The Big Book of Literacy Tasks, Grades K-8

75 Balanced Literacy Activities Students Do (Not You!)

Nancy Akhavan

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781544321899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de métodos de lectura

The Comprehensive Handbook for Scaffolding Students' Literacy Growth Our readers and writers must "do the doing" if they are to succeed. In The Big Book of Literacy Tasks, Nancy Akhavan offers an instructional plan designed to yield independent effort and engagement. 75 tasks in beautiful full-color two-pagers ensure gradual release by moving more swiftly from the "I do" teacher phase to the "you do, " when students benefit from the healthy amount of struggle that is the hallmark of learning. (And spoiler alert: you kick the habit of hovering, over-explaining, and rescuing!) Backed by research and thoughtfully arranged to make day-to-day planning easier, this groundbreaking book provides:

• Reading and writing tasks organized into 3 sections—everyday skills, weekly practices, and sometime engagements requiring greater complexity
• Mini-lessons that are essential— whether you use a reading program, a workshop approach, or are just transitioning to Balanced Literacy
• Colorful teaching charts allowing you to quickly grasp the high points of each lesson
• A clear task structure for introducing and managing the stages as you move students toward independent practice
• Mid-task "Watch Fors" and "Work Arounds" showing how to coach without risking helicopter teaching
• Amazing scaffolding tips for meeting the needs of a range of learners
• Sample student work that offers valuable insights on how to use the tasks as formative assessments

Practical and engaging, The Big Book of Literacy Tasks gives you a clear framework for "working the minds" of your students, helping them forge their own path to becoming better readers and writers.

1 A New Spin on Who, What, Why, When, and Where

The other day, I was in a classroom and students were working, independently, to answer questions at the end of the text in their anthology. I leaned over a student’s shoulder to take a peek, and they were the typical who, what, why, when, and where questions. How boring! I thought, and indeed, I began hearing a rhythm band of tapping pencils, sighing, shifting chairs. Don’t get me wrong—these recall questions have a place, but the flaw was that students were merely working to prove they had read. Here is a task that puts a livelier, more metacognitive spin on identifying who, what, why, when, and where of any text.

When You Might Offer It

You might offer this task when younger readers are ready to dig into nonfiction text or students are beginning to read fiction texts with longer chapters or sections. You might offer it when older readers are reading more complex pieces of text or longer chapter books or nonfiction books with multiple sections.

Target

Students will identify important information, including who, what, why, when, or where, after reading a text independently and reflect on how they arrive at their answers and why they are supportable.

Your Instructional Playbook

Name It: In this task, you will read with a partner and then use the different colored highlighters or markers to mark up your text and identify the five points you have been discussing (the five Ws). Most importantly, you will state why you made your decision to label a section with one of the Ws.

What You Might Say Next: “When reading, it is important to think about who is doing what, when is it happening, and where it might be taking place. When we think about the five Ws (who, when, what, why, and where), we are checking that we understand what the text is about. Today we are going to practice finding these five parts of a text together and then justifying our thinking by pointing out what part of the books helps us know we are correct!”

Typical Successes

A page from Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (Steptoe, 2016)

Model/Do Together: Give students two or three different colored highlighters and a copy of the text. Or when working with younger readers, have a few different colored sticky notes handy. Facilitate reading the text and deciding on which parts of the text to highlight with a marker or by placing a sticky note. As you read the text together out loud, highlight the parts of the text that tell who, what, when, why, or where. It is best if you read the text the first time uninterrupted and look for the sections of text to highlight on the second or third read. Elicit a lot of discussion from students. Encourage them to decide one or more of the five Ws for themselves, and discuss their thinking about their choice by using the text to justify the answer. Older students can add a sticky note or write the justification in the margins. Younger students can add it to their sticky note or write it in a reading journal. Don’t just show them the answers (because then you would be doing the “doing,” and we want the students to do the thinking).

