It's time to link up with my sweet friend Holly from Fourth Grade Flipper for her informative Tried It Tuesday linky party! It's so great to read about what's worked and what hasn't from other professionals...such a time saver! :)
If you're a follower of my blog, you know I have a small problem with Post-Its and love to incorporate them in my lessons as often as possible! My students love using them and they become such an interactive tool in our classroom!
Author's purpose is one of our focus skills, but I wanted to stretch my students' thinking by using author's point of view/perspective during reading groups. Understanding the author's purpose helps us to understand the author's perspective. Although the article we read was a non-fiction article (Scholastic News), it was definitely written with a positive tone and opinion words were sprinkled throughout the text. After we read the article we decided the author was definitely on the side of Malala, or was in support of her. My students then had to practice their close reading skills by finding evidence in the text that supported the author's view point.
Author's purpose is one of our focus skills, but I wanted to stretch my students' thinking by using author's point of view/perspective during reading groups. Understanding the author's purpose helps us to understand the author's perspective. Although the article we read was a non-fiction article (Scholastic News), it was definitely written with a positive tone and opinion words were sprinkled throughout the text. After we read the article we decided the author was definitely on the side of Malala, or was in support of her. My students then had to practice their close reading skills by finding evidence in the text that supported the author's view point.
For this reading group, I assisted them with the author's view point, which made finding the evidence to support much easier.
This template is perfect (pointed out by my teammate) for the gradual release model: the first piece of evidence (post-it note) can be modeled by the teacher, the second is the "we do" as a group, and the last one can be done independently. At first, a few students were selecting "good" things about Malala from the article, but they were just facts: ("she won the International Children's Peace Prize" and "they bombed hundreds of schools for girls"). Once we really started critiquing the article by looking for adjectives and opinion words they got the hang of it!
Here are some examples:
*Underlined words/phrases that supported their thinking.
For my more advanced readers, I gave them very little guidance-I wanted to extend their thinking by allowing them to determine the author's perspective on their own and give them time to have "friendly" arguments with their group members to justify their thinking. One student picked up on the front cover title: "Meet the World's Bravest Girl", which helped support his argument that the author definitely liked Malala and thought highly of her.
Tomorrow we will complete the reflection piece by explaining if we agree or disagree with the author's view point.
If you're interested in this Post-it template, you can pick it up in my Reading With Post-Its II pack.
Thanks for reading and stopping by! I'd love to hear your comments! Don't forget to check out all the great ideas at Holly's blog!
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