going to learn about a special type of force. This type of force can move things without touching them. I wonder what force we are going to learn about tomorrow?”
Day Two: Annotation and Post-Reading
Day Two started out similar to Day One. The students were called to the carpet. Just like the day before, students brought a pencil, their text, and something on which to write. To activate prior knowledge, we reviewed what we had learned through class discussion the day before. Students shared with a partner one thing they had learned. Then several students shared with the whole class.
After reviewing what we learned, the students were ready to read the next section of the text. Again I read the text aloud to the students. Then the students read the text silently and annotated their three responsi-bilities. To begin the discussion, the students shared with their partner what they thought was important in the text. I selected several students to share with the class. The
first student said, “I thought it was
important that gravity affects
everything we do.” The next
student said, “Gravity is a
force that makes everything
attracted to it.” The last stu-
dent said, “The bigger the
object is, the more it attracts
things.” After the students
shared what they thought was
important, our discussion started.
I posed the question, “What kind of
force is gravity? Is it a push or a pull?”
I directed the students to go back to paragraph 7 to find the sentence with the answer. One student said, “ Gravity is a pull. I know this because it says in paragraph 7 ‘Everything is pulled to the center of the Earth.’” Another student responded by saying, “We learned yesterday that pulls move things toward it, so the Earth uses gravity to pull things toward the center of the Earth.” Another student added, “We learned yesterday that the heavy things need a lot of strength to move. Today we read about the moon staying in the sky. I think the moon is too heavy for gravity to pull it all the way down. That’s probably why it’s in the sky.” To end our discussion, I reminded the students about our wonder: “I wonder what force can move objects without touching them?” All the students responded with, “Gravity!”
Finally it was time for our post-reading activity. Our post-reading activity focused on student response to a prompt in their reading response journal. The prompt was displayed on the board: “Describe the force of gravity. Use details from the text to support your answer.” One sample response was, “Gravity is a force that pulls things down to Earth. We stay on Earth because of gravity. Gravity is a force that makes other things go toward it. Gravity can move things without touching it like when you drop your pencil and it lands on the floor.” Another student wrote, “Gravity is a thing that pulls it down. Gravity is a force that makes all objects attracted to each other. Bigger things have more gravity and you need more strength to move them.”
Conclusion
Close reading and text-
dependent questions can be
used to teach science content
during literacy instruction
time. Both strategies allow
readers to discover
meaning for themselves.
Close reading helps
students decide what is
important in the text.
Through the use of text-
dependent questions, teachers
are able to guide classroom dis-
cussions toward a specific learning
goal. Hinchman and Moore (2013) summed up the relationship between close reading and text-dependent questions when they said, “Students read complex, grade level selections. They dive into the selections with practically no prereading preparation. They respond to teacher led questions that are specific to the text under consideration, depend entirely on evidence from the selection for acceptable responses” (p. 444). Close reading and text-dependent questions helped my students develop important reading and writing skills while learning science content.
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"Through the use of text-dependent questions, teachers are able to guide classroom discussions toward a specific learning goal."