PACIENTES Y MÉTODO
7. LIMITACIONES Y FORTALEZAS DEL ESTUDIO.
This genre has its own insider vocabulary words such as detective,sleuth,suspect,wit- ness,clues,motive, andred herring, to name a few. You will want to encourage clubs to adopt this vocabulary for use in their discussions. This specialized language is a way for children to adopt the basic premises or concepts that define the elementsof a mys- tery story and to use these concepts efficiently in their talk. Without active knowledge of these basic conceptual words, club members’ discussions will be clumsy and under-
developed. Imagine the conversation between teachers who aren’t familiar with the basic jargon of their subject—if we had no mutually understood, specific words for basic concepts such as instruction, strategy, skill, differentiation, assessment, for instance—how long-winded and ambiguous our communication would tend to be! For this reason, you might make a prominent display chart of the words or concepts you expect your mystery readers to know and use while talking in their clubs. Many teachers find it helpful to also build vocabulary around criminal motives, charting words such as “jealousy,”“revenge,”“greed,” and so forth. You may find other vocab- ulary groupings to chart, depending on the ways in which you teach this unit and on the sophistication of the books your children are reading.
Also, if there are readers in the room who are not yet adept at reading independ- ently for prolonged stretches of time, you’ll want to equip them, in particular, with a repertoire of decoding strategies. You might say: “Sound a word out to hear it said aloud before you try to guess its meaning. Read around the word for context clues. Try to insert a synonym or a placeholder in the word’s stead and continue reading. Be alert to prefixes, suffixes, root words . . .” Of course, the advice you might give your readers to help them figure out a hard word is as important as you actually demonstrating how these strategies might look when you model them actively in your teaching and your read-aloud.
During read-aloud, you might use phrases crafted to prompt student thinking, such as:
■ “That’s weird! Let’s reread, paying close attention to the description of this character.” Then, “Turn and tell your partner what’s so weird.”
■ “Oh my gosh—I think that’s a clue! Turn and talk—what clue do we have and what might that mean?”
■ “Let’s figure out what’s really going on: Partner A, be Jigsaw, and Partner B, be Mila. Act out this scene—now talk about what’s reallygoing on.”
■ “This changes everything! Now who do you think did it?” ■ “How does this part fit with your theory of who did it?”
Additional Resources
This unit is right for your readers if they would benefit from reading more closely and inferring as they read. For many of your third graders, the move toward “reading between the lines” is one that needs explicit instruction. Left to their own devices, many young readers might move happily over the surface of the plot, surprised by what happens, and often delighted, but not really thinking about why events in the story unfold as they do. This unit aims to entice your readers to think as they read—to pause and make predic- tions, to gather up clues, to notice what’s happening and to think about why things hap- pen the way they do, to revise their predictions—in short, to become deeply involved in
the books they are reading. If you’ve taught a lot into prediction and inference in previ- ous units, your class may be ready to work on interpretation, finding deeper meaning and life lessons hidden in their mystery books. If you feel that readers still need work paying attention to the tiniest details and using them to make inferences, you can save the interpretation work for the subsequent reading unit on biographies.
For this time of year, grade level benchmarks are around N–O, and fortunately there are many mysteries within those levels. If you have readers who read at dramatically lower levels than those described above—such as E-F-G-H, you may want to look at the first- and second-grade units on dramatizing characters.It’s unlikely that you’ll find enough mysteries at these levels for kids to keep their reading volume high within the genre of mystery, and so the second-grade unit may be more beneficial to your readers. If you have read- ers within the J-K-L band, but you find that your mystery library is not substantial enough to sustain them throughout the month, children could read mystery books in school while reading a separate independent book of their choice at home. Keep an eye on their vol- ume and make sure they are getting plenty of reading done.
For all your readers, you’ll want to watch their reading volume as they are in clubs. Most of your readers, if they are reading at N–O, will be finishing a book every other day or so, so you’ll need plenty of mysteries to keep them going. You may find that you need to invite your readers to keep an independent reading book going on the side to satisfy their reading life. This method also helps with kids who read at different rates, so that your swifter readers aren’t slowing down their reading to await club members. Aside from reading volume, your primary concern in this unit will be that kids are not only predicting, but also then comparing their predictions with what actually happens in the books they read. You may find that you need to coach them in jotting down their predictions, marking places in the book where they come upon clues, and in holding onto their Post-its so that they can reflect on how their thinking matched what hap- pened in the book. These Post-its will serve as a great assessment for you as you tailor your instruction to your class’s specific needs. If you notice that the predictions are vague and generic, you might teach students to be more specific about their predictions, using character names and detailed events on their Post-its. If kids’ predictions name a spe- cific outcome of the book, you might coach students to not only jot what will happen but also how this will come to be. Or, if your readers are already adept at making spe- cific, long-term predictions, you could coach them to think of multiple ways this story could go based on the main character, other books in this series, and their knowledge of the genre. Essentially, you’ll want to not just think about whether your readers are pre- dicting or not, but instead notice the level of sophistication within their predictions.
Observe how readers use their Post-its and jottings when they get ready to talk to their clubs as well. If readers are bringing Post-its to club conversations that lead to dead ends, you may use “mentor Post-its”—or sophisticated Post-its crafted by you or other children—to show clubs how some jotting can lead to rich discussions. Watch if they go back to specific pages in their books and see if they reconsider their thinking as a result of their conversations. If your kids need some propping up in their club con- versations, you might find the teaching in the third-grade series unit helpful.
One Possible Sequence of Teaching Points
Part One: Mystery Readers Read for Clues
■ “Mystery readers start our books wondering, ‘What’s the mystery?’ We read the first few pages trying to identify the main problem. Next, we ask ourselves, ‘Who’s the main detective? Is this main detective one person or a group of persons?’ Then, we read deeper into the book, paying attention to the clues this main detective finds.”
■ “Mystery readers often step into the main detective’s shoes, almost solving the mystery alongside this character. We try to see whatever the main detective might be seeing, consider all the clues, and keep guessing solutions, almost as if we were the main detective ourselves.”
■ “Mystery readers read for clues. We notice and think about all of the information that we are getting and saying to ourselves, ‘This might be important because . . .’ This helps us to talk about possibilities for how the story may go.”
■ “Mystery readers read with suspicion. We make a list of suspects as we read, and each time a new character enters the story we think, ‘Could this person be responsible? Is this character telling the truth or is he/she guilty?’ We pay atten- tion to the little details in the story that point to whether a character should be on our list of suspects or not. We also think of motives, asking ourselves, ‘Why would this suspect want to do this? What does he or she have to gain?’” ■ “Mystery readers retrace our steps if we need to. Just as the main characters in
mysteries often go back to the crime scenes to revisit and study clues, we can go back and reread a portion of the story to study the information the author has given us to solve the mystery.”
■ “Mystery readers, like detectives, rethink everything. As we read deeper into the book, we consider old clues in the light of new information. We ask, ‘How does what I’m reading now fit with what came before?’ Often, we revise our predictions because the story shows us a new angle or clue that we didn’t know previously.”
■ “Sometimes a mystery reader sees more than the main detective does. We almost want to shout to the main character to ‘Look out!’ or ‘Pay attention!’ It’s at moments such as these that mystery readers become detectives ourselves.”
■ “Although mystery readers can often sniff out a false clue, sometimes the author tricks us with a red herring. We consider the specific red herrings (false clues) that threw us off course, wondering, ‘What did the author do to trick me? What did this make me think?’ We vow, ‘Now I know—I will not fall for this particular red herring in any future mystery I read!’”