Release: Using a new piece of text (it could be the next section from the book you took the first excerpt from) remind students to recheck their text as they decided what is what in the text they are reading. Have a couple of groups of students share out what they were thinking. If they are younger readers, have them come up to the shared read-aloud text and highlight the part of the text they think shows a point they worked on (highlight by putting a sticky note under the sentence). Then, encourage them to write out what they discussed with their partners in journals or on additional sticky notes.

Watch Fors and Work Arounds

Students don’t highlight anything or don’t offer their ideas about the five Ws. Make sure they know it is Okay to not get the answer “right” and that it can be helpful to share their thinking with a partner or in a small group, to get the others’ take. Have kids talk and negotiate what they think the five Ws are in a given text. Or have them tackle just one of the five Ws, for example, “What is this text about?”

Students highlight everything with marker lines or sticky notes all over the text. Help students make decisions for themselves by displaying the following prompts on a chart or on sentence strips: What is in the text that tells us what might be important? Let’s find the sentence. How do we know this is who this text (or what) is about? Can you find the sentence and circle it?

2 Making Predictions to Help Comprehension

I have seen many lessons where the teacher sets up the students to predict, the kids do, and then they power on through the story. I dubbed these lessons “predict and run.” Don’t do it! Slow down and savor the hypothesis and keep reflecting on it as you read on. Ask, Was I right or wrong? And why? How do I know? The comprehension boosting isn’t in the guess but in stopping after reading to check the prediction. It is really important that you set this task up with your students as an inquiry. Make them excited to predict, then read and check.

When You Might Offer It

You might offer it when students need practice with making predictions. With younger readers, model the task with a shared book before having students practice predicting on their own, doing more modeling as needed. For older readers, use when the text level increases or any time you want to check on the accuracy of their predictions.

Target

Students will comprehend and add new information to memory by making predictions about what a text will be about and then confirming through reflection.

Your Instructional Playbook

Name It: When we make a prediction about a text before reading it, we are waking up our brains and getting them ready to figure out what is happening in the book. The graphics, heading, and words in a text give clues to what the text will be about. In this task, we are going to make a prediction by waking up our brains and predicting what we will read and then stopping after we read to see whether our prediction was correct or incorrect.

What You Might Say Next: “You know when you are reading a good story or watching a suspenseful movie, maybe a mystery, and a character does something or acts odd all of a sudden, you say to yourself, ‘Ooh, I bet something is about to happen! I bet that other guy is about to cause trouble!’ When you do that, you are making a prediction. You are guessing what is going to happen next, based on clues. Good readers make predictions all the time, whether they are reading a story or a science book. Readers scan a cover and opening pages to predict what kind of book it is and if they will like it. And then as they read, they pause whenever the author seems to inviting them to slow down and think and make an inference. An inference is a prediction, a guess based on what you know. We are going to start by flagging some stopping points for ourselves.”

Owns It! Notice how the students are correctly making predictions about the text that they had read.

Model/Do Together: Take a bunch of sticky notes and talk with the students about where would be good places to stop and make predictions. Place them on the text and let the students know that the little sticky notes are going to be little stop signs for you as you read. The sticky notes will remind you and the class to stop and make a prediction. For younger readers, use a big book or enlarged text; for older readers, use text under a document camera. As they are choosing good stopping places in the book, invite students to come up and place the sticky notes on the text for stopping points. Then, read the text together and stop where there is a sticky note. Ask something like, “Based on what we read (or see in the pictures or the headings), what is a prediction we could make right now? What do you think will happen next? Or what else is going to happen now that __________ happened? How can we be sure our prediction is plausible or could really happen? Should we reread what happened already in the text to make sure our prediction makes sense?”

Release: Once students have practiced this a few times with you, have them try it for themselves. Stop at a stopping point and make a prediction about what will happen next, how the text will end, what the character is going to do, and how the information you are learning is going to change or develop.

Have students share their predictions. Ask, did their predictions come to pass? How do they know? These reflective questions will take students back to the text to think about what they read and how it gives them clues about what might be next.

Watch Fors and Work Aro...