If you are an elementary or middle school teacher who has ever perused my article of the week lists (disclaimer: Kelly Gallagher is the man who invented Articles of the Week), you’ve probably wanted to hurt me. This is because my articles are often a stretch even for my ninth graders (after all, the vocabulary difficulty of newspapers has remained stable […]
Using the Efficient “Take a Stand” Strategy to Hook Kids into a Reading
Let me just start out with this: Erica Beaton (of b10lovesbooks.wordpress.com/#seekthebalance/my next door teacher neighbor fame) introduced me to this strategy (her version is much more sophisticated — see her explanation in the comments), and I’ve also seen something like it accredited to George Hillocks in Michael Smith’s, Deborah Appleman’s, and Jeffrey Wilhelm’s book UnCommon Core (which […]
Here’s What I Know about Reading for Meaning Statements
If you used any of the articles of the week I posted this year (just to be clear, Kelly Gallagher is the originator of the Article of the Week strategy), you definitely noticed some changes to the format. I’ve written elsewhere about why I use Graff/Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say strategy with AoWs (here and here), but I […]
Moving Forward with Close Reading
Yesterday, I wrote an obituary to close reading. This grew out of a delightful professional development session I led with a group of teachers in Louisville, KY. (It was delightful, mind you, because of the audience, not the presenter!) During the training, in which we worked through the non-freaked out approach to Common Core literacy, it hit me: the […]
An Obituary for Close Reading
Close reading, one of the most ubiquitous terms of the Common Core literacy era, passed away yesterday evening. Ironically, its death is mourned by the very teachers (myself included), administrators, coaches, consultants, and authors who killed it through overuse. In its final hours, close reading lay on its deathbed and reflected on its meteoric rise to stardom and similarly rapid decline […]