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Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Writing Curricular Calendar, Sixth Grade, 2014-2015 Unit Seven - Raising the Level of Reading Notebooks

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Unit Seven – Raising the Level of Reading Notebooks May - June (minor unit)

Welcome to the Unit This unit parallels a major reading unit in Nonfiction Reading (and Keeping up an Independent Reading Life). The unit gives some attention to raising the level of writing about fiction, and to note-taking and writing to grow ideas about nonfiction. We begin with fiction, so that you have a structure in place to monitor how students are keeping up with independent reading. In this unit, your explicit goals are to help your students become more engaged and open-minded readers and writers, who read their books closely, and can better express their ideas and support them with text evidence through writing and talking. One way for students to work diligently in understanding what an author is saying and deeply interpret the text they are reading is by writing about reading, responding to literature and nonfiction in ways that unpack a deeper understanding of the text. The implicit goal in this unit is to encourage your students to create and craft something of their own about the books, or inspired by the books, they are reading.

Overview

Essential Question: How can we make the invisible work of comprehension more visible by using multiple modalities, including various tools, partnership talk, writing about reading, reading notebooks, and creating something new from the thinking work we have done across our books?

● Bend I: Collecting Artifacts from Our Books to Make Sense as We Read and Get Inspiration for Deeper Thinking

How can I use my notebook as I read, to tackle story elements of harder fiction, and to trace and develop new thinking?

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● Bend II: Note-Taking and Writing to Think Across Nonfiction How can I do similar work I’ve done in writing about fiction, to write to develop thinking about nonfiction reading?

● Bend III: Outgrowing our Initial Ideas and Writing Longer to Make Sense of

Longer and Denser Fiction and Nonfiction How can I use writing about reading to help me make sense of longer and denser fiction and nonfiction?

CCSS/LS Standards Addressed in This Unit The below standards are the major writing standards addressed in this unit. However, the unit will also include work with other standards as well [e.g. Reading Literature and Speaking and Listening Standards].

● W6.9. Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

● Apply grade 6 Reading standards to literature (e.g., “Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres [e.g., stories and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories] in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics.”)

● W6.10.Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and audiences.

● CCLS W6.11. Create and present a text or art work in response to a literary work.

● Create poetry, stories, plays, and other literary forms (e.g. videos, art work). (New York State only)

By now, you will have gathered a significant amount of data on your students as readers and writers. You will want to look back at students’ writing notebooks and reading responses to date to get a baseline sense of students’ volume of writing, and their ability to articulate thoughts about their reading using evidence from the text.


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John Hattie, author of Visible Learning, has done a mega-study compiling thousands of studies from every walk of life that attempt to understand the factors that support achievement. When looking at data from twenty to thirty million students to see the factors that were especially influential, Hattie came away saying that it is incredibly important for learners to be working towards crystal clear, challenging but accessible goals, and it is important for them to receive informative feedback on what they’ve done that is working and that clarifies the next steps they can take. It will be important, then, for you to illuminate for students what it is that they are trying to accomplish. We suggest you sit with your grade team to assess student work in order to ensure consistency across the grade. Before meeting, each teacher will want to choose samples of writing about reading that he or she feels exemplifies different levels of work. As a grade you can determine your final set of student samples—one piece for each level. The conversation that ensues during this process will help to make sure all teachers on the grade are consistent (or relatively so) in how they assess writing about reading. The rubrics and checklists for information and argument writing may be worthwhile anchors here, although not all writing about reading will need to be in the form of an argument essay or fully fleshed out writing. At the end of the unit, a reasonable summative assessment in reading and writing would be a performance assessment in which students were asked to choose, assess, and share two pages from their notebook which best reflect their ambitions for writing about their reading and for sharing idea with others.

