In an
earlier post, I explained how I have been focusing on text structure. We have been hard at work looking at
descriptive text structure. We followed
a similar fashion of learning about sequential text structure. We glued in our two guiding pages into our
reading journal. Why two you ask? In Florida, we can never do what the rest of
the world does-we have to make our own standards and rules. The rest of the educational world knows this
text structure as descriptive, but for the FCAT they need to know it as define
and explain. This actually works out ok,
because there is some foundational learning by using that terminology. Anyways, here’s how we rolled out learning
about the descriptive text structure.
First, we examined our Science
books. Our first, in the book, chapter
starts out with this very text structure.
We used the graphic organizer to break down the information found in the
text. This was relatively easy. It was descriptive AND IN ORDER! We were able to look at how important each
term was to the MAIN IDEA of the page.
What we took away was that this descriptive/define and explain model
helped us to understand what groups of plants are.
Next, we hit up our mentor text, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In our reading journals, we built a model of
the graphic organizer. Students charted
one of the characters, Veruca Salt, from one of the chapters. It was rather obvious that this was a
descriptive chapter-Roald Dahl does an excellent job at switching back and
forth between the two at the beginning of the text. The students gathered all the evidence they
could to support the definition of descriptive texts. Here are a couple of samples of what they
came up with.
From this, we were able to determine, yet again, that it was
IN ORDER! There is a fine line between
these two text structures. They both
organize themselves, but, as a student pointed out, descriptive is SUPER
organized so that the description overpowers the sequencing. Very interesting. Yes, the author has to be SUPER organized to
get their point across when they are writing in the descriptive style. Amazing learning!
We were ready now-ready for a
bigger challenge. At this point, we dug
out our reading journals, we grabbed our Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, and we added to this a blank piece of
construction paper! Construction
paper! Yes, it was time for a
construction paper challenge. On the
construction paper, students created two boxes.
At the top, they wrote, “Sequencing:
Chapter ___ Evidence.” On the
other side they wrote, “Descriptive:
Chapter ___ Evidence.” Then I
pointed them to chapter 9 and 10! Their
mission-discover which one was which and provide at least 4 pieces of evidence-
it was amazing! They dug in and searched
through each chapter to find the evidence.
They used key terms and the facts columns to justify their selections. If they got off the scent, it was easy to
point them back. In fact, I had a table
of 4 where 3 were going in the wrong direction and one of my struggling
students could justify and explain why to them!
Here are a few samples of the end product.
We also made a chart of our
discoveries. This chart included the
sentences the students found and some of our own discoveries about how the
lengths of paragraphs impacted the type of text it was as well!
Even with all this learning, I was
beginning to question myself-was I spending too much time on this, was it
important enough to spend this time on, was there enough here to keep
going? Boy, did I discover what I was
really teaching! I’ll be posting again tomorrow,
because I don’t want to get too close to Halloween because it involves a fun “readcraftivity”
opportunity to try with a descriptive text!!!
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