Close Reading

Close Reading is a current buzzword in Education. In a nutshell, Close Reading involves teaching children how to interact in a meaningful way with text in order to promote comprehension and all of those sorts of things. So this week, we tore apart the Preamble to the Constitution. I learned a lot.

I split the Preamble into ten phrases and had my students walk around the classroom for about 20 minutes with sticky notes, conversing with their peers about what they thought certain words meant, and stuff like that. We're not finished yet, but this segment of the process was oh, so enlightening!

I heard one girl say, "I think 'promote the general welfare' means we have to take care of the general of the army first, because if he's doing okay then the whole army is doing okay which means our country is doing okay."

There's more to accomplish!

In other news, a quiet-ish boy left school yesterday for the weekend and stopped just outside of the classroom door and said, "You know Mrs. Kyburz, I've only had two teachers that ever made me want to come to school. One was my fourth grade teacher and the other one is you." I nearly died! I gave him a side-armed hug and told him it was people like him (and the website he's developing) that made we want to come to school everyday.

And that, my friends, was better than a paycheck!