Getting Ready This unit does not require a special set-up, as responding to literature or nonfiction can take many forms. At this point in the year, you have already launched and been in reading notebooks with your students. When thinking about reading notebooks in middle school, especially in response to nonfiction, you might want to connect the work that readers to in a reader’s notebook to the same type of work artists do in a sketchbook and that scientists and explorers have done in their notebooks over the centuries. Be sure to rally your students behind the bigger purpose of this tool -- a place for readers to analyze, reflect, and live their lives differently as a result of the books they are reading. To teach note-taking skills, it helps to examine what you do when you are studying content and then think, “What am I doing that I could teach students to do?” It may be valuable to


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spend fifteen minutes or so taking the best notes you can on a book, meeting, or video, and then to look back and try to discover what made those notes effective. This unit suggests that in order to record notes, a learner prioritizes and organizes information as he or she learns it. And once the learner has written notes, the learner can (and should) reread and work with those notes in order to do more prioritizing and organizing and to link related information. The intellectual work of note-taking, then, involves ranking, categorizing, and relating. These mental processes are all essential to analytical thinking. Our contention is that students need to be taught analytical thinking—that simply asking students to write about a topic does not necessarily lead them to think analytically about that topic—and that note-taking is one excellent way to do this. If you can, we also recommend that you envelop your room with other materials that can yield higher levels of student engagement. For example, we have found that when students are provided with Post-Its of different colors and sizes, colored paper, sentence strips, tape, glue, and scissors, their thinking about books comes to life. Students began to explore with symbolizing their thinking using materials to represent their thinking. In one sixth grade classroom, Margo decided she was going to have a page of her reader’s notebook that contained images she cut out of different magazines to represent greed and materialism in The Hobbit, or Alexander who taped in a song he wrote for Stargirl to play on her ukulele during lunch. If we want our students’ thinking to be full of metaphor and nuanced, analytical thinking, we should think about the materials students are interacting with to present their thinking in creative, alternative ways. When launching any unit, the first challenge is to entice students to be interested in the inquiry. First, gather examples. There are online sources of famous notes that you can share with your students. For instance, you can find Leonardo Da Vinci's notes in the archives of the British Library (www.imagesonline.bl.uk). Quick Google searches will uncover the scanned notes by Thomas Edison, Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and many others. You might try searching for any of these names along with the word “notes” or “notebooks.” If you start asking people to help you find notes to use as mentor texts, you’ll soon be directed to yet other sites (one favorite is www.notebookstories.com). Of course, you will very likely also have notes and writing about reading that students in your previous class created. You may even have your own notes from courses you have taken. Since this unit is so closely aligned to the major reading unit in Nonfiction Reading and Keeping up an Independent Reading Life, it will be important for you to take stock of your classroom library. In the reading unit, we strongly suggest that students will do more reading if you get them into a series. As students read in a series, they also should be


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reading in partnerships. Get them into the same books by any means you can. The reading partnerships you establish should remain consistent in this writing unit as well. Students’ response to literature will have a real peer audience which inevitably raises the level of their thinking and writing. Like in reading, these partnerships will help you set up readers to invent work, challenge each other, push each other, problem solve difficult situations, ask questions of each other that will hold onto what is happening but also to push more deeply, to hold each other accountable for pushing each other to be our best thinking and writing selves.

Bend I: Collecting Artifacts from Our Books to Make Sense as We Read and Get Inspiration for Deeper Thinking Bend One focuses on showing students how to collect ideas about the books they are reading and capture those ideas through writing. You will want to ensure that as you are teaching students to analyze characters’ external pressures and internal strengths and flaws in reading, they are making choices about ways to capture their analysis through talking and writing. As students are developing theories, accumulating text evidence, and arguing their ideas coherently during reading workshop, you will explicitly show them how to bring that smart work to their literary responses in their reading notebooks. The Common Core standards in writing calls for sixth graders to be able to draw evidence from literary text to support analysis and reflection. Bend I, Session One: Writing to think To launch the unit, you will want to engage students in the work of capturing their thinking and getting it on the page, teaching them that writers read their books closely, to dig out relevant parts to write ab22out, like an archeologist excavates fossils, holding onto what the text says explicitly, creating images about the characters and settings in their mind, and then getting those images down on the page. That is, you might start by saying, “When we are reading books, so much of the intellectual thinking work happens in our heads. Let’s think about how we can use our reading notebooks as a way to spill out everything that is in our head and get it on the page, almost as if we will chop off the top of our head and let the world see what we are thinking.” To demonstrate this work, you will probably use your own reading notebook to show students what you mean. You could return to familiar stories, such as “Inside Out,” by Francisco Jiménez, so that students can make direct connections from reading to writing workshop.


