Muertes atribuibles directamente a la epilepsia.

(Level 3 Reading Benchmark: N)

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his marks the time of year when your students will leave the adventures of their characters, their struggles and changes, and move into the world of the water cycle and whales, spaceships and skateboarding. They’ll want to leap at the whole new section of the library you’ll open up for them, with a drum roll to announce the start of this new adventure you’ll take together as a class. Maybe you’ll clear off the chalkboard ledge and fill it with the coolest, most beautiful, most awe-inspiring nonfiction books in your library. Maybe you’ll surprise your students with a bulletin board cleared of all their character work, and in its place, a display of maps and news- papers, brochures, blogs, photographs, websites, and magazine clippings. Perhaps you’ll start on the first day showing them a short clip from a popular TV show that highlights a child, curious to explore new facts and cool information such as Bill Nye the Science Guy.Regardless, you’ll help all your readers feel at home in this new genre, and hope to especially entice readers who may have felt like stories were not exactly their cup of tea.

This unit is tailor-made for early in the third-grade year. Although this unit of study leans heavily on the Navigating Nonfiction in Expository Textsbook from the Units of Study for Reading 3–5series, we suggest the following trajectory because we acknowl- edge that that two-volume set may be a bit too packed and ambitious for younger read- ers. This unit aims to take the first book in the two-volume set more slowly to teach third graders the reading work that will help them read expository nonfiction with clar- ity, depth, and power. We’ve written about places where you might slow down and linger for a while on certain skills, stretching one session across several days.

At this point in the year, you’ll know your readers well. You’ll likely observe and notice the skills they’ve already demonstrated in reading nonfiction during your science and social studies times of day. You’ll listen to the ways they respond to your turn-and- talk prompts during your nonfiction read-alouds. Use those observations of your stu- dents in combination with the suggestions in this curriculum calendar to make deci- sions about where to linger longer, and where to pick up the pace.

In this curricular calendar write-up, we outline a unit of study in which you give children stretches of time to read whole texts, reading not to answer a specific question or to mine for an interesting fact, but rather to learn what the author wants to teach. The unit spotlights skills and habits essential to a reader of expository nonfiction: deter- mining importance and finding the main idea and supportive details; questioning and talking back to the text; figuring out and using new content-specific vocabulary; and applying analytical thinking skills to compare and contrast, rank or categorize.

The first part of the unit tackles portions of what the Common Core State Standards describe as determining “Key Ideas and Details.” Our goal in this part is to help chil- dren get what the other is saying. For children to ascertain the big ideas in a nonfiction text in such a way that they can summarize as well as think critically about them, they will need to grasp the text’s infrastructure. Since your readers will also be writing infor- mation books while they engage in this nonfiction reading work, they will be able to recognize that expository texts follow a “boxes-and-bullets” structure. The “box” is the main idea, and the “bullets” are the details. If readers expect this infrastructure and if they learn to use text features, white space, and transitional phrases to help them dis- cern that infrastructure, they will be able to glean what matters from texts that contain an overwhelming amount of raw information. In their partnerships, readers will learn how to teach each other what they’re learning by being engaging teachers—using their whole body and gestures, not just their words.

The second part of the unit asks readers to not only paraphrase and synthesize, but also to learn to think and talk about the texts they are reading. Though they may begin with reactions like “Weird!” or “Cool!” or “I never knew that ______,” you will want to push kids to notice places in the text that draw them in, and you’ll want to nudge kids to question the information they’re reading. Then, we’ll teach them that nonfiction readers read on, seeking out information. They’ll take the new information together with the information they’ve already learned and what they know about drawing con- clusions. Partners can work together here to talk long about questions, to synthesize key parts of their text, and to develop a knowledge base together.

The third part of the unit explores vocabulary. When reading books on unfamiliar subjects, it’s predictable that a reader will encounter new words. We aim in this part to teach readers to pronounce, understand, and use the vocabulary that they encounter. The Common Core State Standards stress the importance of teaching students to determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases in texts rele- vant to third-grade topics and subjects. In this part, you’ll help them to use text features and context clues to help understand new vocabulary, of course, but also to take the words to their partnership time to teach their partner using the language of a real expert.

For a final, extended leg of this unit, we suggest that you organize text sets on spe- cific topics of inquiry for small groups to study. This means putting together sets com- prising several multilevel books on a single topic that two partnerships, a small group of four, will share. You’ll teach children to read these texts critically, discerning differ- ent perspectives and reporting angles. They’ll apply analytical thinking skills like com- paring and contrasting, ranking, and categorizing to synthesize across texts. After reading deeply about this one topic, the group of students may create a quick one-day expert project to share their newfound expertise with others.

In document Estudio epidemiológico de mortalidad en epilepsia en una población del sur de Europa (página 63-70)