Step for Reading Nonfiction

Want an easy guide to reading difficult text.  Here are steps to follow.

1.  Skim the entire article FIRST
2.  Look at the title, headings, subheadings, and bold print
3.  Does the introduction give facts or just get the reader engaged?
4.  Visualize and make connections
5.  Stop and think. Ask yourself, “does this make sense?”
6.  Reread sentences, paragraphs, or the whole article to help you understand
7.  Focus, know when you don’t know
8.  Wonder, ask questions, predict and confirm
9.  Look for capitalization of names and other proper nouns
10. Find the W’s (who, what, when, where, why, and how)
11. Mark out and substitute hard words
12. Cross out words that don't matter
13. Highlight only the important parts (BIKINIS ONLY)

Learning to Read, Adult Style

For the next several weeks, we will be focusing on learning how to read. I am not talking about your overused, "sound out the words, and go back and reread when you don't get it," but real skills that readers of higher level essays use to comprehend.

Learning to read is the main focus throughout elementary school. However, the style of reading must change as students enter Jr. High School and above. By sixth grade, figuring out all of the words is a small part of the reading process. Students must learn to decipher meaning, especially in difficult text. Reading for the gist, understanding the W's (who, what, when, where, why, and how), and comprehending important details becomes the focus.

Although comprehension strategies are taught in the primary grades, the techniques should change as students enter the intermediate grades. That is our objective currently in language arts class.

Over the next few weeks, students will be taught to follow these steps when reading nonfiction.

1.Skim

2.Read and Highlight

3.List W’s

4.List facts

5.Write a topic sentence/Gist Statement

Today we focused on skimming for key words.  As we move forward we will break down nonfiction articles trying to glean the most important facts and information.  In the weeks to come, we will focus on how the parts of speech help determine meaning, what to highlight, and what to ignore, pace of reading, word substitution, and several other skills that will prepare students as critical readers in the years ahead.

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Highlighting is Like Wearing a Bikini

One of the biggest problems when students read nonfiction is deciding what is important. Today's lesson focused on determining what is important and what is not, to understand an essay. Writers add a lot of detail that is not necessary to understand the gist. They use variety in their language through word choice, and sentence structure. Often times they put in entertaining stories or share their opinions to generate reader interest. The challenge with difficult text is to cut through the fluff, or extra details to understand the main points.

OK, by now I am sure you are wondering, what does this have to do with bikinis? When you highlight, you should only cover the essentials. A one piece suit covers things that don't neccessarily matter. A cover-up covers even more, a lot of which is not needed. A big beach towel can be wrapped around and covers everything.

This is just like highlighting. Students' papers usually look like yellow coloring pages when they first learn to highlight. They need to throw away the beach towel, and only highlight the essential information. Think about minimal coverage for maximum effect. Then what is highlighted will help understand what is important.

What Doesn't Matter

Part of being a successful reader of nonfiction means understanding the important information. This week, we looked at reading from the other side. We looked at the article No Drivers Wanted about robot cars. This is an article about the DARPA Challenge for driverless cars. Students highlighted in pink, all of the information that wasn't important.

Student partners went through the article and looked for trivial details, unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, and minor facts, opinions, and quotes that didn't help understand the article.

Once the highlighting was completed, student partners were combined to make teams of four. The four students compared each team's work and discussed their decisions.

Scotty D. took over as the teacher next, and students looked at the article with the projector. With Brianne managing the computer, the class as a whole had to agree on what wasn't important. Today, students will use what text that is left as they search for the W's and write a gist statement.

This is how the article looked when they finished. If you look at what is not highlighted, you should be able to see the important details, and get the gist.

Tuesday, October 11—Stanley usually seems to know where he's going. He moves quickly over rocky ground and across puddles. He works hard and he's almost always on the move. Stanley is a robot car.

Last week, 23 teams—including the Stanford University team that built Stanley—gathered in the Mojave Desert in Nevada to compete in a special race known as the Grand Challenge. The race was special because none of the cars had drivers.

Stanley completed the dangerous 150-mile course through the desert in six hours and 53 minutes, earning the Stanford team a $2 million prize from the Department of Defense. Of the 23 teams that competed, only five actually finished. The others were stumped by mechanical or technological problems.

Sebastian Thrun, the lead robotics engineer for the Stanford team, realizes that driver-free, robot cars like Stanley still seem like something from a science-fiction film. "People by and large don't believe in this stuff," he said. "They've seen too many failures." This year's Grand Challenge was much more successful than last year's, when no vehicle was able to travel more than eight miles.

Learning to Read, con'd

What is important? What should we highlight? What are the W's? The students worked hard to drag the meaning out of an article, and here is what it looked like when we finished. We used the DLP projector with a student leading the discussion, and a student operator on the computer.