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“Today I want to teach you that writers read their books closely, to dig out relevant parts to write about, like an archaeologist excavated fossils, holding onto what the text says explicitly, creating images about the characters and

settings in their mind, and then getting those images down on the page.” After you provide a rally-cry for why writing about reading matters and how it can help deepen their reading life, you will want to show readers a few ways they might capture their thinking on pages of their reading notebooks. That is, you might model how close observation of the details about characters and setting can help paint a clearer picture of those people and places and that sometimes writers will either sketch a setting or person in their notebook, then provide annotations and labels to their sketches based on the details and evidence from the text. For example, one sixth grader, Josie, found a picture of a red barn to represent Zuckerman’s barn in Charlotte’s Web. Under the picture, she listed specific textual details that support what kind of place Zuckerman’s barn is (e.g., it’s smelly; there is a large manure pile, a pig pen, and a food trough). But it’s important to push beyond the actual details of setting and move closer into how there are people in those places. This draws a close connection to the first session in reading workshop. For example, one question you might ask is, “What do we know about the characters in the story and how this place might influence the external pressures those characters are experiencing?” Josie then pushes herself to add “Fern is not allowed in the pig pen” and “Wilbur can’t go on walks with Fern.” Collecting what the text says explicitly will help support students’ work on developing more nuanced, thought-provoking analysis. After drawing on the text details to create an annotated image in her reading notebook, Josie then asks, “Are the animals unhappy because they are not free?’ Bend I, Sessions Two and Three: Writing to test theories about characters In these next sessions, you will guide students into more writing strategies to support analysis of what their books are saying explicitly as well as the inferences they are drawing. The important overarching lesson here is that writers collect the theories and interpretations they are developing about the characters in their books, synthesizing all the information they are learning to say something bigger about who those people are. In reading workshop, you will be showing students how to analyze and develop complicated understandings of characters using key details as evidence.

“Today I want to teach you that writers collect the theories and interpretations they are developing about the characters in their books, synthesizing all the information

they are learning to say something bigger about who those people are.”


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One way writers capture the theories they are building about characters in stories is they jot it in on a Post-It, and then put that Post-It on the top of a fresh reading notebook page and begin collecting evidence, direct quotations, from the text that supports their theory. Grace, a sixth grader, writes on a Post-it, “Bradley [from “There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom] seems to be a boy of contradictions -- school versus home, talk versus thoughts, actions versus feelings.” She then creates a t-chart under the Post-It and collects quotes from the book that supports the varying contradictions she has discovered. From the quotes she has collected, Grace is developing the muscles for not only having and deepening ideas about characters in books, but she is also able to provide textual evidence that backs up those ideas. As in reading workshop, you will want to show students that when writers respond to literature, access to the actual text is important, and that writers reread text closely for key details -- how to actually find the details that matter and making those details matter to the theories the reader is building. The ability to scan a text and find significant parts to analyze is a skill that students will need throughout their reading and writing lives, whether on high-stakes standardized tests or conducting academic research. Another strategy you might want to teach is that writers can sketch their characters, thinking about and annotating the internal and external traits, then pushing themselves to write more about why and where they see those complex traits emerge in a text.

“Today I want to teach you that writers sometimes sketch or ‘map’ characters to trace internal and external traits and conflicts, to better keep track of an analyze these concepts.”

