Diseño del estudio.

During the nonfiction unit of study, you will want to read aloud a variety of nonfiction texts, so you can provide students with opportunities to synthesize, have thoughts off the text, make connections, activate prior knowledge, and so on. You’ll want to show children how nonfiction readers assess a text, make plans for how to read it, and begin by chunking it and moving across the sections and pages, including the pictures and diagrams. In the read-aloud, you’ll want to demonstrate how readers learn new words from the context clues and from glossaries, and demonstrate word attack strategies they use as they read nonfiction. As you read aloud, you may want to organize a chart that shows how readers synthesize and retell the text as main ideas and supporting information/examples. So, if you’re reading a book called Owls’ Nests, you might teach children that they could try to infer the main idea of the text, so far, after reading the first page—and that the system they might use to organize these notes is a boxes-and- bullets one that looks like this:

Owls Don’t Build Their Own Nests • They move into abandoned nests. • They live in holes in the ground. • They live in holes in trees.

There are several ways to make a read-aloud interactive. You might pause at strategic points in the text to nudge children into making an inference, into predicting what hap- pens next, or articulating a personal response. Such participation from children provides

unique and valuable instructional potential as well as the chance to scaffold and manage children’s engagement with, and response to, the texts you read them. However, you will want to keep this participation brief and well timed so as not to detract from the flow and power of the read-aloud itself. In past units, you employed techniques such as “turn and talk” and “stop and jot,” and you can use those here as well. You might also try to subtly teach academic vocabulary and the language of analytical thinking by incorporating those words into your prompts. For example, instead of saying “turn and talk” you might say “turn and teach” or “turn and compare” or “turn and rank” or “turn and define.”

Nonfiction texts can sometimes be challenging to read aloud. The density of infor- mation packed into every page, and the sometimes didactic nature of books that teach and explain, can make them a bit harder to listen to. It’s important to plan more oppor- tunities to stop and engage your children in interacting with the text. In addition, the role of visualizing the information that’s being presented cannot be underestimated. You may demonstrate acting out the information as you explain the part you just read before giving children an opportunity to act out a part as they explain information to their partner. Having children stop and sketch what you read, adding details to the sketch as you read on, is another way to encourage visualization.

Of course, one of the most important elements of a read-aloud is your own voice. Your intonation alone might clarify the structure of expository texts. For example, as you read, you might use your voice to emphasize main ideas, varying your intonation where support details are suggested. Using fingers, you might count out bullets or listed points.

When reading nonfiction, readers will encounter specialized vocabulary. This makes it an opportune time to use read-aloud to highlight how readers take on new vocabu- lary and incorporate the words into their conversations. You may find it helpful to chart the most important vocabulary from the sections you will be reading aloud that day. You could also choose to preview vocabulary before the read-aloud, especially if you’re working with a large number of ELLs. You could write the words they’ll encounter on sentence strips with an icon or picture next to them. Before reading the section aloud, you could teach the words by showing pictures and explaining other contexts in which they might encounter those words. Each day you will add a few more words. When you come to the part where these words are found, you will point to them and run your finger under them as you say them and have students repeat after you. You may want to give individuals or partners a word bank that has the specialized vocabulary on it so they can find the words on their own sheets. When children turn and talk, or dur- ing whole-class conversation, you will remind them to use their word banks. This way, they are actively using these words not just that day, but across the days that you are reading aloud that book. If you read aloud many books on the same topic, the children will have repeated opportunities to use and learn these words.

You might also help children understand the information they are learning by giv- ing them a picture or two that you have copied from the book, so they can label these as you read. For example, if you are reading about insects’ bodies and children have a picture of a grasshopper and a beetle in front of them, you can stop to have them add labels like exoskeleton, thorax, abdomen, and spiracles as you read about those.

Then, partners can meet and explain to each other what they learned, or during whole-class conversations children can reference their diagrams to help them explain, compare, and contrast.

Additional Resources

As you approach this unit, it will be important for you to read the entire write-up, not just the teaching points below, because ultimately kids learn through the work they do, not the words out of your mouth. So the really important thing in a unit of study is that you have created opportunities for kids to engage in work that matters. The unit write-up can help you issue the wide generous invitation that rallies kids not only to work with heart and soul, but to also engage in deliberate practice, trying to get better at specific skills that the unit aims to highlight.

But in the end, a good portion of your teaching will revolve around the responsive instruction you provide as you move kids along trajectories of skill development. This part of your teaching relies on you assessing your students often—not in big fancy ways, but by watching the work they do—and on you seeing their work as feedback on your teaching. If you have taught something and only a handful of kids are able to do that work to good effect, then you’ll want to decide whether that skill was essential, whether you want to reteach it in a new way, or whether you want to detour around it. You’ll want to become accustomed to fine-tuning your teaching through an attentive- ness to student work, because the work your students do is not just showing you what they can and can’t do, it is also showing you what youcan do. From this attentiveness to student work and from your own persistence to reach students, one way or another, and your inventiveness in response to what they do, you’ll find that your teaching itself becomes a course of study for you as well as for your students.

One Possible Sequence of Teaching Points

Part One: Introducing Readers to Expository Nonfiction—