Close reading is an instructional routine to build the habit of reading closely.
And I want to separate out those two things.
When it comes to close reading as an instructional routine, it’s further differentiated based
on the age of the students that you’re working with.
So, I’ll talk about generally speaking grades three and up, and then I’ll go back to primary.
In grades three and up what we’re generally doing with close reading is a couple of times
a week zooming in on a small piece of text, on a passage, whether it is a self-contained
passage or whether it is a couple of paragraphs from a larger piece of text.
We’re zooming in on a small piece of text, and we’re having a text-based discussion
about all of that.
We’re spending time hanging out with those couple of sentences or those couple of paragraphs.
And we’re moving students in a very thoughtful kind of way from understanding what the text
says literally, how the text works structurally, and moving them into what does the text mean
interpretatively or inferentially.
And that doesn’t happen by accident.
That happens with lots of guided instruction.
The teacher is absolutely integral to being able to host those text based discussions.
In grades three or so and up students typically are first reading the text themselves or with
a minimal amount of support and, you know, we need to be careful not to make rules that
are so hard and fast that we forget the child in all of this.
But generally speaking they will read a text on their own and then the teacher hosts this
text-based discussion with lots of repeated readings because the questions that he or
she is asking are prompting students to go back into the text to reread a portion of
that text again in order to be able to come up with the answer.
Now, in grades K through two it looks quite differently.
Students aren’t reading a piece of text on their own, but rather they are listening
to a piece of text that causes them to think.
What’s interesting is that for all of us who have raised children ourselves, we read
and talk to our toddlers at levels that we understand they can think at.
They can’t read what it is that we’re reading to them, but we still read to them,
we have conversations with them, and so on.
In other words, we’re fostering their thinking skills even though we know that their reading
skills are quite a bit different than their thinking skills.
We need to continue doing that as they move into primary.
Yes, they’re learning how to read.
They’re gaining those reading foundational skills, and those are very important.
The phonics, the phonemic awareness, and so on are very, very important.
But they haven’t suddenly lost their ability to think.
It’s not like they went into kindergarten and now they can’t think critically anymore.
They’ve been thinking critically for years with their families as well.
As teachers in primary, we’re also exposing them, giving them a good steady diet of these
more complex pieces of text that we read to them and with them, and we ask them those
same interesting kinds of questions.
There isn’t a kindergartener or a first-grader that’s going to be able to pick up, for
example, Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner and be able to read that all by himself.
But it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be reading that to them and having really
interesting conversations with them about what’s going on in this story and what are
some of the characteristics that we know about Winnie the Pooh versus the rabbit and so on