For example, Alyssa drew a quick sketch of Greg, the main character from “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” by Jeff Kinney, and then she labeled parts of Greg with traits and feelings like bossy, bitter, clever, manipulative, creative, and easily embarrassed. It is important to show young readers and writers that the thinking doesn’t stop here. That is, writers choose a character trait and think deeply about why they believe their character is a certain way, and then they talk with their writing partners and spend time writing longer in their notebooks. Alyssa decided she was going to think more about Greg being bossy. She writes, “Greg is extremely bossy to Rowley. He manipulates Rowley to do whatever he wants, and sometimes even tells Rowley what do. For example, he made Rowley sneak out on Halloween, even though he didn’t want to.” As Alyssa constructs theories about the characters in her book, she is pushing beyond stating the theory and including reasons why and times when the theory is proven.


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Bend I, Session Four: Writers prepare for literary conversation At the end of the first week of this unit, your students will be brimming with tons and tons of ideas about the characters in the books they are reading. Their responses to literature, or notebook entries, have been elevated from retelling or summary work, and they have flexed the muscles of analyzing and interpreting their books with using textual evidence to support their thinking. In this session, you will remind students of the great work they have been doing and rally them behind a larger purpose or audience for their writing and thinking. Teach them that writers respond to literature as a way to prepare for thoughtful, meaningful conversations with other readers and writers, and they remain open to revising their writing as their conversation uncovers new thinking. That is, you will model how writers reread the entries in their reading notebook, highlighting or underlining pages, or parts of a page, where they are most proud of the thinking work they did or where they feel like they want to linger in for a longer period of time.

“Today I want to teach you that writers use their writing about reading to prepare for literary conversations - they reread entries, re-organize post-its, and

prepare for the points they want to make and investigate further.”

Bend I, Session Five: Sharing in a ‘Gallery Walk’ After providing students an opportunity to reflect on the work they have done thus far, explain to students that they will be doing a “gallery walk” around the classroom to admire each other’s favorite thinking or notebook page. It will be important to reinforce the importance of audience and purpose at this stage of the unit.

“Today I want to teach you that writers share their best efforts with other writers, to get feedback and to inspire each other.”

During the gallery walk, students will go from one notebook to the next, reading what each writer has created, and leaving comments -- both compliments, things they loved, and ideas for making the notebook page stronger. Then, students will make their way back to their seats, read the comments from other writers in the room, and prepare for a conversation about their ideas with their reading and writing partner. Your goal here will be to hone students’ ability to express their own ideas clearly and build off each other. By students sharing during the gallery walk and talking with their partners, we are holding them accountable to not only volume of writing work and self-reflection, but also, students are


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provided with opportunities to get inspired for other ways they can collect writing entries for the big ideas emerging from their books.

Bend II: Note-Taking and Writing to Think Across Nonfiction Bend II, Session One: Note-taking from nonfiction is highly personal and dependent on what you already know Plan to read a portion of text aloud to your students, demonstrating for them how you read and then make a conscious decision about how you could take notes. Show them how you read a bit, then before jotting you pause to consider what you have been learning from the text and a way to represent that thinking. Let them see how you might try out more than one way, as well.

“Today I want to teach you that readers make conscious, personal decisions about what kinds of notes to take when reading nonfiction, and those decisions

reflect their overall purpose and their knowledge of kinds of notes”

Highlight for students the importance of making notes personal. Part of the purpose of this lesson is to build excitement, while another is to help students see that this is a year where you are expecting them to be more independent than any year before. So explain to your students that while in the past some teachers may have prescribed one form of note-taking (“We will all jot who, what, when, where, in boxes”), you are expecting that they are now using various forms they have learned in the past to develop their own, useful style. The aim for this session is to develop some excitement and interest around note-taking, then help your students see a variety of ways you could record their learning and offer up choice. You could make a chart or very quickly demonstrate how you can record in a variety of ways:

● Pause to sketch quick approximations and label them. ● Write a summary of the source text, thinking about what you just read as a table

of contents and trying to jot a sentence for each main point. ● If the texts invite you to, a timeline of events may even be appropriate. ● And so on.


