Falling in Love with Close Reading Book Study: Chapter 7

Hello Friends~

Welcome back for Week 7 / Chapter 7 of our Close Reading Book Study! I hope everyone is having a fabulous weekend!
THIS IS OUR LAST CHAPTER & WEEK POSTING TOGETHER!!!
What an adventure it has been!!! So blessed to have my online friends! 

Below is a direct link to the previous chapters in the book:
Chapter 1 {CLICK HERE}
Chapter 2 {CLICK HERE}
Chapter 3 {CLICK HERE}
Chapter 4 {CLICK HERE}
Chapter 5 {CLICK HERE}
Chapter 6 {CLICK HERE}
Make sure that you visit each participants blog to see what they have to share about each chapter. Don't forget to enter our raffle each week as well!
YOU CAN WIN A COPY OF THE BOOK & 
$5.00 TO SPEND IN EVERYONE'S STORES!

Chapter 7
I Believe in You
A Vision of Independence

Chapter 7 is a wrap up off the entire book. Bringing each individual chapter together in the focus of teaching & scaffolding our students to "read closely" & gain new understandings of text.

Question #1: What newly acquired advice can you share?

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.

{CLICK HERE}

Question #2: What new ideas do you have?

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. 

Question #3: How do you plan to implement close reading in your classroom?

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. 

Next I'm going to continue my adventure of learning about close reading with my own staff by doing other book studies. We are starting the first week in September with another book. I will post about it weekly here on my blog as well.

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