As school resumes tomorrow and throughout the week, I am looking forward not only to seeing my students but helping them recognize the historical significance of this Friday, which is the 14th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. While thinking of the upcoming school year in context with this unforgettable day, I got the cool idea of exposing my students to some of the most iconic September 11th photographs via the practice of close looking, a term I became familiar with during last year’s NCTE conference.

As the name suggests, close looking is like close reading in that the viewer dives deeper into a photograph through multiple viewings. Here’s how it works.
 

For my first time attending NCTE, or any national reading conference for that matter, I certainly got lucky on my first day. After being enlightened and entertained by Ruth Culham, as detailed in my third and fourth NCTE reviews on mentor texts and literary borrowing, I was fortunate enough to follow up with a lecture by Nancy Frey (http://fisherandfrey.com/), a renowned expert on close reading.

To be even more honest, I felt that I had a strong handle on close reading before heading into this conference. My school has been a partner with Roosevelt University, which turned me onto the book Notice and Note, an excellent source for how to teach close reading of fictional work, specifically through six signposts. Additionally, I had developed my own close reading annotation key and practiced close reading for nearly two years, so I felt that I was hardly a newbie. 

Well, I couldn’t have been any more wrong as Frey opened my eyes (in very good ways) to making the close reading process simpler yet still challenging for my students and more intentional on my end.  

With that said, here are 10 must-have close reading takeaways from Frey’s great lecture at NCTE.

My first three reviews of the 2014 NCTE conference have been clearly based upon the common theme of mentor texts. As a teacher who has some but not enough experience with mentor texts, it can be quite intimidating to think what is a good mentor text and where do you find the time in a busy profession to find them?

Well, the aforementioned Ruth Culham recently wrote a book called The Writing Thief that is a bible of mentor texts for various themes, literary techniques and writing conventions. In short, the book is worth checking out.

In the meantime, consider these mentor texts that Culham suggested at the NCTE conference as a nice starting point for instruction blending reading and writing.

To make this post more efficient, I am going to list a topic and then some suggested mentor texts. Perhaps in the future, I will add to this post or build a specific page with mentor texts for various themes.

In my previous two posts, I detailed how one fifth-grade teacher was using mentor texts in her classroom and what one researcher found in student’s writing from this literary borrowing.

Continuing off of this theme in today’s post, I am going to share some amazing insight from the inspirational and entertaining Ruth Culham, who capped off this dual lecture at NCTE with an introduction to her bible on mentor texts, The Writing Thief, and some wonderful examples of mentor texts for various themes.

In my previous post, I detailed how one fifth-grade teacher was using mentor texts as a bridge to guide her students’ own writing, as detailed by Fairfield University’s Ryan Colwell. In this post, I am going to explain some of Colwell’s major findings about how students literary borrow from mentor texts.

For reference, literary borrowing refers to when students identify something (i.e., a literary skill or technique) about the text they’ve read and then use it in their own writing. With this in mind, Colwell had five major findings from his observations of the fifth-grade classroom.

My first session at NCTE was an engaging dual lecture by Ryan Colwell of Fairfield University ([email protected]) and Ruth Culham (www.culhamwriting.com), author of The Traits of Writing and The Writing Thief. Both presenters focused heavily on the power of mentor texts. Today I am going to share some of Colwell’s observations of how a fifth-grade teacher has her students use mentor texts.

For reference, a mentor text is any text that can be used to demonstrate, model, discuss and then incorporate a literary skill into one’s writing. For example, Colwell shared the example of how this teacher used the Sandra Cisneros story “Eleven” to demonstrate how authors convey (i.e., show, don’t tell) big feelings in their writing.

Let’s say you wanted to teach your students how to use similes. You could use Lauren Leedy’s “Crazy Like a Fox: A Simile Story” as a mentor text to explain what a simile is, how they are used, and why they are used, and then have students write their own similes.

So how did this teacher go about doing this? Colwell provided an important reminder before detailing this teacher’s five-point plan.

In November I had the fortune of attending the National Center for Literacy Education’s 104th annual conference, Story as the Landscape of Knowing, in Washington, D.C. Quite honestly, the experience was inspirational and mind-blowing, leaving my notebook and head packed with many ideas, some of which I began to incorporate within my instruction last school year.
            As the 2015/2016 school year rapidly approaches, I am going to share some of my notes and information, which I hope to incorporate even more into my classes. Topics covered will include mentor texts, close reading and much more. I hope you enjoy as I start rolling out these posts tomorrow.  

After spending the last three weeks decompressing and rejuvenating from last school year, I have been slowly starting to catch up on some literature that has naturally piled up during the past couple of months. While skimming the Preliminary Program for the Illinois Reading Council Conference (October 1-3, 2015, in Peoria, Illinois) last night, I came across a cool advertisement for Illinois Reads, a statewide literacy initiative for all ages, from toddlers to adults.

While the Land of Lincoln can certainly be frustrating on many levels (see the recent political stalemate in Springfield), Illinois Reads sounds like a pretty enlightening program, especially for students and teachers with some down time this summer. Essentially, the program consists of different age bands in which there are six books to read. The selections seem quite interesting, especially if you are a fan of Star Wars or the 1985 Chicago Bears (no to the former, heck yes to the latter).