a shared text, model how to discern if the text is organized in time, sequence, or cause/effect. Highlight key terms in the text and discuss how these are specific to that technique.
Create a chart of key language that lets students know that two pieces of information, ideas, concepts, or events are being compared (e.g., but, however, in contrast).
Teach students how to use highlighting or color-coding to identify and delineate the different key language.
To explain events, scientific ideas, or concepts or steps in technical procedures in a text:
Using a shared text, model how to determine key words that are important to the main idea of the text.
Think aloud to demonstrate how to take these key details and formulate “what happened.” Create graphic organizers (e.g., cause/effect charts) to demonstrate the “why” of what happened.
To help your English language learners, try this:
Guide a small group of students through a text and discuss setting and characters. Students should each have their own copy of the book or text. Help students use vocabulary to describe and explain. Provide students with graphic organizers. Talk thorough the task first, then fill in the organizers with labels and pictures.
Preparing to Teach
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Preparing the Mindset
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Preparing the Texts to Use
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Preparing to Differentiate
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Connections to Other Standards:
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Common Core Reading Standard 3: Academic Vocabulary: Key Words and Phrases
Actions or events: “Actions” refer to what happens, what people do; in English Language Arts it is the actions of the characters we study; in history, of the people who rebel, discover, or invent; in science, what we must do in the context of a procedure. “Events” are those moments in a story or history or any other field when things change that merit the time we spend studying them (war, social movements).
Analyze: This means to look closely at something for the key parts and how they work together.
Cause/effect relationship: The reasons something happens and the consequences of that action. The cause is why something happens. The effect is what happens because of the cause.
Character traits: How a character is—both what they look like and who they are, which is revealed by what they do. Their motivations and feelings, thoughts, words, and actions.
Characters: Characters can be simple (flat, static) or complex (round, dynamic); only characters who change, who have a rich inner life that interacts with people and its environment, can be considered “complex.” Often represented as an arc: what they are like or where they are when the story begins and when it ends.
Compare/contrast: This requires students to identify and analyze what is similar (compare) and what is different (contrast).
Develop and interact: As stories unfold, events and characters change; these changes are the consequence of interactions that take place between people, events, and ideas within a story or an actual event such as “the Twitter Revolution” in Iran, where events, people, and ideas all resulted in a variety of changes and developments as a result of multiple interactions between people, events, and ideas like social media. To “develop” is to otherwise change, increasing or decreasing in importance, growing more complex or evolving into something different altogether.
Key details: In the context of literature, key details relate to story grammar elements, that is, character, setting, problem, major events, and resolution, and how they interact.
Key steps in technical procedures: Whether in social studies or science, the idea here is that some steps or stages are more crucial in any series of steps or stages than others; one must be able to discern this so they can understand why they are so important and how they affect other people or events or experiments.
Major events: These are the most important events in a story and typically relate to how the main character resolves a problem or handles a challenge.
Sequence of events: The order that events in a story or text occur or the order that specific tasks are performed.
Setting: The place or time that a story, novel, or drama takes place. Usually students answer and can describe where it takes place (there may be more than one setting in texts) and when it takes place—this can be a specific time period or can be the past, present, or future.
Steps in technical procedures: Whether in social studies or science, the idea here is that some