helps me organize my instruction. There are seven components to the framework.

--Selecting the text:

Guided reading helps kids develop their ability to read informational texts. Leveled nonfiction text is one way to scaffold the difficulty of the material. I use leveled material that matches the instructional levels of the kids or I evaluate other texts and try them out to see how they match the readers.

--Introducing the text:

Introductions contribute to the success of guided reading. They support readers as they take on new strategies. A careful introduction helps kids succeed with the reading. I'm working on analyzing my introductions in order to make good teaching decisions. I do this by recording them on an audiotape and listening to them later to analyze my teaching.

--Reading the text:

Kids read the text independently while I listen to one of them or observe their use of strategies. Sometimes I help with the problem solving. But primarily, it's a chance for them to practice what they have learned.

--Discussing and revisiting the text:

This is a very important part of guided reading. After kids have read the text, discussing what they noticed, the strategies they used, and any questions they have, makes the meaning more accessible to them.

--Teaching for processing strategies:

Here's where all the things kids learn about how to read informational text help with reading. Knowing and using text features, the ability to retell text, awareness of the structures writers use, and strategies for understanding vocabulary facilitate the learning of content.

--Optional components:

--Extending the Meaning of the Text
--Word Work (2 minutes)

How I go about selecting a text

"A Book About Your Skeleton" by Ruth Gross is one of the informational texts I'm using for guided reading. It's beginning of third grade, level M. My goal for the end of the year is to be able to use end of 4th and beginning of 5th grade material for guided reading.

The text includes a limited amount of new vocabulary, content that goes along with the science curriculum, pictures, captions, and diagrams with labels -- just the right balance of challenge and practice. I try to find text with no more than 10% new material either in content or in processing strategies. That makes it possible for me to scaffold the reading.

This brief excerpt from the book gives a clear idea of what it's about.

Everybody has bones. Everybody needs them. If you didn't have any bones, you would flop around like spaghetti.

Your bones are hard and stiff. The rest of you is soft. The hard, stiff bones help hold the soft part up.

And they give the soft part a shape.

You can feel the hard, stiff bones that help hold you up and give your body its shape.

You have more than 200 bones in your body-long bones, short bones, flat bones, curved bones, little bones, big bones.

There are bones in your head and bones in your toes and bones almost everywhere else in between.

All of your bones put together are your skeleton. But a skeleton isn't just a pile of bones.

Doing the book introduction

(my words are in italics)

--Today, we're going to read an information book titled "A Book About Your Skeleton." The author is Ruth Belov Gross. The illustrator is Steve Bjorkman.

--You know what we mean when we talk about your bones. But what is your skeleton?

Student responses:

-It's what helps you move.

-It helps you grow and play.

-It's a bone; it's hard.

-Sometimes you could break them.

-It reminds me of the skulls we use for Día de los Muertos

-You play with them, you can dance with them, you can dress them, you can make them out of sugar, and you can use them for Halloween.

-Connection -- You can see a chicken skeleton when you eat and see the bones.

--That's great! You already know lots of information about skeletons.

--Take a look at the front cover and the title page. What do you notice about the pictures?

Student responses:

-Pictures of a bone (an x-ray)

-A big bandage with writing on it (a cast)

-His broken leg, he has a cast

-Connection: My cousin had a broken hand with a cast, and he had to put a bag on it when he went in the water.

-Connection: My brother had a cast on his hand but it was blue.

--(We discuss the vocabulary that they need to clarify: cast, x-ray, and skeleton.)

--In this information book, you're going to learn about your skeleton. You'll learn why it is important and the names of the different bones. What information would you expect the author to give you about skeletons?

Student responses:

-How the skeleton is.

-What your skeleton does.

-What your skeleton is about.

-How they work, how you can move them, and how to protect them.

-Everything

--Take a look at the page with the picture of the large bone. It has three captions. Two of them point to a particular place on the bone. The other caption gives general information about the picture. Captions are very important. They give you information about the pictures or photographs. What information do you find in the captions?

Student Responses:

-It tells what the inside of a bone looks like.

-The blood is made at both ends of the bone.

-Blood cells are only made in the middle of the bone when you are growing.

--Let's turn to the last 2 pages in the book. They both have a diagram of a skeleton. Each of the diagrams has labels to tell you the names of the different parts of the skeleton. Take a look at the two diagrams. What do you notice?

Student Responses:

-That it has lots of colors. The bones are different colors.

-How many bones are there?

-Why are the names easy to read on one diagram and hard to read on the other?

--I can tell that you have many questions about the information in these skeleton diagrams. On the page next to the diagrams, it says: "The bones in these diagrams are various colors to help you see the different bones more clearly."

--That lets us know the colors are important and give us information about the bones.

--You also noticed that one of the diagrams has labels that use names we are familiar with like: skull and shoulder bones. The other diagram uses "scientific names" like cranium and scapula. Before we start to read, let's do a little Word Work.

(Students are unsure of the pronunciation and meaning of the word "scientific.")

Word Work

(2 minutes)

Let's look at this word from the last page. How do we read it? "Scientific" What do you know about this word that can help you read and understand it? Yes, that's right. It has "scien" in it. What other words do you know with "scien" in them? Good, you know two more words-"science" and "scientist."

So what do you think that "scientific" means? That's right! It means, "using science." These "scientific words" are words that use the science names of the bones in your skeleton.

Here's an example of another scientific word: Homo sapiens. That's the scientific word for "human beings."

--Now it's time to read

The last time I wrote about guided reading it had more to do with my questions about "how to do it" than my concern about kids being able to read informational text. Reading Workshop Week # 22, "Exploring the Riddles in Guided Reading" describes how I went about answering some of my own questions.

What exactly is guided reading anyway? Guided Reading has various meanings. Two books, The Art of Teaching Reading and Guiding Readers and Writers: Grades 3-6, give excellent information about the subject. Even, today, guided reading is not absolutely the same thing to all people. So, learning all you can about the subject is a good start to sorting things out.

For now, guided reading helps us learn. It's a great way to help readers connect to the meaning of the text. And wouldn't you know it! For one of the few times this year at Huntington Beach, the waves are overhead and glassy.

Surf's up!

Resources for Guided Reading

The Art of Teaching Reading by Lucy Calkins

Guiding Readers and Writers: Grades 3-6 by Fontas and Pinnell

Exploring Informational Text, From Theory to Practice by Hoyt, Mooney, and Parkes

Guided reading online:

http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/curriculum/english/guided_rdg.html

http://www.carolhurst.com/profsubjects/reading/guided.html

http://www.laurens55.k12.sc.us/guided_reading.htm

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

Juli Kendall's Weekly Reading/Writing Workshop Journal