lessons

Strategy Focus – While you read about a young girl=s fear of thunderstorms, monitor you understanding. If you have questions, stop and reread to clarify (page 225).

Questioning and monitoring are further explained, "As you read, your brain monitors your comprehension. When something doesn"t make sense, you ask yourself questions, "What does that word mean? How can that happen? What are they talking about here?" The more complex the topic, the more monitoring and questioning your brain has to do. Even in familiar text, you may sometimes misread a word, and then have to go back and reread when you realize something is not right. As you read, your brain is constantly monitoring whether or not what you are reading makes sense. As long as it seems to make sense, you are not aware of this monitoring function but when something – an unknown word, a misread word, an apparent contradiction – disrupts meaning making, your brain sends up a red flag with a big question mark on it. Once you realize that something is not working, you try some fix-up strategies – rereading, continuing to read while looking for clarification, or asking someone. Sometimes, you may decide that the confusion is not worth the trouble, and you "forget about it" and read on. If your brain raises too many red flags and you have too many questions to try to resolve, you may decide you didn't really want to read this anyway and quit reading (Guided Reading the Four Blocks Way book page 45)."

Set purpose for reading – as you are reading today, place a sticky note in the places where you notice you have a question.

During reading – Read with a partner. Place sticky notes where you have questions.

After reading – Discuss places in the book where the children had questions. List the questions and code them.

Do a "Talking Why and How" lesson with Thunder cake (See Guided Reading the Four Blocks Way book pages 111-115 for more details).

Before reading – Today while I am reading record your why and how questions. Even if you find an answer to a question later, that is ok.

During reading – Record How and Why questions individually while teacher reads or the students listen to the tape.

After reading – Make a list of the how and why questions as a small group. Each small group chooses one or two how questions and one or two why questions that they think are the best from their group. Then each small group shares their questions with the large group and the teacher records them in numerical order.

Set purpose for reading – While you are reading today, look for answers to these questions making sure to use the book to justify your answers.

Extension – pages 262-263 discuss writing answers in response to a question from a story. Some teachers may choose one of the How or Why questions to have the students respond to Thunder cake.

During reading I recommend using the format Book Club groups. Have the students scan the four biographies and choose which three they would like to read. Then assign the children a biography based on their choices. See Guided Reading The Four Blocks Way, chapter 22, pages 192-203 for examples. There is a specific Book Club example with a biography.

After reading – Have the students fill in a graphic organizer similar to this one:

Family	Places lived	birth
What special fact about the person	Name of the Person	early years
Work	death	later years

Writing Extension – (pages 282-283) Write a biography – Choose a person you want to know more about. That person might be an explorer, a president, or a sports star. Look up facts about the person in books, in the encyclopedia, or on the internet. Write a biography of that person. Tips for the teacher: You should model this lesson for the students. You could write a portion then the children write that portion.