Group items tagged

:One of the things students struggle with the most - and it's relevant to every grade and subject - is distinguishing between argument and evidence. This problem manifests itself in both reading and writing. In this article, I want to briefly highlight these two key Common Core ELA-Literacy elements and point you to more in-depth discussion and resources at my Literacy Cookbook blog.

"To be college and career ready, students need to be able to read sufficiently complex texts on their own and gather evidence, knowledge, and insight from those texts. These close reading exemplars intend to model how teachers can support their students as they undergo the kind of careful reading the Common Core State Standards require. Each of these exemplars features the following: i) readings tasks in which students are asked to read and reread passages and respond to a series of text dependent questions; 2) vocabulary and syntax tasks which linger over noteworthy or challenging words and phrases; 3) discussion tasks in which students are prompted to use text evidence and refine their thinking; and 4) writing tasks that assess student understanding of the text."

Lately, I've been working with teachers on how to help students write more effective paragraphs and essays. We have found that students can quickly master Step 1-applying the three rules for determining if a statement is an argument or not (it includes debatable/arguable words; it includes cause/effect language, or it raises "How" or "Why" questions). But they need more scaffolding to move from Step 2 to Step 3.

"The school year isn't a series of sprints, but the way you forge your curriculum can make it feel that way. The most common way of structuring how you teach is by first assembling standards into units, then those units into lessons. You may use a backwards-design process (popularized by UbD and Grant Wiggins), where you start with what you want the students to understand, then decide what can act as evidence of that understanding, then finally design an assessment that provides the best opportunity to uncover what students know."

"The Common Core Learning Standards describe the importance of teaching students how to comprehend informational text. They are asked to read closely, make inferences, cite evidence, analyze arguments and interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text. Primary source documents are artifacts created by individuals during a particular period in history. This could be a letter, speech, photograph or journal entry. If you're looking to integrate social studies into your literacy block, try out one of these resources for primary source documents. "

"At Harriet Tubman Elementary in Newark, New Jersey, 5th grade teacher Yvonne Copprue-McLeod teaches a lesson about reading comprehension and answering open-ended questions using textual evidence. Ms. Copprue-McLeod's strategy for her lesson is to have students work in groups, using specific details from the text to draw inferences and answer questions about the main character in the text. This lesson is aligned with multiple 5th grade Common Core ELA standards (RL.5.1, RF.5.4, SL.5.1, SL.5.4)."

"RACE is the acronym we've adopted school-wide to help unify our teaching language and help students develop good answers. The thought is that even kindergarteners can start restating questions verbally and teachers in the youngest grades can use the vocabulary when they are modeling."

"Reading a picture book aloud from her armchair, 20 children gathered on the rug at her feet, kindergarten teacher Jamie Landahl is carrying on a practice that's been a cornerstone of early-literacy instruction for decades. But if you listen closely, you'll see that this is not the read-aloud of your childhood. Something new and very different is going on here."