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For your demonstration, you could read a very small bit of a text and show how you could record in one way. Then stop, and show how that same part could be recorded in a completely different way. Lastly, read a new section and invite students to take notes and then share quickly with students around them. Bend II, Session Two: Reading a lot and pausing before jotting To improve note-taking (and avoid plagiarism) teach your students to take a mental pause from their reading to think, before jotting. One way to do this, is to read, then cover up the text while you jot your learning. After jotting, reread the text, looking for any key information that may have been missed to revise, briefly. Demonstrate this by reading a section of an article or text, such as one about atoms and molecules. Read, and then pause to jot notes. Most essentially at this point, show them how what you are reflecting on and preparing to write is not just minor details, but instead you are attempting to distill central ideas or information from that source. That your jotting is sort of a quick draft summary. From this text, for example, you might write “atoms are the basic building blocks that make up all materials. Atoms are made up of three particles—protons, neutrons, and electrons—which each have specific functions within the atom.”

“Today I want to teach you that readers don’t just move information from a book to their notes. Instead, they read a lot, then pause to think, and then jot

what they think the most important ideas and concepts are.”

Show students how you then return to the text to look for information that an expert on this topic may know, but that you had missed. The key, here, is not to just rewrite every nuance, but again determine information that is central to understanding this concept. For example, you could add in that atoms consist of a dense central nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons. This detail highlights the relationship among different components of the atom instead of merely listing its components, an important point missed on the first go. As your students read content specific texts, move about the room and talk with individual students. A key here is not to attempt to assess their notes, just for notes sake. But instead to notice the way they read and think about their reading while note-taking. So plan to ask questions such as:

● Can you point to where you are in the text and tell me what you are thinking about right now?


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● Can you tell me what you are learning so far about this topic? You can look back to your notes because I’m interested in having us see if your notes are helping you learn, or if we have to revise how you are taking them.

Bend II, Session Three: We can manipulate notes to uncover relationships between ideas In this session, demonstrate for students how you cannot just look at current notes, but look between pages of notes to find relationships. Good inspiration for your planning can come from searching “sketch notes” online, as mentioned in the beginning of this unit, it is a popular trend in the academic and business world right now—studying, teaching how-to, and posting examples of living notebooks. After studying some of these (perhaps even sharing some with your students) plan to demonstrate how you look between notes on one page of your notebook, and even notes on different pages, and overlay them with new lines, bubbles, sketches, words.

“Today I want to teach you that readers look between notes and across notes to uncover connections and relationships between ideas.”

You might suggest a range of possible connections to look for, and then work with students individually or in small groups that would benefit from extra support. Some connections including:

● Looking for cause and effect. Such as choosing an event on a timeline, preceding event or events that may have caused their event and drawing arrows to other notes and labeling the line with “because of X, Y happened...” Similarly, you might ask them to look at the last event on their timeline and predict the effects this event might have if the timeline were to extend further.

● Ranking events, ideas, people, etc., using numbers and words. ● Combining points under larger, more central ideas. ● Looking for contrasting points of view, or conflicting source material. ● Finding and replacing general terms with more domain-specific language.

Bend Two, Sessions Four through Six: Summarizing nonfiction to hold onto denser texts Summarizing gets increasingly harder as texts and concepts become more complex. You may want to think about ways to talk up the importance of this to your students. Some


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teachers have found it helpful to point out that one of the best ways to be a powerful learner about a subject is to become a teacher of that subject, taking what one learns and then teaching that content to someone else, and that summary is an efficient way to do this. In the parallel reading unit, students will have learned to look over a text in order to discern whether the author has written primarily in a narrative or in an expository mode. Teach students to try to summarize texts not as characters and conflicts, or as a series of fascinating facts, but instead, as a central idea, with supporting examples.

“Today I want to teach you that one way readers summarize nonfiction is to summarize it as overall ideas, and supporting evidence.”

