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 #18

Literature Study with Informational Text:
Getting Down to the Basics

"It's elementary, my dear Watson!"

It seems like it should be easy to figure out how to do literature study with informational text. But managing kids while they select books, make groups, design meeting schedules, and hold literary discussions can be an overwhelming job. What helps me figure it out is something called "the elements of literature study."

To understand the elements of literature study, I look up the definition of the word "elements" on my word processor's dictionary. "The basic and most important things to be learned when studying a subject" is the definition that fits the best. So I take it to mean that the elements of literature study are "the basic and most important things to be learned when doing a literature study."

We're going to a lot of trouble to figure out the basic and most important things to be learned during our unit of study with informational text. Our state Reading Standards remind us of why it's so important. Virtually everything in the Reading Comprehension Standards is included in this unit of study with informational text. Here's an excerpt from the Standards:
Reading 2.0: Reading Comprehension (Focus on Information Materials)

Students read and understand grade-level appropriate material. They describe and connect the essential ideas, arguments, and perspectives of the text by using their knowledge of text structure, organization, and purpose.

Structural Features of Informational Materials

2.1 Understand how text features (e.g., format, graphics, sequence, diagrams, illustrations, charts, maps) make information accessible and usable.

2.2 Analyze text that is organized in sequential or chronological order.

Comprehension and Analysis of Text

2.3 Discern main ideas and concepts presented in texts, identifying and assessing evidence that supports those ideas.

2.4 Draw inferences, conclusions, or generalizations about text and support them with textual evidence and prior knowledge.

Expository Critique

2.5 Distinguish facts, supported inferences, and opinions in text.

Guiding Reading and Writers by Fontas and Pinnell helps me organize my thinking about the elements of literature study with informational text. Thinking about what happens before, during, and after literature study helps me understand the basic and most important things to be learned in this unit.

What happens before, during, and after literature study?


Before literature study

We're done with this section now, so I can look back and see how things went.
--I established and taught the routines. (Journal #17)

--I gathered book choices from leveled informational text. (Journal # 16)

--We set meeting times during our daily class.

--With the students, I decided on the sections to be read. Because these were short texts (75 pages maximum), we decided to read the whole book.

--I assigned the students the task of using post-its while they read to record their connections, questions, important facts, unknown words, etc.

As we get ready to talk about our books in groups, Helen has something to say. "Remember, I said, 'I hate dinosaur books.' Well, I read two of them and I changed my mind."

Trying to figure things out I ask, "What made you change your mind?"

"It was the fossils," she says. "It was just so interesting. Now I have to figure out which group I want to be in. I think I'll pick A Dinosaur Named Sue, The Find of the Century. That's the one with the most facts about fossils."

This is why we're reading informational text!

During literature study

This is the section where we are currently working- "during" literature study.

--I facilitate, coach, and reinforce as the groups meet to talk about their books.

--I spend some time redirecting discussion. It's easy to get off track because of the Presidential Primaries. "Why can't anyone but white people be President?" someone asks. "It's because it's called The White House," someone else answers. After a short bird walk, it's back to the book.

--As I sit in on the book discussions, I model by "thinking aloud" about the text.

--If necessary, I interject into the conversation and summarize what I am hearing from the group.

--Although I restate what I hear kids say about the text, my goal is to get the students to restate.

--I encourage students to extend responses by talking longer about individual post-its. (This is something I learned from reading Lucy Calkins, The Art of Teaching Reading.)

--I add new information if I come across it in my own reading of the texts. I make sure that I find time to read all of the books the kids are reading. I just can't do as good a job if I'm not familiar with the challenges of the text.

--I do everything I can to move the discussion forward and keep to the "high ground."

After literature study

This is what we'll be doing as we finish talking about our books.

--I'll get students to evaluate their discussions by using the "How was our conversation rubric?"

--I'll invite comments, questions, and opinions by having them fill out an end of unit survey about literature study with informational text.

--I'll plan the next steps. (More discussion, projects, more reading or rereading)

What Students Are Saying


Our literature discussions are full of enthusiasm. Here's what some of the kids are saying about their informational books:

Finding the Titanic (Daniel, Rigo, David, and Danny)

Daniel ­p; page 10
Daniel comments, "I think there were too many people for the little boats." For this group, "lifeboats" was an unknown vocabulary word. They extended their conversation by talking about suggestions for how to choose people for the boats. They decided there was no time for a lottery and that children and mothers should go first and then fathers.

