Writing about Reading In Bend I, you’ll launch reader’s notebooks. You’ll distribute notebooks to your students and channel them to use their notebooks to collect all their learning about their new topics. Across the bend, your students learn how to do three kinds of writing about reading. In Session 1, students learn how to make and add to concept maps that integrate prior knowledge on the topic of plants and plant adaptations, with the new information that they are learning as they read texts about that topic. Their writing mostly consists of phrases jotted on sticky notes and organized into subtopic clusters. In Session 4, students learn about the importance of note-taking in order to hold onto the important information they are learning. Students revisit two note-taking strategies that they learned in second grade during Growing Knowledge Together : making a big sketch with lots of details and labels, and making a series of smaller sketches, with arrows and labels to show how they connect. These strategies especially support students in notetaking about sequential or chronological information or about cause-and-effect relationships. It’s important to note that students should not be reading with pen in hand, pausing after reading a sentence, or even a para- graph, to jot notes. When students read in this way, writing about reading dominates reading time, and students are often so focused on the details that they are unable to wrap their arms around the bigger ideas addressed in text. Instead, we channel students to read a big chunk of text—a few sections or a chapter—and only then to pause and think, “What’s the most important information I just read?” Then, students can take notes on that information. Bend I Session 6 focuses on topic word collections, which you’ve been modeling in read-aloud since Unit 1. You channel stu- dents to attend to new content words and to jot those words—and their definitions—in a special spot in their reader’s notebooks. The vocabulary extensions will also support this work, providing students with regular opportunities to add to their collections. In Bend II, you’ll emphasize determining the main idea, and you’ll teach students a handful of strategies to help them write about main ideas they encounter. Starting in Session 1, as students read start-here texts, they learn to use a highlighter to take notes about main ideas and supportive details. Students highlight main ideas that they locate in topic sentences, and they add dots to note key details that support those main ideas. In Session 2, students learn that they can add main idea sentences to the sketch notes they learned about in Bend I. In Session 4, you introduce students to a boxes-and-bullets structure for notetaking, and students learn to record a main idea in a box and then key details underneath as bullets. This structure is used repeatedly across the Units of Study in Reading and Units of Study in Writing in Grades 3, 4, and 5, so you’ll want to model this structure regularly as you take notes across the curriculum. Then, in Session 6, students will learn how to use their boxes-and-bullets notes to craft brief summaries, where they write the main idea of a short text (or a section of a longer text), and explain how that text is supported by key details. You’ll lean on a structure detailed by Hochman and Wexler (in their 2024 book, The Writing Revolution 2.0: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades ) to support students who need additional support crafting summaries.
In Bend III, you’ll support transference, reminding students early on of the strategies they have learned for writing about reading, and encouraging them to draw on those strategies as needed to capture their new learning. Since Bend III emphasizes vocabulary, you’ll espe- cially want to see students adding new words and their definitions to their topic word collections. The Let’s Gather read-aloud and close reading plans for this unit provide students with additional support for writing about reading that resembles what they’ll be asked to do on many state standard- ized tests.
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WELCOME TO THE UNIT
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