Falling in Love with Close Reading Book Study: Chapter 7

For me, & I have been saying this for months now. It’s a new way to me, of teaching reading so to speak. I need to practice & re-train myself in some ways that I deliver instruction. This isn’t something we do to our students, but rather a way we instruct & guide our students. In Chapter 7 the authors refer to a few specific things for teachers to do: Enjoy the bad ideas as much as the great ones, talk less & read more, balance students’ reading diet & be a vision of reading. I’m a visual person & I need a sample map so to speak. So I’ve re-created some options from the authors in the text about balancing student’s reading diet.

Umm everything!!!!!!!!!!! I’ve only really done close reading to find text evidence to answer 1 specific question, which relates to a specific standard. But now, I want to teach a specific lesson on finding text evidence for things like structure, point of view, figurative language and so on. I’ve never done anything that specific in this type of manner. I’m up for the challenge & change. It will only make me a better teacher & my students better readers. I have my notes from each chapter & ideas of how to incorporate things. I’m just going to do a little at a time & like the book says accept when things don’t go as planned & learn from them.

In my current position, close reading is one of my school’s focuses for this year for Literacy Improvement. I don’t work with kids anymore but I am going to pull 1 small group of 3rd Graders daily to practice these new instructional techniques with. I am a firm believer in practice what you preach & I cannot expect my teachers to do something if I’m not doing it.

With that being said, I’m am definitely going to try & use a variety of texts other than non-fiction like in this book. I want to try using media, commercial ads & sitcom scripts in lessons. I think this will be a wonderful way to engage my students & start to model some of the close reading strategies I learned in this book. From there I’ll move into using select sections of literature from different texts.

Am also going to do a lot of whole group mini-lesson modeling at first as well before we move into individual texts.