Rigo ­p; pg. 15
Rigo reads from the text, "For the first days of the voyage, the weather was clear and the ocean was calm." The unknown words, voyage and calm, interferes with his understanding of the text. He makes a connection to when he went to Seal Beach and the weather was clear and cold and there were big waves. We clarify the meaning of the word "calm" and talk about the difference between the ocean when it is calm and when it has waves.

Finding the Titanic (Pedro, Loren, Joanne)

Pedro ­p; p. 6
"How many people did it take to build the Titanic?" Pedro's question seems to spring from his overall curiosity about the Titanic rather than insight from reading the text. We talk about how some questions need more research and that for some questions you never find the answer.

Loren, - p. 5,
Loren reads from the book, "We were searching for the Titanic, the most famous of all shipwrecks." "What does shipwreck mean?" she asks. "Is it a compound word?" Everyone says, "Yes." So Loren uses the part of the word she knows, "ship," to help her understand the meaning. But she still is confused by "wreck." We try using the thesaurus to help, but the synonyms it lists, ruins and wrecked, don't help her understand. Next, she looks it up in the dictionary and fines a definition she likes, "the remains of a wrecked ship buried in the sand." Thanks to Webster's New World Children's Dictionary Loren's question is answered.

Joanne ­p; p. 16
"It says, 'Ruth, Ruth, wake up.' What does that mean?" Joanne asks. We go back to the text to locate details that let us know that it was in the middle of the night, that Ruth had been sleeping, and that the Titanic hit an iceberg.

*A side note about the word "iceberg": Surprisingly almost no one who was reading this book knew what an iceberg was. When I worked on helping them clarify the meaning, I asked kids what they called big pieces of ice that were floating around in the water. They all replied, "Chunks of ice." It took lots of conversation for them to understand the concept of icebergs.

A Dinosaur Named Sue, The Find of the Century (Edgar, Jose, Jonathan)

Edgar ­p; p. 10
Edgar has a question about an illustration, "Is this a bone, are these bones? It doesn't look like bones." There is no caption with the picture so we all go back to the text on the page and read to find out what is in the illustration/photograph. The text says:

"Susan looked closely at the bones. They were hollow. Dinosaurs that ate meat, called carnivores, had hollow bones. Plant-eating dinosaurs, called herbivores, didn't. So this was a carnivore."

As a result of rereading the text and our conversations about what it means, Edgar decides that the illustration showed bones that had just been discovered and not cleaned yet.

Jose adds additional information about cleaning bones that he found on p. 43. But as an aside, he comments, "It looks like rocks to me!"

Then Jose picks up the book, Dinosaurs, to look for more information about bones. "I like fossils," he says.

In reference to how they dig up and clean dinosaur bones, Jonathan's comment is, "I read a book about that. I'll try to find it." In this way the search for information about fossilized dinosaur bones continues.

The Magic School Bus: Inside the Earth (Jeannie and Michelle)

Prior to our literature study conversations, Michelle encounters the word, "sedimentary" (p. 18) as she is reading the text in a small group. She uses the thesaurus and the dictionary to try to find out what the word means but they lead her to dead ends. It has no synonyms listed, and the definition refers to "made from sediment" which is no help to her.

Next she refers back to the page in the book where she discovered the word to look for clues to its meaning. She finds two sections that refer to "sedimentary." Both excerpts were written as if by a child.

"How Rock Layers Were Formed by Mollie ­p; Millions of years ago, wind blew dust and sand into lakes and oceans. The dust and sand settled to the bottom in layers called sediment. Seashells formed layers of sediment, too. Over time, the layers hardened into the sedimentary rock we see today."

An Earth Science Word by Dorothy Ann ­p; Sedimentary comes from a word that means 'to settle.'"

She's still confused, so I try my word processor's dictionary. This definition helps her the most.
used to describe rocks formed from material, including debris of organic origin deposited as sediment by water, wind, or ice and them consolidated by pressure

Here's the definition that Michelle develops for herself. "In this book, sedimentary is a kind of rock. It was made when dust and sand got into lakes millions of years ago. It all went to the bottom and they called the layers, sediment. Sometimes there were even seashells in the layers. Then it had pressure on it for millions of years, lots and lots of pressure, and they called it, sedimentary rock. It might be shale or sandstone or limestone."

That's pretty good for a fifth grader. I think she's got it!

In the end, after lots of conversations about books, it's the kids who teach me the basic and most important things to be learned when doing a literature study.

"I know the most important thing," Helen says. "You have to find a really good book or you'll just be bored the whole time."


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

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