You may want to remind your students that when summarizing a text or a part of a text on a topic, it helps to think, ‘What are the different main parts of this topic?’ Then we give a brief overview of each of those most important parts and synthesize them. You may find that your kids’ summaries are too detailed. They may find that it helps to look for the sentence (or clump of sentences) that identifies a big idea of a passage. If you do this work with texts you are reading aloud or enlarging and studying in your content area studies, it will support and be supported by the independent work your students are doing in the nonfiction reading workshop. Once students are finding central ideas of parts of expository text, you can then remind them that they can often take productive notes on these parts using a boxes-and-bullets (central idea and supporting detail) infrastructure:

The parts of a plant cell each play an important role

● The cell wall shapes and supports the cell ● Chlorophyll traps light ● Chloroplasts are where food is made ● ...and so on

Next, you may want to teach kids that when readers reread our own notes, including boxes-and-bullets, we flesh out the cryptic phrases into full sentences, creating almost mental paragraphs. Usually when we read our notes, those expanded versions of the notes exist only in our minds, although there are times when a reader might expand notes into written summaries—especially when the concepts and our thinking become complicated.


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“Today I want to teach you that one way readers take their ‘boxes and bullets’ and expand those into paragraphs, or full explanations.”

We can turn our ‘boxes-and-bullets,’ therefore, into a paragraph, which is an explanation or mini-essay:

The parts of a plant cell are equally important because each plays an important role. No single part could sustain life for the cell. For example, the cell wall supports the plant cell and gives it its shape. The chlorophyll traps light, which helps the plant produce food—which is done in the chloroplasts... (and so on)... Each of these parts contributes to the life of a plant cell, just as each cell contributes to the life of the plant.

You may need to teach your readers to figure out whether the text is organized by cause and effect, compare and contrast, claim and support, or some other organization system. Understanding the overall structure of a text is one of the things readers need to do when reading tackling informational texts (CCSS RI 6-8.5). This is important work for readers to be doing, as learning to detect these organization systems will give them strategies for organizing their own thoughts and notes (and eventually essays).

“Today I want to teach you that readers pay attention to how a text is structured, and they often consider and mimic that structure in their note-taking.”

Before reading aloud or showing a video, you might say to your students, “I got a chance to read this earlier (or to watch it) and I have recorded the big ideas and supportive details for the first part of the text. What I am unsure about, though, is the relationship between the big ideas and the details. Is this chronological, like a timeline or a procedure—one of those ‘this happens and then that happens’ texts? Is it a text that lays out problems and then has solutions? Let’s listen to the text, and will you think about whether this text is structured to show causes, to show kinds of something, to show what happened first, next, last....or how is it structured?”

You will probably want to start a chart or document of all these organization systems and prominently display it, referring to it often as you discuss read-alouds with the class and adding to it as you go, and teaching students to develop their writing to think skills by comparing their work to examples that surround this chart. Students may find other ways


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that information is organized in their nonfiction reading workshop, and these discoveries can be shared with the class, celebrated, and added to the chart. Some students may find information organized in ways that don’t fit any of the categories the class has discovered so far, and that puzzles them. Perhaps it will even puzzle you. Don’t hesitate to bring these difficult cases to the class for discussion and theorizing. The more you conduct this as a genuine inquiry, the more students will begin to notice the different information organization systems out there. This is not only wonderful for creating articulate thinkers and astute readers—it will also set them up for the work of this unit’s next bend. Students will need the opportunity to revise their summaries so as to include the domain-specific vocabulary words of their topic. Often these terms are bold-faced in the text. If a child is reading about the cells, she will probably want to include the terms chlorophyll and chloroplast in her writing. If we want kids to learn and hold onto the content-specific vocabulary, writing summaries is one way to encourage them to use, and therefore internalize, those terms. A content area word chart, glossary, and notebook lists are tools that can support students improving the usage of domain-specific vocabulary in their summaries.

