Plants and Seasons Close Read: KWL

Close reading as an activity we engage in fairly regularly in first grade.  During a close read, students are given a text we have read together a few times.  We work with partners a lot during this activity because working collaboratively is something we really enjoy and is helpful in meeting the needs of all learners in 1H.

Below is a graphic showing some of the steps of close reading.  I found this in the Teachers Pay Teachers store.  (It's FREE!)

You might try doing some close reading with your child using any text you have at home or the Take Home Books we send each night!  We have some great discussions about not only information we gain as a result of reading, but also the strategies we use to find the information and what makes us successful readers.

Before our close read of our book, Plants and the Seasons, we filled out a KWL chart as a class (K stands for what we know about plants and seasons, the W stands for what we want to know, and the L stands for what we learned after reading.)  As we set the purpose, we said we wanted to read to answer our questions as well as to add any new facts we learned to our chart.

Then, with a partner, we added facts found from the book to our L section.  (This was our "Turn and Talk" component.)  We discussed as a group how it might be a good idea to reread the text multiple times to find information.  We also talked about synthesizing information and paraphrasing, or saying the facts in our own words because it helps the information "stick" in our brains.

After convening, I reread the text and we shared out information and added it to our class KWL chart. I then asked them to find specific meanings of vocabulary words such as dormant and challenged them to find evidence in the text which gave the definition.  We discovered that sometimes we have to read on to find the meaning of a word, but sometimes we can use resources like the book's glossary to help us.

Close reading is a great way to get kids immersed in text and engaged in the strategies we are focusing on during whole group reading instruction.

Mrs. H :)