Bend III: Outgrowing our Initial Ideas and Writing Longer to Make Sense of Harder Stories and More Complex Nonfiction Bend Three focuses on showing students how to outgrow their initial ideas about the characters or nonfiction ideas and to write in longer, more developed ways. As you are teaching students in reading workshop to read and think more critically about literature and nonfiction, students will also learn the craft of writing about texts in more sophisticated ways. Bend III, Session One: Writers elaborate their thinking by writing longer In Session One, we suggest you encourage writers to take stock in all the writing about reading they have done so far, either in the form of post-its and/or reading notebook entries. In this session, you will want to model how writers revisit ideas they had as they were reading their books and elaborate on their thinking by writing longer on the page, pulling on everything they know about pushing their thinking deeper. They can take an original idea they had as they were reading and build off that idea by writing longer and stronger in their notebook.


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“Today I want to teach you that writers revisit ideas they had as they were reading their books and elaborate on their thinking by writing longer on the page, pulling on everything they know about pushing their thinking deeper.”

One way writers do this is by rereading their Post-Its or notebook entries, asking themselves, “What idea or ideas do I feel passionately about?” or “What ideas do I have more to say about?” Then, they put that idea in a box on their next reading notebook page and write longer. You will want to draw upon sentence starters or prompts to help writers elaborate, such as: “For example...” “Another example...” “In addition...” “This makes me realize...” “This is important because...” “This is giving me the idea that...” “The reason for this is...” “Another reason is...” “This connects with...” and “On the other hand...” Bend III, Session Two: Writers study the work of other writers Another way you could teach writers ways to elaborate on their original ideas is by doing an inquiry lesson. That is, you might put a reading notebook entry up on the overhead and ask students, “What do you notice this writer has done to think more deeply about their original idea?” How did the writer do it?” You might also turn to your collection of mentor texts, as exemplars.

“Today I want to teach you that writers expand how they are responding to fiction and nonfiction by studying what other thinkers and writers are doing.”

From this partnership and whole-class conversation, you might chart out the things students notice and encourage them to use similar craft moves in their own entries. It is important to keep writing volume high so you will want to remind students that when they feel like they have written everything they can about one idea, they can draw a line in their notebook, and start a new entry. Bend III, Session Three: Fan fiction or nonfiction pages At this point, your writers might be ready for, and enjoy using their notebooks to add pages to the books they’re reading. That is, they might write a fan fiction scene, one where they take on the characters, themes, setting, and style of the fiction they are reading, and create an additional scene. Or if they are drawn to nonfiction, they might add to the book they are reading, inserting additional pages, including diagrams, charts, and so on.


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Bend III, Session Four: Celebration During this last part of the unit, inspire students to invent ways to respond to literature and nonfiction. Teach them that sometimes readers respond to what they read through art - now is an opportunity to tap into students’ strengths and allow for multiple expressions of response to reading. Let students know that they have the opportunity to present something that conveys their appreciation for and understanding of a book they’ve read this month, and give them a day or two to work. You should not have to bring in supplies for this - let students know that they have to plan for a project they can achieve. If it involves tech, they need to have access to the tech. If it involves googly eyes and glue, they need to get to Michael’s Craft store and get some.

“Today I want to teach you that sometimes readers respond to reading through creative and innovative responses.”

Then set kids into small groups to share at your celebration. Some possible mini project ideas:

● Poetry in the voices of different characters, bound into a multi-voice journal ● Podcast book review ● Video book trailer (see online for many samples) ● Key artifact from the story or nonfiction topic, annotated ● Monologue in the voice of a character, videotaped ● Illustrated map or timeline, with annotations ● Soundtrack to the story or nonfiction topic, in the form of an annotated playlist

Gin


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Appendix


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Some examples of student reading responses from fiction and nonfiction reading notebooks:


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Welcome to the Unit - The Reading & Writing Projectreadingandwritingproject.com/public/themes/rwproject/resources...Teachers College Reading and Writing Project ... How can I use my